Friday, July 19, 2019

Seven Pages of Horror- "Night of Blood" for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay



                                                                                                                 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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