Setting up to run Enemy Within for Warhammer as a Clue-based Series of Scenarios

TAKING SOME TIPS FROM "SO YOU WANT TO BE A GAME MASTER"

I've recently been reading the excellent "So You Want to be a Game Master" written by Justin Alexander, in it he talks at length about using clues for investigative style games. In this post I'm discussing some of my own thoughts on this and how I plan to apply it to my upcoming Enemy Within campaign for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4E.

Since I'm talking about some prep and stuff I'm going to be doing in my upcoming campaign, if you're a player in the campaign please don't read this article since it may spoil things for you a bit; likewise if you plan to run or play in TEW campaign there will probably be some spoilers.

If you're not bothered about that and aren't playing in my campaign please enjoy.

I've very much enjoyed the book "So You Want to be a Game Master", finding a lot of the advice very useful, the section that particularly struck a cord with me was the chapter about running investigative games and using clues. I've run various types of investigative games (normally one-shots that are distinctly mythos-themed using) Tremulus with varying degrees of success.

As you may have seen in my recent posts I'm going to be starting running the iconic The Enemy Within campaign for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition (henceforth referred to as WFRP). This campaign, dealing with the chaos-tainted rot and conspiracies that consume the Empire from within has far more in-common--as far as I am concerned--with a Call of Cthulhu investigative-style scenario than it does your more "traditional" fantasy RPG fair. It's hardly surprising given that Bryan Ansell's brief to Graeme Davis for the module that became Shadows Over Bögenhafen was to "write a bloodless Call of Cthulhu adventure for Warhammer."¹

So I've been brushing up on the WFRP 4E rules and TEW campaign books, jotting down some prep and ideas in Obsidian Notes; it occurred to me that perhaps I could marry some of the ideas that had been swirling around in my mind about clues and investigative games with this new campaign. Previously I've gone for a more traditional approach with my GM notes, but I decided to try and run the campaign as a series of linked scenes with clues that pointed to other items/npcs or scenes.

What do I mean by this?

Think of one of the old Fighting Fantasy or Choose Your Own Adventure books, you read from a paragraph of text explaining what is going on and then you're given a number of choices along with a page to turn to if you take that choice, if you attack the bandits turn to page 6, if you try to negotiate turn to page 13, etc etc.

My plan is that each scene will effectively be the paragraph of text, and the clues that the PCs find will be the choices that either point them to more clues, items, etc or that lead them into a different scene; it's not a perfectly analogy since TTRPGs have fair more player choice and agency that even the most well written gamebook, but I still think the structure can work well.

An Example

In the first scene of the campaign (okay, it's not technically the first scene but I've condensed the start a little so it's the first in my version of the campaign), the PCs are heading along a main road in a coach with some other passengers, planning to get to the city of Altdorf where the streets are paved with gold² and employment opportunities for opportunistic adventurers abound.

Along the way they encounter a "monstrous" figure in the road, a cannibalistic mutant who may in-fact be known to one of the player characters; this gruesome creature attacks the cart forcing the PCs to fight it off.

There's a screenshot below of how this looks in my notes:

The first section of the notes provides the title (Blood on the Road) for the scene as is taken from the title of the section in the Enemy in Shadows campaign book, some scenes will have "official" titles, but--if there's not one suitable or I think it gives away too much--I'll just come up with one myself.

It also contains a brief description of the scene and a few bullet points providing additional clarification/activities; in this case the fact that Rolf (the mutant) rushes the coach causing the driver Hultz to be dragged off by the panicked horses, his companion Gunnar stops the coach by is frozen in fear as he is attacked.

The next section summarises the names of any notable NPCs involved:

All of the names of NPCs are linked to seperate articles containing their stats and further info about them so I can look it up quickly during a game:

We then get to the Clues section of the notes, I'm trying to keep it simple so I've put a series of tick boxes, each summarising what the clue is, it then has an arrow icon (➡️) which points to a link another notes (scene, item, etc).

In this case we have the following clues:

• A rogue or low-level academic could recognise Rolf from his pre-mutant days, this links to a hand-out containing information they might know about the mutated thief.

• The mutants is eating the body of a coachman from a different company when the PCs encounter him, examining this body leads them to see he was killed by a crossbow bolt and the angle of the shot seems to indicate it was fired from further up the road, leading them to another scene if they pursue this.

• The tracks of the missing rival coach disappear round a bend in the road, if followed it leads them to the next scene.

I've also dropped in what I'm referring to as a FLOATING CLUE, this is an idea I got from the "So You Want to be a Game Master" book and is basically a clue or an incident that you can pull out if the PCs seem to be floundering or a little on the indecisive side to give them a nudge along the way.

• In this case the floating clue is the sound of screaming from further up the road, the dragged off coach drive Hultz comes running down the road pursued by a gang of bloodthirsty mutants, leading onto the next scene.

The check boxes can be ticked off as the PCs discover clues so that I can easily go back and find out what they discovered during the session.

The scenes are all fairly linear in this section of my notes, not how I normally do things but the first book of the campaign seems to be fairly linear, or at least the initial part of it is, so I'm sticking to that for my notes; however--if the PCs come up with some crazy or wild ideas (which TBH I hope they do)--I'm certainly going to roll with them and adapt my notes as I go along, I'm hoping that this loose scene/clue structure should enable me to be pretty flexible when it comes to actually running the game.

When the scenario branches out a little more and becomes more freeform I may use a flowchart or something similar to plot the relationships between the various scenes if I think it is necessary, I think for now that just having them linked in my notes will suffice though; we have our first game coming up on Friday and I'm looking forward to running it. That said, no plan survives contact with the players, so I'm sure that I'll post some more about how well (or not) this worked and how I'm adapting my prep system for this campaign as the game itself develops.

If you've tried running a clue-based/investigative game in the past (whether WFRP or not) and you have any tips for me, I'd love to hear them, or if you have any stories/advice from your own attempts at running The Enemy Within, please feel free to post them in the comments.

Likewise, if you have any questions for me, let me know in the comments and I'll either respond there or--if the answer is more involved--write a further post by way of a reply.

1. Many thanks to the excellent Awesome Lies blog for bringing this quote and many others to my attention.

2. I expect the streets are actually paved with something a good deal less pleasant, no doubt as a result of the disappearance of the dung collector class.