Christmas is almost here, so it’s appropriate that I take the opportunity to review The Spirit of Mondstille which is, as far as I’m aware, the only Christmas-themed WFRP adventure ever1. This is a Fourth Edition update of a 3rd Edition adventure (called ‘The Ghost of Mondstille’, apparently) by Clive Oldfield, which sees the PCs having to hole up in a tavern in a snowbound village, accepting the hospitality of a suspicious family and dealing with a vengeful Ghost. There’s also a Night Goblin dressed as Santa trying to eat the traditional feast and some creepy children (in a nod to The Shining, I guess).
Spoilers follow!
Before the adventure proper we get some information on Empire customs at Mondstille. There are some fun details – I particularly liked the burning Taal-log which mustn’t go out (potentially leading to hilarity during the adventure if the players get into the proper spirit of things) and information about how the cult of Sigmar has co-opted old traditions (basically that any tradition can be claimed by saying “and Sigmar may have done that”!)
Then there’s another short section before we get the main plot providing an optional hook to get the PCs into the mountains (the search for a scribe, who eventually turns up dead) and a brief description of Kupfertal, the small mining village which hosts the main plot. This is (conveniently, and reasonably believably) mostly abandoned in winter months as mining becomes impossible, and the only people who stay in the village are the family who run the guesthouse – which provides a convenient place for the PCs to stay as the snow draws in. It’s there that they gradually uncover the haunting of Kupfertal Guesthouse.
The plot is an excellent example of how to subvert expectations. It appears to be a classic “vengeful spirit” plot, the ghost believing that his daughter and son-in-law have locked his other daughter (to whom he left the house) in the cellar, in order to benefit from her inheritance. In fact, the ghost is mistaken and the main NPCs are protectively sheltering their relative since she has developed mutations. The scenario structure is that the ghost gradually masters his powers, resulting in more and more obvious clues to the mutant’s hiding place. At the climax we get a classic WFRP dilemma about what to do with the innocent mutant and those harbouring her.
In support of this there’s a cracking map of the house (albeit with an inconsistent map key), plus an unkeyed version for showing to players. Complicating matters are the aforementioned creepy children (there’s nothing actually supernatural about them) and a Goblin climbing down the chimney (to eat the traditional Mondstille feast).
In many ways it’s a lovely little adventure – there’s some nice riffing on Christmas traditions, a refreshing lack of combat (in the main), and a genuine mystery to be uncovered. There is perhaps a bit of a big plot hole (why can’t an ethereal ghost just pass through the cellar walls to see his daughter and discover her condition?) but I don’t find that a major problem2. My main concern with the adventure is suspicious PCs discovering the mutant too early, perhaps due to ransacking the tavern on principle, and I’m not sure how you can easily avoid that; I guess you could have a fortuitously-timed Goblin attack to distract them?
Naturally there is also the timing issue: it may be tricky to get an existing party to be in the right location at Mondstille, so I feel this might work better as a one-shot.
Buy The Spirit of Mondstille from DriveThruRPG. (This is an affiliate link so I receive a small payment for purchases made using it.)
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That’s it for 2023 from Ill Met by Morrslieb. I’m taking a break for a couple of weeks so I’ll be back with more WFRP-y goodness in January 2024. Happy Christmas one and all!
Ill Met by Morrslieb 
This is the only official Christmas themed scenario I’m aware of. But the same author also wrote the similarly titled “The Ghosts of Mondstille”, an unofficial scenario for 2nd edition. Per the introduction, it “is a festive riff on A Christmas Carol”.
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It looks very much like the adventure reviewed here. http://www.chumley.co.uk/wfrp/ghostofmondstille.pdf
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Yeah, I think it’s this one. Unless it was original a 2nd Edition that was updated for 3rd? From the DriveThruRPG product page (for the 4e version): “Originally published online as ‘The Ghost of Mondstille’, this scenario by Clive Oldfield is the perfect bleak midwinter’s tale with which to challenge your gaming group this December.”
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My bad – the pdf I found was the 3E adventure. I can’t find any reference to a 2E adventure called “The Ghosts of Mondstille”, even in L. M. Fisher’s exhaustive “Every WFRP adventure” collection. Where did you know this from? 🙂
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I can’t remember where it came from, sorry. I assumed Strike to Stun, but if you don’t know it then it must have been from somewhere else.
I only have it as a Word document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18KpRruIVds2SfbIEFQa9VYrNBEOUxvEK/edit?usp=drivesdk&ouid=107519679946468028940&rtpof=true&sd=true
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Ricky: Neat! I only caught the very tail end of the Strike to Stun forum era, so I’m sure I’ve missed tons of stuff that was there.
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I can’t see it anywhere in the Strike to Stun archive, but I can’t find any trace of it by googling either. It may just have to be a mystery!
For some reason I got the impression that you were an StS veteran, not sure why. I also only got there towards the end.
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I started hanging out there regularly in late 2017 when I was first preparing to start up my (still ongoing) The Enemy Within remix.
I read through the 2E adventure and it felt more like a somewhat mean-spirited joke than a proper adventure; the 3E/4E one seems clearly superior.
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Fascinating! So Clive Oldfield did two quite different WFRP adventures, both called Ghosts of Mondstille, one for 2e and one for 3e!
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“The Ghosts of Mondstille” and “The Ghost of Mondstille” – apparently that ‘s’ in the first one is quite important 😉
I guess Mr Oldfield has a penchant for ghost stories!
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Always the party pooper, I find the adventure quite poor and think it wouldn’t be fun the play.
I like the mood, I like the place, the whole setup is brilliant, the mining town, the family, the believable characters. It starts great with the hosts being nervous, there’s something clearly off, the players get nervous – it’s classic. Like The Night of Dead. The expectations are that the hosts are the bad guys, the reveal should be surprising.
But there’s nothing to do!
I mean: nothing for the players to actively strive for, no real problem to solve. The hosts are actually good, so the play doesn’t naturally escalate into conflict. The initial tension of there being something off never builds up.
The player’s can’t really take initiative because the game is structured like 14 (!) events they need to wait for. So the players are in a passive stance, there’s no real player agency. We’re just waiting for stuff to happen. And all the stuff that happens has a single goal – to get the players into the cellar. Once the players start being initiative and go to the cellar, that’s it, adventure over.
So there’s really only one thing to do: go to the cellar. No real space for non-linear play, creative solutions, no unpredictability. We’re showing the players clue 1 to 14 until they get the gist. We’re not asking the players “what do you want to do?” We’re merely showing them clues and asking them “Do you get it now?”
I think all tension gets ruined by the fact that the 14 events stretch over the whole night AND the following day plus the following evening. The scenarios of the “there’s something wrong with the inkeeper” only really work in a really tight timeframes.
Plus, the inkeeper actually invites the players to join him on patrol the next day? Where the tension in that? And we get to discover and fixt a group of six goblins? What? Why? How is that relevant to the ghost story we’re trying to play here?
It’s a mess. I doubt this was playtested, and I’m pretty sure that almost any party will discover the cellar by event 3 or 4, therefore ending the adventure early. Going to the cellar is literally the only thing to do here – players will do it soon.
Poor scenario design, if you ask me. I do like the mood. And it can be fun to roleplay the holiday evening, play with the burning log, get into the mood, speak our wishes for the next year… but that’s just fluff. Mere theatrical roleplaying for the sake of theatrical roleplaying, without any real conflict and problem solving underneath. Do people prefer to play this way?
Also, the adventure does the thing I hate: it hides clues behind Perception rolls. Most of the “hauntings” are only noticed if a player passes a Perception roll. Otherwise nothing happens and we skip the whole scene. This is not how you do things! Only use perception rolls if failure is interesting (as in “someone stabs you in the back and you didn’t notice!”). If failure means nothing happening and us skipping the whole situation, what’s the point of that?
So again, I remained unconvinced about the qualitites of Cubicle 7 adventures. Sorry – I need to maintain my contrarian reputation!
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Sorry, I always forget there isn’t an edit button to fix the typos. I’m a hasty poster! And the comparison in the beginning is obviously to the Night of Blood.
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I slept on it. Maybe I was too harsh. Let me change my assessment from “poor” to “salvageable”.
There’s a lot to like here – the grounded setting, the believable characters, the inn and the village, the Christmas mood and events, fun little atmospheric tidbits like the two creepy girls who stalk a character they take a fancy in. The mood is excellent. It’s just that the structure of the scenario is poor – completely linear with just a single thing to actively achieve (find the cellar). Sometimes, I’m too focused on the structure and tend to not see the mood.
I like when a scenario presents o complex open situation, and lets the players find their own way through it. Gives them many options for them to do. I, as a GM, am excited and suprised by what they do.
This one drags the players through a carefully scripted, atmospheric experience. I, as a GM, know almost exactly what is going to happen – my job isn’t to be suprised and react to the players; my job is to drag them trough the experience.
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Thanks for your comments, I appreciate your perspective! I think you’re right that it’s a very reactive adventure from the players’ point of view – just reacting to hauntings rather than having a clear goal to pursue.
I do appreciate more open-ended scenarios, and I think WFRP in general doesn’t really do them very often.
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It’s a long time since I first read the WFRP3 version of this scenario, ‘The Ghost of Mondstille’, so my memory has faded, but I recall really liking it. It was interesting and atmospheric. Markuscz may be right that there isn’t a lot for the players to do in it, but sometimes short and simple is fine. Also, I don’t see it as a problem that there are so many events to lead the players to the cellar. Scenarios too often fail to provide enough hooks or leads, and a surfeit of them helps the GM without being detrimental to the adventure.
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In the past few days, I’ve mulled over this, and I think I’ve come around (slightly). In a way, these comments are a real-time record of my thinking, which wouldn’t happen if I didn’t write them down.
Come to think of it, this whole “adventure” is really just a single interesting situation with a single decision point: there’s a creepy-looking family but it turns out they’re just scared because they’re hiding a mutant in the cellar. What do you do? This by itself is well realised, the place and the people in it are great. It’s good fun… for an “encounter”. If this were five pages long, I’d be excited.
I think my misgivings come from the fact that there are actually 19 pages of text build around something which is actually a simple encounter. And these don’t really add much, except delaying the actual decision point by some moody but not very interactive bits.
In the end, I think it comes down how much player agency or interactivity as opposed to just “enjoying the mood” you want in your games.
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I take your point (about the length compared to the meat of the scenario). But I think if your players are up for engaging with the “silly Reikland customs” aspect of the adventure then that could be pretty fun – quite aside from the actual main plot.
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