Cubicle 7
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1st edition earned its legendary status through high quality pre-written adventures. The six-book long Enemy
Within campaign is regarded as one of the best ever written, and with good
reason. But WFRP had plenty of other scenarios that have gone largely
overlooked. My personal favorite has always been Night of Blood.
Originally published in issue 87 of White Dwarf magazine, Night
of Blood was only seven pages long. Written by Dungeons & Dragons mainstay
Jim Bambra, it’s nothing short of a triumph of game design. The adventure
perfectly conveys the tone, themes, and gameplay that defined classic Warhammer.
Like all great WFRP stories, Night of Blood starts
with a stage coach crash. Stranded in the middle of a thunderstorm on a
secluded, wooded road in the Empire, the adventurers find themselves surrounded
by the mutants responsible for the accident.
Night of Blood is one of the rare examples of “in
media res” storytelling in a published RPG scenario. It does away with any awkward
introductions and plunges the players right into WFRP’s “grim world of
perilous adventure.” Emerging from the crash to discover a dog headed mutant
devouring the coachman tells the players more about Warhammer than any
exposition ever could.
Aside from its effective simplicity, the opening sets up Night of Blood’s “out of the frying pan into the fire” narrative. The adventurers quickly discover that the only respite is the nearby Hooded Man inn. Unfortunately, what lies within is much worse.
While the roadside inn is a well-established part of RPG mythology, Night of Blood uses it in a very novel fashion. Bambra
offers a quick summary of its secret, dark history as a place of chaos worship. But the players aren’t privy to that information.
Even then,
it’s immediately clear that something foul is afoot. The Hooded Man inn’s
inhabitants have been butchered or captured by chaos cultists, in preparation
for a ritual. The cultists don’t expect the adventurers’ arrival. They
pose as the owners and patrons they’ve attacked while they figure out how to
deal with their unexpected guests.
While not particularly well defined, the chaos cultists are
memorable adversaries. They offer a wealth of roleplaying potential. The cultists also
serve as a realization of Warhammer Fantasy’s dark humor.
All things considered, they're a relatively mundane bunch, aside from some
mutations that range from awkward to horrifying. To even the fight against any
nosy adventurers, the cultists rely on dirty tricks. They force the players
into unfortunate circumstances any chance they get.
The cultists’ constant deception offers a perfect example of good enemy design. None of them are particularly
imposing, neither individually nor together. But the scenario forces the
adventurers to fight them alone in confined spaces, atop slippery roofs, or under
the influence of sleeping draughts.
And that’s assuming they even manage to see past the
bloodstained disguises in time.
Just about every GM is tempted to make custom, beefed out
adversaries to throw at their players, each one with a wealth of homebrewed abilities. Meanwhile, Night of Blood takes
some of the most basic enemies from the core book and makes them lethal by
placing them in the right circumstances.
Night of Blood eschews the cycle of introducing
bigger and badder monsters. Instead, it shows the value of an “average” adversary
that strikes the players at the worst possible moment and in a cunning way. The
is much more engaging than the former.
As is appropriate for such underhanded enemies, the cultists
are doomed regardless of the player’s actions. Even if they
successfully complete the ritual, they discover summoning a daemon is a death
sentence without a binding spell at the ready.
Like most of Night of Blood, the climax is
mechanically and narratively fulfilling. The daemon’s betrayal ties into the
self-destructive nature of chaos and its followers, as well as Warhammer’s
larger themes of lethal failure.
The nameless daemon breaks up the player/enemy/ally dichotomy
that so many games fall into, as the nightmare can’t be bothered to make those
kinds of distinctions. The daemon is the “final boss” but the context
surrounding it ensures that the adversary is properly integrated into the story and not just a gameplay contrivance.
Like any good scenario, there are multiple ways the Night
of Blood can unfold. It’s plotted loosely enough that the GM doesn’t have
to railroad the players for the story to unfold as intended. Regardless of
whether the adventurers are triumphant, they have to answer for their actions in
the morning.
At the end of Night of Blood, Roadwardens arrive at
the Hooded Man Inn and discover the carnage. With no one else left alive, it’s
up to the adventurers to get themselves out of trouble.
In WFRP even the most seemingly
defensible of actions have consequences. In Warhammer, victory is never
as simple as killing the enemy and Night of Blood conveys that all
important theme.
Night of Blood is a perfect example of something more
than the sum of its parts. By pulling together various elements, Bambra
produced the perfect introduction to the tone, themes, and concepts of Warhammer.
The adventure’s a constant fight for survival, one so vicious that it swings
between being absurd and terrifying when it doesn’t fall somewhere in between.
Night of Blood has been updated and reprinted a few
times, most recently as a free PDF release for WFRP 4th
edition, published by Cubicle 7. I can’t think
of a piece of media that captures the horror, brutality, and comedy of Warhammer
Fantasy so succinctly, so it's a good choice for a free adventure.
This newest rendition of the adventure removes some of the flair from Bambra's writing and lacks Russ Nicholson's appropriately grimy art. Scott Purdy's new illustrations at least have an appropriately Warhammer flair that nearly all of the modern artists to work on the franchise have lacked. More importantly, the rewrite keeps the narrative core of the adventure while still delivering it to a modern audience.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter which version of Night of Blood you end up running. Just so long as your players end up paying a visit to the Hooded Man Inn.
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