Review: Enemy in Shadows Companion (part 1)

As noted in my overview of The Enemy Within, each volume of the “Director’s Cut” (the new 4th Edition version of the campaign) had an accompany Companion sourcebook, sold separately. These were intended to provide a mixture of additional material to expand the main adventure as well as extra (vaguely) related material useful for any WFRP campaign.

Much of this material is updated material from 1st Edition – principally stuff from the original Enemy Within campaign (which didn’t make it into the main 4th Edition TEW adventures), plus short adventures published in White Dwarf. I’ll be identifying where this is the case. (Unless I don’t spot something, in which case please leave a comment!)

This then, is the companion volume to Enemy in Shadows (which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago). So how is it?

First we get the map of Berebeli – very welcome, but as noted in my review of Enemy in Shadows, it should just have been included in the main adventure. This is quickly followed by a page each of reflections by original writers Phil Gallagher and Graeme Davis (the latter of whom is also the main writer for the new version of the campaign). These are great for big fans of the campaign – but more than that, they provide insight into the development of the Warhammer world as a whole, because the Enemy Within was very early on in the development of WFRP, which was so also key to the development of overall Warhammer lore.

Part of the map of The Berebeli. Copyright Cubicle 7

Particularly fascinating is Phil Gallagher’s reflections on his inspiration for no less a figure as Sigmar himself, and the twin tailed comet that (supposedly) heralded his birth. (It’s from Shakespeare, naturally.) He also provides a rather less grandiose story about the inspiration for the Drakwald Forest. Meanwhile Graeme Davis goes over the development of Shadows Over Bogenhafen (famously Games Workshop owner Bryan Ansell told him to write a “bloodless [Call of] Cthulhu adventure for Warhammer”), and I’m pleased to see a reference to The Oldenhaller Contract too¹. He also considers the legacy of Bogenhafen over the years since. I suspect there isn’t anything here that a Serious Fan wouldn’t know already, but it’s a nice read nonetheless.

Then we get a couple of pages on Easter eggs in the adventure (some of which are pretty obvious, but others were new to me – I had never twigged the derivation of Elvyra Kleinestun’s name, for instance, or that Castle Reikgard is apparently a pun on the deodorant Right Guard).

Then we’re on to the actually gameable stuff. It begins with an overview of The Empire: the provinces, and lots of details on the politics of the realm (Elector Counts, Prime Estate, the Council of State etc). We also get some brief details on the law, guilds, taxes and titles (this last being particularly useful for helping a poor GM who doesn’t know the difference between a Count and a Margrave). As far as I can tell, most this material is reproduced from the original The Enemy Within sourcebook (the eponymous first part of the whole campaign). In my opinion it hugely useful for running any campaign in the Empire – helping to provide verisimilitude to the overall world, with a pleasing amount of complexity in the politics of this great realm. In fact, it’s so important that to my mind it really ought to have been in the core rulebook. As it is, it is very helpful to read it in concert with first section of Archives of the Empire, which provides a good overview of each of the Grand Provinces of the Empire (at the time of the beginning of The Enemy Within campaign).

Roads and Highways

There follows a brief chapter on the Empire’s Roads & Highways – a mere two pages of content, plus an incredible full-page picture of a steampunk coaching house by JG Donaghue (if you’re interested, he goes into detail about creating this image in The Ratter issue 4). More information on the Empire is always great, but its really very brief – the main benefit here is telling you who is responsible for maintenance of larger and smaller roads, which could have some potential if you want to come up with a more grounded adventure hook. Then we have a page detailing the major coaching houses of the Empire. 

Delberz or Delbren? That cartographer’s got it wrong again! Copyright Cubicle 7

Mounts & Vehicles is the next chapter. This is full of potentially useful information like profiles of mounts, speeds for various vehicles (carts, coaches, wagons and even litters), rules for pushing your mount to travel faster (and the potentially disastrous consequences for doing so), even rules for leaping from one vehicle to another! It’s dreadful boring to read but I can imagine it could come in useful. It does a shame that there aren’t rules for modifying vehicles to create your own War Wagon!

Travelling Rules follow – again, an adaptation (and expansion) of information in The Enemy Within sourcebook. In theory this sounds like an incredibly useful chapter, given that The Enemy Within include loads of overland travelling, and it is potentially very helpful to have rules and guidance on this. In practice however this is a highly abstracted system, reminiscent of the controversial Between Adventures rules in the main rulebook. Rather than determining how many days a journey will take, it is instead split into rather vague ‘Stages’, the number of which is determined by the slowest travel speed of the party, and which can be reduced by a successful Navigation or relevant Lore test.² There is only the vaguest guidance on how many Stages a particularly journey will take – and indeed, how long an individual Stage is supposed to represent. A sidebar explains that “maps of the Empire are notoriously inaccurate [and] few feature any indication of scale” which I do not regard as a justification for the vagueness in this chapter: it’s absolutely fine to say that in-universe maps are unreliable, but the GM should still have accurate info!

In any case, once you’ve worked out the number of Stages, you work through each one in order – determining the weather, enabling each Character to take a Travel Endeavour and (if the GM chooses) rolling for a Travel Event. Weather is very basic – it’s basically going to be OK, raining or snowing, and gives you the exciting opportunity to make your PCs catch the Common Cold, and arrive at their destination thoroughly drenched and sneezing. (It’s up to you whether you think this adds to the gritty realism of the setting or is just an irritating thing that no-one in their right mind is going to want to deal with in a roleplaying game.)  Travel Endeavours are treated similarly to those in the core rulebook’s Between Adventures chapter, and include things like foraging for food, woodcraft (which mitigates the effects of weather), keeping watch and so on. Failure on a Travel Endeavour gives you a Fatigued condition (i.e. -10 to all tests) so these carry an element of risk! 

Your Travel Event consists of a roll on one of three tables (Positive Encounters, Coincidental Encounters and Harmful Encounters). A Positive Encounter is generated by rolling an Impressive Success on a Travel Endeavour; a Harmful Encounter is triggered by a fumble on a Travel Endeavor, or if the majority of PCs simply fail their Endeavour. Why exactly a one PC failing to forage, another failing their woodcraft check, and a third failing to Gather Information results in the party getting robbed is unclear… in other words, its a classic Dissociated Mechanic, where a mechanical failure in one place is punished in a completely arbitrary way. I don’t like it! Not only that but the encounter tables are incredibly generic – things like “you encounter a bunch of decent people on the road” or “a rival plagues their journey”. This is the sort of stuff anyone can come up with themselves – we need a bit of detail! 

(For a much, much better selection of travelling encounters, I recommend the WFRP 2nd Edition Gamemaster’s Toolkit – found in the Gamemaster’s Pack – which is packed with flavourful encounters.)

Road Wardens. Can you spot the Beastmen? Copyright Cubicle 7

Continuing the theme of road travel, Chapter 6 is Road Wardens. It’s pretty brief – just a page or so on their organisation (including toll houses), followed by four NPCs (two toll keepers and two road warden officers – it’s a bit weird that we don’t get an NPC for a rank-and-file Road Warden). I’ve always been a fan of Road Wardens – having some kind of law-keeping force highlights the fact that the Empire is (somewhat) civilised nation (which is one of the thing that defines WFRP for me), yet the size of the Empire is such that the  road wardens are massively over-stretched and they often function as a deterrent at best, or a symbolic presence at worst. I’m still not convinced by toll keepers being a part of the overall road warden organisation (rather than answering directly to the bailiff of the local lord) – but I suppose since Road Warden units are raised and paid for by the same local lord, it makes some sense that the toll keepers could be used for upkeep. 

In any case I’m a little disappointed by how brief this chapter is. Players being players, I feel it would be helpful to have some concrete advice on the consequences for PCs if they refuse to pay a toll. How long does it take for them to be reported? What is the likely scale of response? How far will road wardens pursue them? A canny GM can make all this stuff up – but surely the point of a book like this is to give you some information on this sort of thing?

A cast of ne’er-do-wells

The next chapter is a beast: 20 pages of sample NPCs who can be dropped into just about any adventure. They’re split between NPCs to encounter on the road, and urban-based NPCs. For each one there is some general information about their profession (entertainers, gamblers, peldars, beggars, labourers etc – not all of which map exactly onto 4th Ed careers) followed by a description of the sample NPC with a profile, personality and an adventure hook. In addition the majority also have a brief idea for how you might use them specifically in Enemy in Shadows (e.g. the PCs might encounter one character if they get thrown in prison, who can help expedite their escape to continue the adventure; another NPC is a put-upon servant who can help nudge investigations in Bogenhafen if the PCs are getting bogged down).

As usual for C7 products, there is a fantastic selection of fun and memorable NPCs here. I particularly liked the noble who claims to be the heir to the Solland throne, a charismatic bawd engaged to more than the the usual number of men, and a dim-witted outlaw who robs from the poor to give to the rich. Its pleasing to see the old 1st Edition trope recur of comedy NPCs based on real-life personages or fictional characters: I spotted Groucho Marx and “Delberz Trotte”, a pedlar always on the look out for a get-rich-quick scheme (a reference to classic British comedy Only Fools and Horses; the artist has done a very good job of capturing David Jason’s likeness). 

Delberz Trotte, Pedlar

Pompai Ricolma, Bawd

Layout is a problem however – very frequently the sidebar giving suggestions for how to use the NPC in Enemy in Shadows is situated on a different page from the rest of the info about that NPC – so you have page after page where you have all the details for NPC a, plus the adventure hook for NPC b; then on the next page you get all the details for NPC c plus the adventure hook for NPC b and so on. It’s very annoying, especially since the adventure hooks aren’t titled with the NPC name so you’re halfway through reading them before you discover they don’t relate to the NPC on the same page! 

---

This review ended up getting so long that I’ve split it into two; the second part can be found here.

Buy the Enemy in Shadows Companion at DriveThruRPG. This is an affiliate link so I receive a small payment for purchases made using it. 

1. I’m perpetually mystified that Cubicle 7 haven’t yet produced a 4th Edition version of this classic adventure, given that much less worthy contenders have been given the treatment. ↩︎
2. I really appreciate having uses for Navigation and Lore skills, so this is a positive, at least. ↩︎