Prepping WFRP Adventures for pOSR Play
Thomas Rowlandson. The Cock - A Coaching Inn in Sutton on the Main Highway to Brighton. 1789.
I love Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay in principle. I love the early modern setting, the unlikely heroes that grow organically over time, and the mix of combat, travel, horror, and heist gameplay that emerge when its firing on all cylinders.
Some of these great qualities are embedded in the adventures (both official and fan-written) that have come out for the games' four editions. Unfortunately, the WFRP house style seems to be brittle railroads presented as wordy paragraph after wordy paragraph. Scenes frequently sprawl across multiple pages and are studded with perception tests to notice that the plot is happening or (to me) improbable expectations of what the PCs will do next. I'm sure there are people who these really click for, but to me I find them almost unusable as-written.
So, how do I actually run these things? I follow these basic steps:
- Extract any maps.
- Extract characters and motivations.
- Draft a coarse timeline.
- Discard the rest.
- Start in media res.
Let's walk through these steps with reference to an example: Night of Blood, a venerable adventure available for free on Cubicle7's store in its 4e incarnation. You can also read a session report I wrote after taking players through it with Ten Dead Rats or listen to Between Two Cairns review it.
Extract Maps
First and foremost, we want to pivot from new-school time to old-school space. That means presenting the adventure as a set of locations, not a sequence of events. If the adventure contains any maps, take screenshots of them. Make a list of all the locations the players might go. In the case of Night of Blood there is basically only one location - The Hooded Man roadside inn.
This map appears originally in the free Night of Blood PDF and is included for critical purposes only.
Now we do some map keying. This is where we digest the meat of the module into a set of briefly described rooms. The goal is to describe each space as tersely as possible. Give each room a name. Record only the details you will need to reference with specificity - occupants, the contents of containers, traps, or clues. Trust the room name: bedrooms have bedroom stuff in them.
Ferry House
- Rope has been cut rendering raft inoperable.
- Furniture overturned, trail of blood into the mud outside
- 12s 42p in bag
Stables
- Grat (spider mutant) is in the hayloft, feasting on a stable boy.
- Panicked horses stampede out when door opened.
Bar Room
- Otto (large mutant) pretending to be barkeep. Tries to drug the PCs with sleeping draught.
- Hans (cultist) pretends to be road warden. Accuses the PCs of being in league with bandits who attacked the inn.
- Fagor (protuberant eye mutant) mopping up blood off the floor
Kitchen
- Halfling scale.
- Fagor puts bloody mop bucket back here.
Bedrooms
- Doors locked.
- One has bloody sheets. Trail leads to the door, then disappears.
Cellar
- loose paving stone leads down to shrine (closed except during ceremony)
Shrine
- real landlord, wife, two servants, and one coachmen are bound and drugged
- guarded by Wilhelm (skull mutant)
- two-foot statue of Tzeentzch in greenish stone radiates patterns of light. If smashed, guardian daemon appears to defend.
- Locked wooden box contains 10g 29s 15p.
- Loose stone conceals Potion of Strength
Extract Characters with Motivations
Now we grab all the characters. You can start with ones that are called out by box text or that feature prominently in scenes, but there might be others that are noteworthy enough to grab. 4e adventures often have character side bars that include these details as well as a stat block. You could just screenshot those and arrange them in a folder.
Hans Jikerst
- Charlatan, master of deception, cultist of Tzeentch.
- Using the mutants to perform a ritual in the inn's basement.
- Disguised as a road warden, but his coat is soaked with blood on the back.
Mutants
- Want to survive by any means necessary.
- Grat - spider legs instead of human ones, eats people
- Otto - preternaturally wide, disguised as bartender
- Fagor - bulging eyes, not very bright
- Wilhelm - skull face
If the module has monsters, try to figure out what their motivations might be too. Grab all the relevant stat blocks now and set them aside for use at the table.
Draft a Coarse Timeline
So now you presumably have combed through the module twice. The next goal is to transcribe the sequence of events of the module in as few steps as possible. Start with the initial position and then take one or two steps.
- Hans and his mutant underlings have seized the Hooded Man and plan to sacrifice their surviving residents to summon a demon in the basement.
- Half an hour after getting rid of the PCs, Hans and the mutants assemble in the cellar to conduct the ceremony.
- If they are successful, the Tzeentzch statue transforms into a demon, but Hans loses control of it and it begins slaying him and the mutants.
This is good enough! We know what happens if the PCs tarry, flee, or are captured. I put this at the top of my prep document in case I need to reference back weeks or months after the session.
Discard the Rest
Seriously. You can make note of any specifics that might be useful at the table - a particularly evocative read-aloud or an inn menu - but the rest is mostly just going to get in your way. Our goal is to trust the characters to drive the action, calling tests when their actions prompt them rather than reading through a script of tests.
Start In Media Res
Many, many WFRP modules start either on the road outside of the location or in the common room of an inn where the players are invited to gamble and drink until the plot happens to them. Skip all of this.
In practice, I like to paint a quick picture of the scene, then ask each player what their character is up to or how they are feeling. Then, once they have all described themselves, I jump in with an inciting incident that they can't easily ignore.
In the case of Night of Blood, the PCs have made their way into the inn courtyard. Rain is coming down in buckets and its already dark. Worse still, they heard bestial sounds from the woods. They need to get indoors. Now. Which building do they approach?
For convention play or other games where you really can't afford to run long, you could start with them knocking at the inn door. Start after the party has made the first choice to get involved.
Beyond Night of Blood
Obviously, this gets more complicated as soon as you are adapting an adventure that's longer than a one-shot or continuing the adventures of previously existing characters. In that case, I suggest applying this approach, but several times. Treat each chapter of the pre-written adventure as a separate site and prep only a session or two ahead. Your players will inevitably diverge from the road or find exciting ways to approach all the expected locales backwards and out of order.
These are essentially the steps I take in preparing any linear module. I worked through very similar steps developing the Eyes Unclouded Sandbox, but first at the region level, then at the individual site level. I think of this approach as being rhizomatic: you can keep making a map and extracting key characters up and up in scale or down and down.