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GW Memories: Frankenstein
In a previous post, I mentioned the Frankenstein game that Mike Brunton and I developed at Games Workshop, and promised to say a little more about it.
As far as I know, there was no formal plan to spin off a set of boardgames themed around classic horror monsters. Fury of Dracula came with Steve Hand when he joined GW, and he also created Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, but the visual presentation of each was very different. Frankenstein, of course, was never published, for reasons that will become clear.
Anyway, here is what I remember.
It all started in a Nottingham city centre pub one evening after work: The Bell, if memory serves. Mike and I started riffing on a Frankenstein concept and throwing out ideas, each more ridiculous than the last. Ale flowed and we were cracking each other up, as we often did, but the following day we thought that we might actually have something. Mike drew up a map and some rules, and I started writing silly text on some blank cards.
The premise of the game was very simple. The board was a hex grid with a lab at each of its six corners. Each of the 2-6 players took the role of a mad scientist involved in a race to create a monster from body parts. The bulk of the board was made up of spaces representing a typical German-ish town from the old Hammer and Universal horror movies, and players set out across the board in search of the body parts they needed. The hospital, the morgue, and the graveyard were able to supply some parts, but a quicker option was to obtain them from innocent townsfolk. Think of it as a beetle drive (the Cooties game, to American readers), with added murder.
Townsfolk came in various strengths, which was matched against the player-scientist’s Lunacy rating in combat. A nice little balancing mechanic ensured that while a higher Lunacy made you more likely to win, it also reduced the number of body parts you could retrieve from an encounter, because you made more of a mess of your victim.
By today’s standards, the range of victims was quite tasteless, including women and children, but this was the 80s and tasteless humor was considered edgy and fun. Take a look at The Young Ones or almost any other British comedy of the time. Anyway…
Other players could try to sabotage you by playing encounter cards on you to increase the difficulty of a combat. Police cards, in particular, could stack to a hideous degree if multiple players decided to gang up. Otherwise, you drew an encounter card when you entered a new space, and either chose to fight it or save it – perhaps to play on an opponent.
The object of the game was to collect all the parts for a complete monster – torso, left and right legs, left and right arms, head, and brain – assemble them in the lab, and wait for a storm (also an encounter card) to animate your creation. Storms came in varying strengths, which affected the chances of success. There were also sabotage cards – lab accidents, rotten parts, and so on – to slow opponents down. The first player to animate their monster successfully was the winner, although we were also considering an expansion pack (de rigeur for boardgame pitches to GW at the time) in which the monsters started terrorizing the town themselves, and fought it out for final victory.
Mike and I assembled a prototype and played it in the GW Design Studio with other writers and designers, to universal acclaim. We were invited to demo it for Bryan Ansell himself at his impressive home (Castle Grayskull to us mortals) just outside Nottingham. Or rather, I was – and that’s where things started to go awry.
Mike was Yorkshire through and through, never afraid to speak his mind and equipped with a wit that could seriously upset anyone whose abilities were not commensurate with their rank – and in his mind, that included most of Games Workshop’s management at the time. It was decided that he shouldn’t be present at the demo, and I should do it alone.
The trouble was, Mike had been tinkering with the rules and the draft I took to the demo was completely new to me. The demo was a disaster, and both Mike and I were berated the next day by various middle managers who denied ever having liked the game and how dare we waste Bryan’s time like that.
Frankenstein was over. I made various efforts to fix the problem, but Bryan had decided it was a bad game and that was that. All the game’s most vocal supporters now hated it, and always had, rather than helping us to get a another chance at a demo. And this despite the fact that the game had already been mentioned in White Dwarf’s news column, the very accurately named “Awesome Lies,” and that cover art had already been commissioned from Les Edwards, the artist behind the Fury of Dracula box art. Our game had failed, and was never to be mentioned again.
And it was all my fault, or at least I felt it was. Frankenstein remains a lifetime regret, although I have to be honest and say that its gallows humor crossed most lines of decency and good taste, and it would definitely not be publishable today.
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November’s Monster of the Month is posted on my Patreon page.
The hag is a well-known creature in many fantasy games, but the underlying folklore is complex, varied, and often terrifying. This 6-page, system-agnostic, PDF monster toolkit includes:
- Stat guidelines for d20-based, d100-based, and other tabletop roleplaying systems.
- A full monster description with lists of basic and optional skills and traits.
- Notes on four variants: Black Annis, Grindylow, Cailleach Bheur, and Fad Felen.
- Three adventure seeds, covering fantasy, historical, and modern settings..
As a member of The Monster of the Month Club, you can expect regular, in-depth treatments of creatures from worldwide myth and folklore—some familiar, some not—in a system-agnostic format that is easy for an experienced GM to use with the tabletop rpg system of their choice.
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GW Memories: Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb
I’m interrupting the series on WFRP 1 in-jokes and Easter Eggs because I just stumbled across an unboxing video for this little game, which I had almost completely forgotten. I’m putting down what I remember about it while it’s still fresh in my mind.
Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb was a boxed boardgame designed by Stephen Hand, the designer behind Chainsaw Warrior, Fury of Dracula, and Chaos Marauders. I believe it was the last game he designed for Games Workshop before quitting, unhappy with management and his role in the company. In a way, his experience paralleled mine: boardgames and roleplaying games both suffered as GW’s focus on miniatures became all-consuming. I remember (half) joking at the time that it would be more honest if the company was called Miniatures Workshop.
The title was stolen from a lesser entry in Hammer Films’ roster of mummy movies. I recall that Steve was a huge fan of classic Hammer and Universal horrors, as well as more contemporary horror. After leaving GW, he wrote the novelization of Freddy vs. Jason, among many other things.
One of the more novel design elements was the 3D board, which was assembled from carboard components in the box. The playable characters were miniatures chosen from GW’s Gothic Horror line, and I wrote up a few more miniatures as playable characters in a support article for White Dwarf. I suspect that in the eyes of GW management, the whole thing was as much an attempt to shift some more of those minis as a sequel to the well-received Fury of Dracula.
And that’s all I really remember of this game. The unboxing video will tell you everything you need to know about it, except for one thing: at the time, there was an effort to make a third gothic horror boardgame, which never came to fruition. I’m not sure it was even announced.
Perhaps I’ll blog about that in the future.
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September’s Monster of the Month is posted on my Patreon page.
The nuckelavee is a demonic monster from the Orkney Islands, which spreads pestilence and terror in equal measure. This 4-page, system-agnostic, PDF monster toolkit includes:
- Stat guidelines for d20-based, d100-based, and – through comparisons with common creatures from most settings – all other tabletop roleplaying systems.
- A full monster description with lists of basic and optional skills and traits.
- Three adventure seeds, covering fantasy, historical, and modern settings.
As a member of The Monster of the Month Club, you can expect regular, in-depth treatments of creatures from worldwide myth and folklore—some familiar, some not—in a system-agnostic format that is easy for an experienced GM to use with the tabletop rpg system of their choice.
Join us on Patreon at patreon.com/MonsteroftheMonthClub, follow us @MotMClub, or email [email protected].
WFRP 1 Easter Eggs: Dwarf Wars
The fourth adventure in the Doomstones campaign, Dwarf Wars was adapted from The Halls of the Dwarven Kings, an AD&D adventure in The Complete Dungeon Master series. It was re-statted for WFRP by Brad Freeman and I developed it for Flame Publications. Art was sourced mainly from the Games Workshop archives, with occasional bespoke pieces by Tony Ackland.
The Art
As with all other Flame products, the cover image was reused from elsewhere. This one was a John Blanche piece that I first saw on the cover of GM Publications #4, Paul Cockburn’s semi-independent AD&D magazine that ran for a total of five issue in the hiatus between the closure of Imagine and Paul’s editorship of White Dwarf.
There is only one joke in the art that I could find: the robot in the store room (area 23). It is based on the Republic Pictures robot that appeared in Commando Cody and elsewhere.
In the original printing, you can barely make out a fragmentary eagle image on the robot’s chest, with Dwarf runes above it that spell out part of the name ‘Republic Pictures.’
The Adventure
There are not joke names in the adventure, as far as I can recall.
I wrote up Poltergeists as a WFRP monster. Unsurprisingly for an invisible creature with no potential to become a miniature, they had never appeared in Warhammer before.
Once again as a sop to the GW Design Studio, I added a short appendix on running the adventure using the Warhammer Fantasy Battle rules, and took the opportunity to plug GW’s Dungeon Floor Plans series as well as the recently-published Warhammer Siege.
Doomstones 5 (or 3*): Heart of Chaos
The finale to the Doomstones campaign was an all-new adventure, published by Hogshead in 2001 – more than a decade after Dwarf Wars first saw print. It was (very) loosely based on an outline I had written at Flame (more on that here), but I was not involved so I’m not able to comment on any Easter eggs.
*The Hogshead printing of the campaign consisted of three volumes. The first two bundled Fire in the Mountains and Blood in Darkness together, and the second did the same for Death Rock and Dwarf Wars. Heart of Chaos was the third volume.
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August’s Monster of the Month is posted on my Patreon page.
The dullahan is a demonic rider from Ireland, who might be the ancestor of Sleepy Hollow’s headless horseman, Ghost Rider, and many others. This 5-page, system-agnostic, PDF monster toolkit includes:
- Stat guidelines for d20-based, d100-based, and – through comparisons with common creatures from most settings – all other tabletop roleplaying systems.
- A full monster description with lists of basic and optional skills and traits.
- Three adventure seeds, covering fantasy, historical, and modern settings.
The Monster of the Month Club As a member, you can expect regular, in-depth treatments of creatures from worldwide myth and folklore—some familiar, some not—in a system-agnostic format that is easy for an experienced GM to use with the tabletop rpg system of their choice.
Join us on Patreon at patreon.com/MonsteroftheMonthClub, follow us @MotMClub, or email [email protected].
WFRP 1 Easter Eggs: Doomstones 3
The third adventure in the Doomstones campaign, Death Rock was adapted from The Feathered Priests, an AD&D adventure in The Complete Dungeon Master series. It was re-statted for WFRP by Brad Freeman and I developed it for Flame Publications. Art was sourced mainly from the Games Workshop archives, with occasional bespoke pieces by Tony Ackland.
The Art
Like the cover of Fire in the Mountains, the cover of Blood in Darkness was reused from a Warhammer fiction title: in this case, Paul Bonner’s cover image for the anthology Wolf Riders.
There are no jokes in the interior art. Even Tony was unusually restrained. I think this was probably because Flame was still in its early days, and we were just rushing things through development and production as quickly as possible. However, in some of the full-page images Tony did take the opportunity to explore some ideas about the equipment and dress styles of the various Orc tribes within the Bloodaxe Alliance and the symbology of Verena in the monastery.
Like the previous Doomstones adventures, Death Rock ran a little short of the target page count, so some padding had to be added. Tony obliged with full-page (or larger) images of Radzog’s court and the forces of the Bloodaxe Alliance, which I annotated just as I had done for John Blanche’s troop images in The Enemy Within a few years earlier.
The Names
Radzog is another example of my thinking around nonhuman character names. Zog had started off in the Gobbledigook comic strip in White Dwarf, as ‘zog off!’ I used the phrase in a few pieces of colour text, and took ‘zog’ as a name element used for magic-using Orcs, including Radzog. The first half of his name was a word common in popular culture at the time: a truncation of ‘radical’ commonly used among skateboarders and BMX bikers to express admiration for particular skill and daring.
The two squabbling sub-commanders, Yuggum Mugrott and Mijull Negg were named after Napoleon’s Marshals Joachim Murat and Michel Ney, and Luggub Duvull was named after another Marshal, Louis-Nicolas Davout.
The Adventure
The adventure is changed very little from the original AD&D version, though I did take the opportunity to write a prophecy about the player characters in terrible verse.
Like Lichemaster, it offers a rather uncomfortable mix of roleplaying and mass combat, though for different reasons. The Feathered Priests, if memory serves, used the Orc army as a source of time pressure, but because this was Warhammer I felt it necessary to at least give a nod to the possibility of actually running the battle as a part of the adventure. I’ve never been satisfied with the result, and I’ve always felt that given a little more time to develop and test the necessary systems, I could have done a better job. But it is what it is.
The only new monsters were the Guardian Spirits, which I wrote up as well as I could in the time. I was hoping to do more with them (and with some of the other creatures that appeared for the first time in the Doomstones campaign) in my pet project that never happened, De Bestiis Chaotic. More on that here.
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If you’ve enjoyed the content on this blog, please consider supporting me by making a small donation. Here are a couple of ways to do so.
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And Also…
August’s Monster of the Month is posted on my Patreon page.
The dullahan is a demonic rider from Ireland, who might be the ancestor of Sleepy Hollow’s headless horseman, Ghost Rider, and many others. This 5-page, system-agnostic, PDF monster toolkit includes:
- Stat guidelines for d20-based, d100-based, and – through comparisons with common creatures from most settings – all other tabletop roleplaying systems.
- A full monster description with lists of basic and optional skills and traits.
- Three adventure seeds, covering fantasy, historical, and modern settings.
The Monster of the Month Club As a member, you can expect regular, in-depth treatments of creatures from worldwide myth and folklore—some familiar, some not—in a system-agnostic format that is easy for an experienced GM to use with the tabletop rpg system of their choice.
Join us on Patreon at patreon.com/MonsteroftheMonthClub, follow us @MotMClub, or email [email protected].
WFRP 1 Easter Eggs: Doomstones 1
It’s well known that the Doomstones campaign was adapted from a series for AD&D called The Complete Dungeon Master and sold by Simon Forrest and Basil Barrett under their Beast Enterprises imprint. A freelancer named Brad Freeman was hired by Games Workshop to re-stat the adventures for WFRP 1st edition, and the resulting manuscripts were passed to Flame for development and layout.
Not having read the originals, I had no idea what order they were supposed to be in, so I just picked one off the top of the pile and started. That’s how The Complete Dungeon Master 3 became Doomstones 1, and the order of the remaining instalments is equally random.
The Art
Like everything else from Flame, the art for Fire in the Mountains was largely reused from older publications, with the occasional bespoke piece from Tony Ackland and cartography and handouts from Ian Cooke. That’s why there are very few things to point out.
Let’s start with the cover. This John Blanche piece was created for an early Warhammer fiction anthology called Ignorant Armies. The human figure is based on Tim Pollard, whose house became a haven for Games Workshop artists, many of whom paid rent in artwork. Sadly, Tim died a few weeks ago, after a brief struggle with cancer.
This doesn’t really count as a joke, but take a look at the picture of the Elves in the section “The Twisted Lands” and see how many rabbits and squirrels you can find.
The Crystal
It was Mike Brunton’s idea to print the Crystals of Power as card models to cut out and assemble. I recall that he had a book on modeling exotic polyhedra, and the handouts for all the crystals were stolen from there.
Character Names
Like the art, the text of the adventure was largely re-used and I developed it at breakneck speed. This left little opportunity for adding or changing names. The only halfway interesting one I can find now is the Outrider Rutger Reiter: his last name means ‘rider’ and his first was probably inspired by the actor Rutger Hauer.
The Adventure
That’s not to say that I didn’t have any fun, though. I padded out the travel sections with encounters of my own devising – although the horribly clichéd gypsies were not my work. I particularly remember enjoying the Chaos-themed encounters in the Twisted Lands. Not too much earlier, I had done a stint developing Realm of Chaos, but I was unable to wrestle it across the finish line and that task was left to Mike Brunton before we went to Flame.
The Drum of Doom was a standard AD&D magic item, as I recall, and it was written into the original adventure. I re-statted it for WFRP and hoped no one would notice. I created the Glass of Scholarship as a short-cut to get around difficulties with written languages that cropped up here and there during the adventure.
And that’s all I have this time, although was always please feel free to leave a comment pointing out anything I might have missed!
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If you’ve enjoyed the content on this blog, please consider supporting me by making a small donation. Here are a couple of ways to do so.
Thanks!
And Also…
August’s Monster of the Month is posted on my Patreon page.
The dullahan is a demonic rider from Ireland, who might be the ancestor of Sleepy Hollow’s headless horseman, Ghost Rider, and many others. This 5-page, system-agnostic, PDF monster toolkit includes:
- Stat guidelines for d20-based, d100-based, and – through comparisons with common creatures from most settings – all other tabletop roleplaying systems.
- A full monster description with lists of basic and optional skills and traits.
- Three adventure seeds, covering fantasy, historical, and modern settings.
The Monster of the Month Club As a member, you can expect regular, in-depth treatments of creatures from worldwide myth and folklore—some familiar, some not—in a system-agnostic format that is easy for an experienced GM to use with the tabletop rpg system of their choice.
Join us on Patreon at patreon.com/MonsteroftheMonthClub, follow us @MotMClub, or email [email protected].
WFRP 1 Easter Eggs: Lichemaster
Lichemaster was originally titled Return of the Lichemaster, and that title can still be seen on the headers of the even-numbered pages. The title on the cover was changed by Bryan Ansell, who felt that simpler was better. He was also behind the bright (some might say garish) cover colors of many Games Workshop products of the late 1980s. In his thinking, a bright cover and a single-word title in a big font made a product easier to spot on the shelf.
I’ve written about this adventure before, but I haven’t delved into the various jokes that Carl Sargent added when he adapted the 1986 battle pack (and its sequel in the Citadel Journal) for WFRP three years later – or those that Rick Priestley came up with in the original! Here’s what I remember.
Names
Let’s start with Heinrich Kemmler. Present-day Games Workshop canon maintains that this name ‘is a reference to Heinrich Kramer, author of the Malleus Maleficarum.’ I can’t dispute this – I’ve asked Rick and he no longer remembers – but I have a sneaking suspicion that it was actually a reference to SS chief Heinrich Himmler. As we’ve seen in this series, there are a lot of regrettable Nazi names in WFRP 1 material. If GW has rewritten the past to give Kemmler’s name a cleaner provenance, I honestly can’t blame them, especially given his prominence in Warhammer lore across the board.
La Maisontaal, the monastery at the heart of the adventure, is Bretonnian (well, schoolboy French) for ‘the house of Taal,’ the god of wild places.
I added Adolphus Zwemmer and his Blue-Blooded Bandits during development, to strengthen the storyline. The name Zwemmer has no particular meaning that I recall, but I made the bandits noble scions on purpose, following my policy of basing the behavior of young Imperial nobles on that of the more headline-grabbing young British nobles of the day. Groups like the Bullingdon Club were notorious at the time, causing all kinds of mayhem in the course of asserting their wealth and privilege.
Jean-Louis Dintrans, the master of La Maisontaal, may well be named after French rugby player Philippe Dintrans, whose career reached its peak in the mid to late 1980s.
Rene de Muscadet, of course, is named after a wine. This is not the only time Carl used this source of inspiration for an NPC name.
Frugelhofen’s miller, Hector Brioche, is likewise named after bread. The name of the Krautheim family means ‘cabbage home,’ and may be inspired by the (mostly American) World War II name for Germans. The Giscard family might be named after Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who had been the President of France earlier in the decade.
‘Albi’ Schutz, who also appears in the battle pack, was named after Albie Fiore, an early employee of Games Workshop and the author of ‘The Lichway,’ the very first D&D adventure to appear in White Dwarf (issue 9, October/November 1978). Here he is DMing a game for Ian Livingstone, Steve Jackson, Jervis Johnson, and Ben Elton in a 1984 TV show exploring this strange new hobby.
Cecil de Vere Cholmondely is based on vintage British character actor Terry-Thomas, who played a near-endless succession of posh cads and bounders on screen in the 1950s and 1960s. The name ‘Cholmondely’ is a real British upper-class name, and it is indeed pronounced ‘Chumley.’ A recent instance is Camilla ‘Chummy’ Fortescue-Cholmondeley-Browne, played by Miranda Hart in the BBC drama series Call the Midwife.
Alain Gascoigne, like the celebrated Gnome detective Alphonse Hercules de Gascoigne, is a tribute to Marc Gascoigne, with whom Carl wrote a lot of material for Shadowrun and other games.
Guillaume Lagisquet is named after another French rugby player, Patrice Lagisquet.
Kemmler’s undead minions Bruno Taglielli and Didier Cousteau are named after talgiatelli pasta and French ocean explorer Jaques-Yves Cousteau, respectively.
The Vaswasser river’s name means ‘what water’ in German, give or take a mis-spelling. The town of Grunère may take its name from Gruyère cheese.
And Speaking of Cheese…
The salaud bleu cheese at the monastery translates roughly as ‘blue bastard.’ That name was mine, but I had to tone down the whole scene from Carl’s original, which was basically an excuse to make one or more player characters throw up on their patron!
The Art
Like all Flame publications, images for Lichemaster were sourced primarily from the Games Workshop archives. Some are recognizable from the WFRP 1 rulebook, others from the Bretonnian army list in Warhammer Armies, and others from White Dwarf articles and the original battle back and Citadel Journal scenario. Among the last is an image of a skeleton champions with a flaming skull. This is not a nod to Ghost Rider, as some might think – in fact, it is a rather tasteless joke from the original, referring to an incident in 1984 when the singer Michael Jackson was taping a Pepsi commercial and a pyrotechnic malfunction set his hair on fire.
War Machines
The skeleton chariot and catapult were fairly new models at the time, and in addition to highlighting the less than comfortable fusion of battle and roleplaying in this adventure, they were included in the rather faint hope of encouraging miniatures sales and winning points with Games Workshop management, who were increasingly of the view that roleplaying games could not be made profitable unless they generated sales of miniatures.
Needless to say, it didn’t work.
Finally, the iron man in the monastery was a Dalek in the original scenario. This was because Citadel Miniatures was selling a range of Doctor Who miniatures at the time, including a boxed set of plastic Daleks and Cybermen. It was a good joke at the time, but it had to be changed for this version.
Well, that’s all I remember about Lichemaster, but if you notice something I’ve missed, feel free to leave a comment.
Next week, I’ll be starting on WFRP 1’s ‘other’ campaign: Doomstones.
Want to support my work?
If you’ve enjoyed the content on this blog, please consider supporting me by making a small donation. Here are a couple of ways to do so.
Thanks!
And Also…
August’s Monster of the Month is posted on my Patreon page.
The dullahan is a demonic rider from Ireland, who might be the ancestor of Sleepy Hollow’s headless horseman, Ghost Rider, and many others. This 5-page, system-agnostic, PDF monster toolkit includes:
- Stat guidelines for d20-based, d100-based, and – through comparisons with common creatures from most settings – all other tabletop roleplaying systems.
- A full monster description with lists of basic and optional skills and traits.
- Three adventure seeds, covering fantasy, historical, and modern settings.
The Monster of the Month Club As a member, you can expect regular, in-depth treatments of creatures from worldwide myth and folklore—some familiar, some not—in a system-agnostic format that is easy for an experienced GM to use with the tabletop rpg system of their choice.
Join us on Patreon at patreon.com/MonsteroftheMonthClub, follow us @MotMClub, or email [email protected].
WFRP 1 Easter Eggs: Empire in Flames
It’s well known that Empire in Flames was rushed out to bring the Enemy Within campaign to an end. The manuscript was written extremely quickly by Carl Sargent, working to a brief which probably came from Phil Gallagher. It was edited and laid out by Mike Brunton as Flame’s first (unofficial) project. In keeping with GW’s new policy toward WFRP, art was re-used from the GW archives as much as possible – which explains the appearance of the Advanced Heroquest heroes in some images.
Like Something Rotten in Kislev (covered in last week’s post), Empire in Flames was not well-liked by the public. When Hogshead Publishing acquired the WFRP license from GW and began reprinting the campaign, James Wallis made it know that he would be commissioning an all-new final instalment, under the working title Empire in Chaos. That never happened, but WFRP superfan ‘Mad’ Alfred Nunez published his own version of a finale for free under the title Empire at War, which can still be found online.
Here is a quick run-though of the things I found in Empire in Flames. There may very well be more, so feel free to add your own finds in the comments!
NPC Names
The re-used art means that there are no hidden jokes in the illustrations, and the plot of the adventure is pretty straightforward, for all its flaws. However, Carl’s humor shows itself well enough in the names of certain NPCs.
The Kislevite princess Anastasia Schelepin takes her first name from the murdered Romanoff princess and her last from Soviet politician and intelligence officer Alexander Schelepin. Her chaperone, Katarina Bukharin, is named for revolutionary Nikolai Bukharin, and her fiance-to-be is a junior member of the regrettably-named Krieglitz-Untermensch family.
The Witch Hunter Theophilus Habermas is another spot-the-philosopher name: in this case, Jürgen Habermas, and the Hochsleben physician Johann Schiller takes his name from the philosopher and playwright Friedrich Schiller. It is not clear whether he is related to the Wizard’s Apprentice Hans-Peter Schiller from Death on the Reik.
Doctor Ludwig von Ente’s last name means ‘duck,’ which may be Carl’s way of hinting that he is a quack. I used the same joke in Death’s Dark Shadow, where a Doctor Entesang (‘duck song,’ according to my pocket German dictionary) created a Frankenstein-style monster.
Don Roberto y Monterrey, from Barsellon, is a direct steal from Fawlty Towers and the waiter Manuel, who speaks very little English and responds to most questions with ¿Que? Owner Basil Fawlty says of him at least once, ‘Don’t mind him, he’s from Barcelona.’ Don Roberto’s traveling companion, Ali Hand’ el Bar ben ibn Khazi, has a comedy-Arabian name that is typical of the lazy stereotypes common in those days. ‘Khazi’ was a British slang term for a toilet at that time. Its etymology is debated, but it does not seem to come from Arabic.
The Goblins in Karar-Khalizad include ‘sprogs’ and ‘YOBs’ – the first a British slang term for a child and the second a common term for any kind of hooligan at the time. ‘Yob’ may (or may not) have originated as ‘boy’ spelled backwards.
The name of Andreas Blumentopf the Templar translates as ‘flowerpot,’ while the Daemonette Gropefondel’sss is a typical Carl name for such creatures. The Slaanesh cultists Emmanuelle Fleschflascher and Anika Furrfondler fare little better than the Daemonette in that department, and nor do their male comanions Axel Throblieben and Joachim Humprutter.
The name of the Chaos Sorcerer Martin Gladische translates as ‘gladiatorial.’
The barge Hindenburg is named after the ill-fated zeppelin, and the name of its owners, Gustav and Diehl Fahrtripper, is an Anglo-German pun (German fahrt – ‘journey’ plus English ‘tripper’) which is pronounced ‘fart-ripper.’ The German valediction Gute fahrt – ‘good journey’ – has always been hilarious to English ears.
The name of Ludovicus Grossprattler is fairly self-explanatory: he prattles, and it’s gross. As I said, Carl write this adventure phenomenally quickly.
…and that’s it for Empire in Flames. I haven’t decided what I’ll do next week: I might carry on with other WFRP 1st edition titles, or I might do something else. It all depends on how this series is received.
Want to support my work?
If you’ve enjoyed the content on this blog, please consider supporting me by making a small donation. Here are a couple of ways to do so.
Thanks!
And Also…
August’s Monster of the Month is posted on my Patreon page.
The dullahan is a demonic rider from Ireland, who might be the ancestor of Sleepy Hollow’s headless horseman, Ghost Rider, and many others. This 5-page, system-agnostic, PDF monster toolkit includes:
- Stat guidelines for d20-based, d100-based, and – through comparisons with common creatures from most settings – all other tabletop roleplaying systems.
- A full monster description with lists of basic and optional skills and traits.
- Three adventure seeds, covering fantasy, historical, and modern settings.
The Monster of the Month Club As a member, you can expect regular, in-depth treatments of creatures from worldwide myth and folklore—some familiar, some not—in a system-agnostic format that is easy for an experienced GM to use with the tabletop rpg system of their choice.
Join us on Patreon at patreon.com/MonsteroftheMonthClub, follow us @MotMClub, or email [email protected].
WFRP 1 Easter Eggs: Something Rotten in Kislev
It’s fairly common knowledge by now that Something Rotten in Kislev was not in the original plan for the Enemy Within campaign. Ken Rolston became available and GW management thought that his name on a WFRP product would help boost U.S. sales. I don’t know how much of a brief he received – I think Phil Gallagher handled that – but his adventure was given the resources and the schedule slot that had been earmarked for The Horned Rat, which of course never appeared.
In the very early days of its creation and development, this adventure was thought of as a one-off, but eventually the word came down from Bryan Ansell that it should be incorporated into the campaign. This made sense, in a way: every adventure we’d published so far had been part of the campaign, and adding this one both avoided a long wait for the next instalment, and slapping the Enemy Within logo on the cover certainly wouldn’t hurt sales.
Ken’s working title for the project varied, but I remember Death Takes a Holiday (presumably inspired by one of the several movies of that name, which also inspired the 1998 Brad Pitt vehicle Meet Joe Black) and Way Too Many Dead Guys (which might have been no more than Ken’s way of describing the adventure.
The adventure was left unfinished when Ken departed for home after a couple of months in-house at the GW Design Studio, and it was left to me to fill in the missing bits and develop the whole thing. That’s why I got a co-author credit.
Over the years, readers have commented on the difference in tone between this adventure and its predecessors, and despite my efforts to link it to Power Behind the Throne it never sat comfortably there. That is acknowledged in the various mentions I added of playing Something Rotten as a stand-alone mini-campaign separate from The Enemy Within, and it is also why I replaced it with an all-new adventure based on Phil’s an my memories of the plan for The Horned Rat, when I came to create the Enemy Within Director’s Cut for Cubicle 7 a few years ago.
The limited involvement from the original Enemy Within writing team meant inevitably that this adventure has fewer Easter eggs an in-jokes than the earlier adventures, but here is what I remember.
The Cover
I vaguely remember being told that the hatted, smiling figure on the cover was a self-portrait of artist Richard Dolan, but I didn’t know for sure whether that’s true. He certainly seems more cheerful than the circumstances warrant, though.
Characters and Names
Eberhardt von Kreuzzug gets his name from my pocket German dictionary. Since he is a knight of a martial order, I looked up the word for “crusade” and left it at that.
Zuvassin and Necoho are nonsense words that I just made up. Ken’s original draft had Malal as the counterbalancing force in the Ancient Allies, but he was stricken from Warhammer canon at about that time, so I made up these two to replace him. You can find more about them in this post from a few months ago.
Chernozavtra means “black tomorrow” in Russian. Phil Gallagher had studied Russian at Cambridge and helped Ken out with a few names and titles. The name reflects the doomed nature of the village.
The Latin names of the plants in Durgul’s Chaos garden are from Ken. I think they were chosen more for atmosphere than precise meaning. At least, I have never found any Easter eggs in them.
The name of Creetox the miniature dragon is also Ken’s, though he followed my lead in having a lot of dragon names end in ‘x’. This had started before my time with Kegox, and I continued it in various box-back stories.
The Dolgans were Ken’s invention, and this was their first appearance in Warhammer lore. They seem to have been revived in later editions, though at the time they were created to justify Krogar’s existence as a Conanesque barbarian.
The names of the pregenerated characters are Ken’s. Guido Vermicelli is a standard Italian stereotype name of that time, while “Lucky” Teufelmist’s name translates as “devil dung.”
Dolgan Jim and Krogar were based on Carl Critchlow and his comic creation Thrud the Barbarian. Ken met Carl at a Dragonmeet or Games Day while he was in Nottingham, and the two got on so well that Ken decided to pay tribute to the pair in the adventure.
The Nature Spirits
I lent Ken my Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology to research Russian lore, and that is where the Kislevite nature spirits come from. The chapter on Slavic mythology includes a number of stunning illustrations, mostly by Ivan Bilbin, and Martin McKenna copied a lot of them very faithfully.
WFRP 1 Easter Eggs: Power Behind the Throne, Part 2
Last week’s post covered most of the silly names in Power Behind the Throne, and sharp-eyed readers called out a few more in the comments. This week, I’m moving on to the adventure itself.
The first thing I noticed, looking at the adventure content, is that there are an awful lot of minor NPCs with names that probably bear investigation. Like those in last week’s post, they are probably the result of Carl’s sense of humor and his German dictionary. But I don’t want to present another list of names and translations here, so please, feel free to call them out in the comments.
The section on the Major Attractions of Carnival Week includes quite a few jokes, starting with the fake postcard by Paul Bonner on page 23. If you went anywhere fun in the 1980s, you sent picture postcards – there were no selfies, and no socials to post them on – and many postcards were multi-image jobs showing off the main attractions of the seaside town or wherever else you were staying. I thought it would be fun to spoof one of those, as well as an opportunity to illustrate multiple events in a limited space. Luckily, Paul Bonner agreed.
The flying displays at the Great Park are obviously inspired by the RAF’s Red Arrows and other aerobatic display teams. Actually, I’m rather surprised that Carl didn’t give the flying wizards a pun name referencing them directly.
The Black Pool Illuminations are a reference to the English seaside town of Blackpool and its annual festival of lights, which has been running since 1897 and remains the high point of the town’s calendar.
Snotball is clearly a reference to football (soccer to American readers). In the first draft the sport used actual Snotlings, whose life among Orcs and Goblins had so inured them to all kinds of cartoonish abuse that being used as a ball didn’t seem that bad to them. Bryan Ansell did not like this at all, telling us that it was basically “tying up a small animal and kicking it to death.” In the final draft, this barbaric version of the game was placed in the distant past, and a ball was used instead. Carl’s writing often had to be toned down in this way.
Carl’s humor shows very clearly in the titles of the various plays and operas: The Barbarian of Seville, The Ring of the Nibble Unger Lied, and A Knight’s Midsummer Dream. I’m sure Rossini, Wagner, and Shakespeare would not have found Carl’s tribute as funny as we did.
The Dwarven Valley Choirs are a reference to Welsh male voice choirs, for which the nation is famed to this day. (In Love Actually, the policeman who makes Hugh Grant jump when he joins in the Christmas carol is Welsh.) According to English prejudices of the time, Wales was populated entirely by coal miners and shepherds, with the former providing an easy satirical jump to Dwarves.
Another instance of Carl sticking one toe over the line of good taste was Guiseppi Pastrami’s Luccinian Liturgical Castrates Choir. This is a clear reference to the 16th-century Italian practice of castrating choirboys to prevent their voices deepening with puberty, and frankly I’m surprised it made it into print.
Finally, there are the Ice Dance Championships. The favorite, an Elf named Torvyll Undean, is a reference to the record-breaking duo Jayne Torville and Christopher Dean, who were the pride of Britain throughout the 1980s. Little-remembered today, they were household names at the time and to make any reference to skating without mentioning them would have been unthinkable.
It’s well known that the Purple Hand storyline comes to a screeching halt after the defeat of Karl-Heinz Wasmeier, their supreme leader or Magister Magistri. At the time, we intended that the cult would retreat, regroup, let people think it had been destroyed, and return later under new leadership, but that never had a chance to happen. Something Rotten in Kislev took the campaign in a completely unexpected direction, and Empire in Flames was rushed out to bring the campaign to an end after GW management lost interest.
Heinrich Todbringer was nothing more than a name at the time Power Behind the Throne was written. The intention, as far as I remember it, was to have him come back and possibly become Emperor in the conclusion to the campaign, ushering in a new age in the history of the Empire. I’ll have more to say about that when I cover Empire in Flames.
In general, the major NPCs were set up in such a way as to offer the GM a series of “gotcha” moments to spring on their players. Most of them were so flawed, or so fundamentally unlikeable, that it would be easy for a party to dismiss or offend the very character who was their key to unlocking the next part of the social puzzle – leaving them with some serious groveling to do, or the need to find some other way around the difficulty. The whole adventure is an elaborately-constructed social minefield, as generations of players have discovered.
Much has been made of Golthog, the Ogre mercenary in the “Chaos Strikes by Night” section – especially the fleeting suggestion that he might be used as a replacement PC if needed. That was me. As I said in an earlier post, I had a bee in my bonnet at the time about making Ogres available as player characters, and this was my way of trying to force the issue by stealth. I wanted players to spot this and start demanding to play Ogre characters, so that GW would have to green-light my proposed supplement. It didn’t work.
…and that’s everything I can remember, at least for now. If anything comes up, I’ll drop it in a comment, and if you spotted anything I missed, or if you have any questions, let me have them and I’ll do my best to answer.
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The brunnmigi is a fox-like trickster that fouls wells and other sources of fresh water with its urine. This 5-page, system-agnostic, PDF monster toolkit includes:
- Stat guidelines for d20-based, d100-based, and – through comparisons with common creatures from most settings – all other tabletop roleplaying systems.
- A full monster description with lists of basic and optional skills and traits.
- Three adventure seeds, covering fantasy, historical, and modern settings.
The Monster of the Month Club As a member, you can expect regular, in-depth treatments of creatures from worldwide myth and folklore—some familiar, some not—in a system-agnostic format that is easy for an experienced GM to use with the tabletop rpg system of their choice.
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WFRP 1 Easter Eggs: Power Behind the Throne, Part 1
Power Behind the Throne was written out-of-house by Carl Sargent, so it was less affected by the Design Studio silliness that you’ve seen in previous products. As you’ve seen in the last post, though, Carl Sargent was far from humorless. Here are some things I found while re-reading the adventure: I’m sure there are more that went over my head.
The Major NPCs
As we’ve already seen, the image of the regrettably-named Gotthard Goebbels was based on former White Dwarf editor Paul Cockburn.
The lecherous “doctor” Luigi Pavarotti takes his name from the famous tenor Luciano Pavarotti, who was at the height of his fame at the time.
The rest of the NPCs aren’t based on anyone in particular, as far as I remember, but there are plenty of silly German names.
The Todbringer “Death-bringer” family was already established in The Enemy Within.
The name of the princess’s chaperone, Hildegarde Zimperlich, mean “squeamish.” There was a Mrs. Squeamish in William Wycherley’s 1675 play The Country Wife, but I don’t know if that was an inspiration. Certainly, delicacy and even squeamishness are key characteristics of a good court chaperone.
Schutzmann means “policeman,” making it a suitable, if rather lazy, name for the Watch Commander.
Schwermutt (or rather schwermut) means “melancholy,” though there is no trace of melancholy in the General’s description.
Maximillian von Genscher seems to be named after Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who was the German Vice-Chancellor at the time.
The name of High Wizard Albrecht Helseher translates roughly as “Hell-seer.” Don’t look into any strange palantirs, Max!
His deputy, Janna Eberhauer, has a name that translates as “boar tusks,” at least according to Google Translate. What that has to do with her as a character, I don’t know.
The name of the Graf’s Paramour, Emmanuelle Schlagen, is a German verb meanin “to hit.” I suppose that means she is a striking woman! And as with Grand Countess Emmanuelle von Liebowitz (later changed to Liebwitz), her first name is a reference to the series of French movies which ran from 1975 to 1993. Poor form to reuse a joke in this way, I feel, but there it is.
Of the ladies at court, Kirsten Jung is named after the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, while Petra Liebkosen’s name means “caress” and Natasha Sinnlich’s means “sensual.” A little obvious (not to mention sexist) given their roles entertaining important visitors to the Graf’s court, but the depiction of women in fantasy was very different in the 1980s to how it is today. Plus, of course, we never expected any non-native English speakers to even look at WFRP!
Siegfried Prunkvoll’s name translates as “magnificent,” which I guess reflects his appearance more than his character.
One to the Law Lords. Reiner Ehrlich’s name means “honest,” and Joachim Hoflich’s means “polite” (give or take an umlaut over the ‘o’). Karl-Heinz Wasmeier seems to be named after the German skier Markus Wasmeier.
SPOILERS!
At the start of the adventure, Hoflich has been replaced by a doppelganger (give or take an umlaut over the ‘a’). There’s a story behind this, which explains why I have always believed that this adventure was originally created for AD&D. Others firmly disagree, so I don’t know what the truth is. But anyway…
Doppelgangers were a last-minute addition to the Bestiary chapter of the WFRP rulebook. Citadel never made a doppelganger miniature – perhaps for obvious reasons – so they were never part of Warhammer. They were well established in D&D, though. Shortly before the WFRP first edition rulebook went to print, I was told to add an entry for doppelgangers to the Bestiary, because there was an adventure coming in that would require them. So I did, and in due course Power Behind the Throne came in from Carl.
Make what you will of that!
Minor NPCs
There are a few more interesting names among the lesser NPCs.
The Spy Nastassia Hess is another example of our thoughtless use of Nazi names, being named after Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess. Her first name might be inspired by the actress Nastassia Kinski, who had stared in a very steamy remake of Cat People in 1982. That’s the one with the iconic David Bowie song.
The staff of the Pit tavern also seem to have been named out of a pocket German dictionary. Landlord Fritz Schwanger’s name means “pregnant” – possibly a reference to his stomach, althouth he is described as being of medium-heavy build. Otto Geschwur’s name means “ulcer,” and I have no idea why. Bruno Kohl, of course, is named after eye makeup, which actually fits his club-kid persona.
Then we have Wasmeier’s pawns. Brunhilde Klaglich (again missing an umlaut over the ‘a’) means “miserable,” which again is at odds with her character. Her aliases are more in point: Kaltblutic means “cold-blooded” and Kenner means “connoisseur.” Dagmar Mitschuldige’s name means “complicit,” which makes a kind of sense, while Fleischer means “butcher” and Hundisch means dog-like. Those two seem fairly random.
Finally, the name of Wasmeier’s servant Swelt Tunger translates as “tungsten.” Again I have no idea why, any more than I know where the name Swelt came from.
Phew! That’s a lot of names. I’m going to break this entry into two, and next week’s post will look at the adventure itself. See you then!
Want to support my work?
If you’ve enjoyed the content on this blog, please consider supporting me by making a small donation. Here are a couple of ways to do so.
Thanks!
And Also…
July’s Monster of the Month is posted on my Patreon page.
The brunnmigi is a fox-like trickster that fouls wells and other sources of fresh water with its urine. This 5-page, system-agnostic, PDF monster toolkit includes:
- Stat guidelines for d20-based, d100-based, and – through comparisons with common creatures from most settings – all other tabletop roleplaying systems.
- A full monster description with lists of basic and optional skills and traits.
- Three adventure seeds, covering fantasy, historical, and modern settings.
The Monster of the Month Club As a member, you can expect regular, in-depth treatments of creatures from worldwide myth and folklore—some familiar, some not—in a system-agnostic format that is easy for an experienced GM to use with the tabletop rpg system of their choice.
Join us on Patreon at patreon.com/MonsteroftheMonthClub, follow us @MotMClub, or email [email protected].
Graeme Davis 