Endhammer

Aaargh! Ian Miller trees!

My 1st edition Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay campaign has come to an end after just over a year and about 30 sessions. Why did it end? Death, lots of death. 

But before we talk endings, let’s review the beginning: This is my second campaign of WFRP set in the town of Ravenstein. I originally chose it because it had a cool sounding name and not much associated lore, so I could just make lots of stuff up about it. The set up for both campaigns was that PCs were all orphans, survivors of the same orphanage, and that common bond was what tied them together as a group of what otherwise would have been fairly disparate individuals. In fact one PC spanned both campaigns as a result, despite two largely different player groups. 

My personal vision of WFRP hews close to the aesthetic of “alcoholic gamblers knifing cultists in back alleys.” I have never had a non-human PC or single orc rear their ugly head with either group. I could write a long post about what I think are appropriate setting elements for WFRP but this blog does it more justice. While I sometimes struggle with games that have a throng aesthetic to maintain, it easier after all to follow the kitchen sink approach to fantasy of early D&D than the low fantasy folklore and horror of Dragon Warriors, I also believe you’ve got to go where the game takes you. This is how you end up with a chicken footed wizard’s apprentice in the group, as well as a one armed Chaos mechanoid that floats around off the ground rather than walks. Or at least it is if you start rolling for mutations on the glorious d1000 table in Slaves to Darkness. I guess once you include a piece of warp stone in the game, there’s no getting the worms back in the can and the campaign was better for it. 

After all the orphans burned down their former orphanage, forced some children into a life of crime, murdered several completely innocent people for money and ultimately all died in a high stakes bid to take over the criminal underworld of Ravenstein. Although the mechanoid did return to life like Arnold in Terminator 2, rebooting by use of his last fate point, to bite off the head of albino gangland boss Kurt Weiss in a spectacular critical attack (only to to have his ruined mechanoid body smashed to pieces by Weiss’s surviving henchman, and new crime Lord of the city, Some Random Guy.)

So yes, we ended on a total party kill. It was glorious, totally fitting, and as with so many of these things could have easily gone the other way with a few better dice rolls on the PCs’ side. Still we’re done with WFRP for now, although a return to Ravenstein could always be on the cards at some point. After all, we never did find out what Little Herman did to deserve a steel crossbow bolt to the spine and a summary burial in the cellar of a burned down pub on Hexennacht.