A Sixteenth-Century Castle

Surfing the web for various inspirational reconstructions, like the Pudding Lane Productions one for London just before the Great Fire (and here’s another one from the same project, but at night), I came across this one for Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire:

Although I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this reconstruction, I rather like how it shows how the castle must have been a mix of its medieval origin and later accretions. Too often fantasy settings look like they’ve sprung from the earth fully-formed (ironically, representations of Tolkien’s Middle Earth are especially guilty of this, despite the setting’s detailed history, or perhaps because Tolkien himself was a great philologist but his sense of history was very flat). But RL is much more complicated, with old things always far outnumbering the new and providing the foundations, often literally, for it.

A Matter of State Security: an adventure suited to Hallowe’en

One of the adventures run at the last TobCon, which I got to playtest in advance, is a dark scenario about a pattern killer who plagues the city of Kemperbad. The author, ‘dark knight of the twisted moon’, has kindly agreed to have it hosted here. It’s statted for 1e, so can be found under Downloads => WFRP1. Here’s the ‘trailer’:

A Pattern Killer is loose in the Freistadt of Kemperbad; the bodies of his victims turn up weeks or months after their disappearance, debased by signs of torture and the marks of gnawing vermin. The Watch are on high alert, seeking to catch the twisted perpetrator; their failure has caused a backlash from the good burghers of the town, and now agitators are seeking to use the unrest to rouse the mob for their own ends. Pamphlets have begun to appear claiming that the Freistadt’s thirteen strong Council has some involvement in the deaths. The most recent of these libellous scandal sheets goes too far – accusing the Council of bondage to the Ruinous Powers. The Council will stand for this no more, and so a special team has been assembled from amongst the espionage services to find and neutralise the agitator threat.

There is much more to this scenario than a ‘simple’ investigation, though. It is also most definitely for adults and touches on some very disturbing topics.

Name of the Rose Ambience

Here’s a rather fun site, designed to create ambience for a monastic murder mystery, in honour of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, but easily usable for WFRP games too: the Name of the Rose Background Ambience Generator.

It has various sliders you can use, including some to create an especially spooky atmosphere appropriate to this time of year.

Updating the Links

So a lot has happened in WFRP-land while I left this blog fallow. Most notably (more so that the appearance of WFRP 4e, for me personally) is the shutting down of the Strike-to-Stun forum. The announcement and tribute thread can still be found here. StS is what got me back into the hobby after many years away; A Bitter Harvest, which is now Zweihänder‘s intro scenario, was written for an StS competition, and it’s how I started to come to Wim/TobCon and met a whole bunch of awesome people who gave very, very good game.

The StS community has moved, in part at least, to the new Winds of Chaos forum. And that made me realise I should update a whole bunch of links here. There are way too many changes to list, but if there are any others I ought to know about and have missed, please mention them in the comments!

Note that I removed the adventures There’s Something About Marie and The Queen of Embers at their author’s request: they’re being published for Zweihänder, with the former already available as part of the new supplement Main Gauche.

Rogue Trader Humble Bundle

From now and for the next 20 days, the Humble RPG Book Bundle is for the PDFs of Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader, once Fantasy Flight Games but now with Cubicle 7.

While this isn’t strictly to do with WFRP, the lowest contribution of $1 gets you a 20% off coupon for the C7 store. You won’t be able to use it for the first installment of the new Enemy Within campaign, since it doesn’t apply to preorders, but you could use it to get the WFRP 4e stuff that’s already appeared.