Play review: Enemy Within I, Shadows over Bogenhafen

So I invited some friends over and we played Shadows over Bogenhafen with the WFRP4 rules for my birthday (man, I'm cool). I had previously run the intro adventure, Mistaken Identity, for 3 of the players and then I demanded we play again. Most of the players were from our D&D 5e game, while one has played old school D&D rules and some WFRP online with me for years.

We used pregens from the new Warhammer Starter Set - a witchhunter, renamed John Lawe, a high elf Merchant named Ambrose, a halfling named Elmira 'Twigget' Brandysnap, later joined by Gus Gruber, death magic wizard, and Bethesda, witch (this last one was rolled up).

Gotta say, it's a great game. The Germanic empire and allusions provide a lot of humor and fun. One of my players caught the Max Ernst reference in Mistaken Identity. The character creation puts a lot of little details into the PCs that are missing from D&D5e - the halflings being good cooks and having Acute Taste was used for humorous effect, and provided plot points (she impersonated a cook to get into the Teugen manse).

The adventure itself is good to great. The basic plot is that a circle of rich merchants running a town have become a cult dedicated to conducting a ritual that they think will get them rich but in fact is to open a portal to the Realms of Chaos. The PCs liked the unusual setup (for D&D) of the authorities being corrupted and bad. There was much hilarity in crawling around sewers. They liked gathering clues, though I have to say it was a bit of a pain as the DM to keep the action moving. So two problems with running Shadows out of the box: (1) reading the voluminous materials to get what facts and details are important before running and (2) figuring out ways while running to keep things moving if the PCs stall and start waffling around.

For the first point about ease of use, I'd love the adventure redesigned along modern OSR supplement/dungeon lines to split it into three parts: Background information that is Nice to Know but Not Important (just read once at some point and move on), a shortened outline of the adventure Events and Clues for the players, and three Pages to Have Open While Running (map, timeline, stats, Random Encounters). As it is, it's filled with fluff, important versus unimportant information is not separated, and hard to figure out how to inject the players. Basically, it needs to actually be organized. It is disorganized now. This leads to railroading, because the easiest way to move things along is simply follow the way the adventure is written down. But it doesn't have to be this way!!! Remove superfluous events, rewrite to just be as mentioned (Events, Clues, Timeline) or whatever. Then it won't have to be so railroad-y. This isn't the greatest criticism of an old adventure: they were breaking new ground at the time, and there wasn't a lot of practice organizing things along the best principles of current adventure writing practice.

Second, the action can drag. The way our session unfolded, there were a couple lulls after the Schaffenfest (sheep fest, a great backdrop event!) investigation of the escaped goblin and then after they couldn't get any response from the authorities. They talked to Dr. Malthius, who suggested interacting with the Thieves Guild as written, but that didn't have as much forward progress as implied in the adventure book, and I remember it stalled again. The wizard miscast hard when trying to teleport inside one of the merchant cultist houses, though, and that was awesome. I really wanted to avoid the massive reveal (almost deus ex machina) of one of the merchants simply explaining what happened at the cult meeting to force the player's involvement, but I did use the lure of that meeting to frame the player's for the merchant's murder as written. Ultimately, I added that the thieves guild knew of a sewer entrance (based on player questions) into the ringleader's mansion (Hagen) that the halfling used to infiltrate the cult's meeting and hear of their plans. This provided a missing connection between the PCs investigations and the actual plot without having to resort to a NPC finding them at the eleventh hour and telling the whole story.

The PCs then confronted the cult at their ritual and after some magical shenanigans, defeated the demon and cult, before the City Watch showed up. The final showdown was easier than anticipated, mostly because the players were clever in how they attacked the demon (and fourth edition empowerment?). All in all, a great adventure. But if I run another Enemy Within adventure, I'll definitely try to "convert" it to a series of more managble tables and bullet points. This should be especially useful with Death on the Reik.