Wednesday 06 November, 2007: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

Welcome back,

This week we join Heini-Ken, Olly’s halfling who turned out to be startlingly overweight (the dice never lie), and Sophia Liechtenstein my Bretonian elf mercenary on their adventures through Games Workshop’s Warhammer world in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Johnny is Games Master (GM) for this campaign but we hadn’t played for a while so things started slowly.

We are currently travelling from the Moot into more central parts of the Empire. The Moot turns out to be a good place to start because its rural setting and proximity to the infamous Sylvania makes it a good place for small-scale, short encounters/episodes for starting adventurers. It is approaching the halfling festival of Pie Week (something which has led to my instant conversion to halflingism). Our last adventure saw us “liberating” an ogre from his drudgery at a tavern in the next town over before being compelled to leave said town after an unfortunate misunderstanding and a local death. We are very sorry for our riotous behaviour and will not be going back in a hurry. We left with a travelling inventor who, due to his corrupt practices involving the accursed warp stone promptly turned into a chaos mutant. Some field wardens caught up with us on our frankly farcical flight from the town and an entertaining and violent fight ensued. The culmination was the almost fatal battle with the chaos mutant and the ogre’s transcendental wonder when the highly dangerous and illegal warpstone cannon (the inventor’s pride and joy) exploded in his face after an unforeseen torch dropping incident – thank you, Olly.

Our new town welcomed us to start with (because we didn’t roleplay the first few days of our stay there). After that though we quickly lost friends. We have become a pair of travelling rogues with a vague tendency towards good but also towards ripping people off – especially mayors and their assistants. (This truly is the first game I have ever played where I have been paid to go away.)

The premise of this adventure was that our arrival in the town coincided with Pie Eve, the first night of Pie Week and, coincidentally, the anniversary of a victory against bandits won by one of the mayor’s ancestors. The problem is that Pie Week comes but once a year and in the intervening months the site of the victory (which is the customary location for the Pie Eve party) tends to become a little wild and unkemped. We were tasked with ensuring it was fit for halfling celebration. Thanks to an astounding roll on my haggle dice we secured a good price and set off.

In the meantime, we had struck up a bizarre relationship with a local doctor who had lost a leg and was now obsessed with legs. He spent his spare time carving all kinds of stylised wooden legs and we felt that he may be interested in legs of any types (perhaps we should have asked). We had also just upset a local minstrel by tempting the wide-eyed children away from his story and promising them ogre rides. Unfortunately, his knowledge of folklore was going to be useful in researching the location of the party so we had to get back on his good side. We promised him an audience in return for the information we required. In order to make a little extra money we also decided to host ogre rides at the party and charge the children for the privilege (he costs enough to feed so he might as well earn his keep). The doctor we met agreed to make a sign (he was the only one who could write in the area) to advertise the bard and ogre ride gathering in return for some legs.

The adventure went well to start with. We met a strange and frightened young man selling pies which he was reluctant to say much about. We bought them all anyway and, because we were suspicious, we examined them before eating them. They had a strange and disgusting contents so we fed them to the ogre. When we got to the location of the mayor’s party we had a fight with a little band of goblins and won quite decisively (no thanks to our now quite unwell ogre). We collected the weapons of the goblins as proof to the mayor of their demise and the ogre carried their bodies so we could give their legs to the doctor.

On the way home however we met the frightened pie man again. He implored our aid and we thought he might take us somewhere where there was money so we went with him. He lived with his aunt who was a witch under the influence of the chaos god Nurgle. She kept her mutant husband locked up and maniacally produced pies filled with the puss which she extracted from his cow-like udder mutation. Oops, we just fed some of them to the ogre.

The witch tried to feed us some of the ghastly pies and I didn’t want any so I became enraged (I’m quite an angry elf and I have trouble not slipping from my French accent to one from the outskirts of Bristol. This gives me a great deal to get angry about). I attacked the witch but she fled from her pestilential hovel into the garden …

Where our ogre’s flatulence had built up to a nurglesque crescendo resulting in him releasing three nurglings in the process. They leapt at me and one of them bit me giving me an as yet unknown illness. After a much less impressive fight (although I did quite definitely kill the witch with a fairly mighty sword blow), The nurglings disappeared due to daemonic instability and, the subject of his aunt’s dying curse, the terrified pie man ran off into the woods. Upon discovering the disease-wracked, mutated uncle he beseeched us to put him out of his misery, which we did. We burned all the evidence of such a blasphemous and corrupted site and went to claim our reward.

We didn’t get the ogre to give rides as our sign wasn’t ready. Firstly the doctor wasn’t happy with the goblins and secondly he pointed out that he was also the only person who could have read it anyway. Also, when we delivered the goblin weapons to the mayor (we kept quiet about the newly-vanquished Nurgle incursion) he paid us extra if we didn’t hang around for the Pie Eve party. I can’t think why…

I must admit that this was another genuinely fun adventure. Johnny’s stories are always strange and entertaining and I eagerly look forward to the next one. He thinks beyond the pail and that makes for fun and interesting games. Feel free to comment and look out for next week’s post (when we will have caught up on ourselves) when I’ll be telling you about the gritty adventures of our characters in the underhive of Necromunda. It will be great to catch up with the renowned Chi-Sul (better known as Drillius) and his pit slaves, Ileria and her Ratskins, Crochell Reek and Sorehead with their small but tenacious Delaques, Lienna and her Esher horde, Big Trev and his mauled Goliaths and anybody else who wanders in. We hope to be introducing an Enforcer squad and a pack of Spirers to spice up the mix but time will tell.

Commander Portman