“I am not a witch!”
– Frau Ingrid Sunter
It all has to start somewhere. And for our players, it began with a Night of Blood followed by a desperate escape down the swollen River Teufel in the dark.
Night of Blood is a great little published scenario – I’ve started WHFRP campaigns with it before as it includes a good mix of social interaction, investigating shenanigans on a dark and stormy night, plus mutants and a chaos ritual.
Although in this case, the players skipped the climactic ending and instead opted to run away. The cowards.
We were still waiting for the PDF of Enemy in Shadows at this point so I had this mini adventure written up already.
The mad dash at the end of Night of Blood resulted in the party wrecking their boat on an islet in the river, home to the village of Birnehugel (or Pear Hill in my basic Imperial German) and its odd inhabitants with their odd beliefs, and plenty of pear cider.
I intended this as a sandbox adventure – creating a setting and a bunch of NPCs, plus an upcoming event to give it a timeframe, and let the players go to town. The plot seed came from a passing reference on the Warhammer wiki to a local legend about ‘the willow queen’ and quickly turned into The Wicker Man with an upcoming festival that would involve a human sacrifice in order to protect the pear crop from the Willow Queen!
Warhammer does a good job of making its locations and characters feel ‘real’ and that was something I was hoping to emulate. And, to ensure the players didn’t ditch my story too soon, I had them trapped there until the river waters abated. Unless they wanted to risk traipsing for days through marshes filled with giant leeches…
In the end, little festival came to pass, the players shouted ‘witch-craft’ (it really wasn’t!), stabbed up some poor old lady and awoke the ancient dryad, the Willow Queen herself. I had written the climax to allow the players to side with either the villagers (the real baddies here) or the dryad (who might have given them an interesting ally in the future) but, true to form, they picked their own side – cutting down the Queen and then robbing the villagers before stealing a boat and sailing off to Grunberg. Classy bunch.
But there was an added twist – one of the party, Wilhelm Bandersnatch the Mystic, decided to stay behind (the village had a sudden opening for a wise-woman) meaning that perhaps one day, we would return to Birnehugel.
The character was proving a little difficult to include in a party along with the Witchfinder, but it was easy enough to write in another ‘stranger’ who had also ended up trapped in the village by the rain, and eager to leave.
But with that done, and the (electronic, for now) copy of Enemy in Shadows almost upon us, the players continued their journey to the town of Grunberg where, after a mini-investigation into a spate of nightly murders, they were ready to hit the road to Altdorf and The Enemy Within…
The Enemy Within 