Enemy Within

I haven't yet made the update to my undead, but I have continued my deep dive into a number of things related to Warhammer. I decided to read, as best as I could find them, the 4e "director's cut" Enemy Within campaign. This so-called director's cut is massive; no less than ten ~125-150 page hardback books (or pdfs, if you get them that way) in full color, published by Cubicle 7 and written (mostly) by Graeme Davis, who wrote the original Enemy Within campaign in the first place. I don't have all of the books (actually, the last one isn't even available yet, even) so my progress on this may be sporadic, and it might take some time to get through. So far, I'll probably only read what's available on Scribd, and then move forward from there. I've read, so far, the first volume, Enemy in Shadows and about half of the second book, the Enemy in Shadow Companion. There are five modules, and five companion volumes, one corresponding directly to each module. The companions are supplemental materials, everything from more travel tables to roll on to give variety to travel encounters, to alternate and optional NPCs, to "director's commentary" on the module itself.

Now, I've been familiar with Warhammer for a long time, although my familiarity with the role-playing game was not super high. I knew that it was, in many ways, a fairly old-school, wargamey type system in some ways. That it had lots of tables and charts (although not nearly as much as Rolemaster, of course.) I knew that it was "low fantasy" and that character careers weren't things like Wizard or Fighter, but famously much more modest (or sub-modest) things like Rat Catcher, or Beggar, or Grave Robber, etc. But I was always much less interested in the system anyway than I was in the tone of the Warhammer setting as it was developed for the RPG. Which, by necessity, was always a little different than how it developed for the wargame. I'd been familiar with the expression, said by a guy online years ago, but which I thought was very clever, that Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was the game where you started off thinking that you were playing Dungeons & Dragons, but before very long, you discovered that you were actually playing Call of Cthulhu. 

As some of the discussion in the Enemy in Shadows Companion says, this is actually more literally true than I ever imagined. When Bryan Ansell, the original owner of Games Workshop when it was still a scrappy independent little company, tasked some of his folks to write WFRP, his mandate was to write a Cthulhu adventure for Warhammer. Davis himself notes that at the time (1986 or so) the state of British roleplaying in particular had moved out of the dungeon; Call of Cthulhu was very popular in the British market, and had done a ton for encouraging investigation and NPC interaction. The Thieves' World product was also very successful at the time. It's little surprising then that on reading the first volume (before I read that in the commentary for the companion) that I thought that the adventure felt very little like a D&D adventure and quite a bit like a Cthulhu campaign, although set in a High Middle Ages setting rather than a 1920s or modern setting, and with a lot of tools to encourage people who weren't used to this paradigm to explore almost sandboxy elements too. The closest thing to a dungeon is some sewer exploration, but you just go in looking for clues, not to "clear them" of monsters, or find treasure or secret doors, or traps, or whatever. 

It's probably not surprising, then, that on reading this I started thinking about how I could potentially adapt this campaign to the Dark Fantasy X setting, because given that the themes and tone are quite similar, it seems eminently doable. It would require a lot of serial number filing and changing, but the basic structure of the campaign (so far, I should caveat) as well as the tone and feel is pretty much spot on. There might be more to come here. It's certainly a much better fit than the Paizo adventure paths that I was trying to go through as an earlier project. Even the horror-themed, and even the specifically Cthulhu-themed adventure paths just weren't right in a way that this Warhammer campaign absolutely is. 

A couple of minor points, that are somewhat random. First, I was struck by many adventure action-grrl NPCs are sprinkled throughout the module. I suspect most (but not all) of them are recent additions due to the "remastering' director's cut nature of this. It's not like they didn't exist in the 80s, but there wasn't any push for it, and because most people weren't drowning in delusional wishful thinking about the nature of men vs women, that wasn't really a thing in the 80s. It would have had everyone collectively from the writers to the publishers to the customers all scratching their heads at what the devil was going on, unless these action-grrls were very sporadic and occasional and kind of meant to stand out rather than be routine. I find this very out of synch with the tone of the setting overall, but given the woke nature of the industry, I strongly suspect that I'm swimming upstream in making a big deal out of that. It's not just a bunch of idiosyncratic stronk wammans, though—there are a more than you would expect bizarrely inappropriately added minority characters. In the entirety of the Warhammer setting through the 80s, 90s and maybe even the 00s, I don't recall there ever being a fantasy analog to a sub-Saharan African ever having been made, especially not throwing them in the Empire with pseudo-German names as if they were just as much a part of the Empire as the actual European pseudo-Germans who are the basis for the Empire. They never even made any mention of fake China, fake Japan or the fake Middle East except as a throwaway off-hand reference. (I guess the Total War game has now added a Cathay faction, though. That's new to the setting. Ironically after the setting was basically destroyed by GW. Noice.)

The other thing that struck me, and I'd thought this before—years before, even, although reading this brought the thought back to mind—Cthulhu stories aren't really supposed to be in-joke guided tours of the Mythos. Cthulhu appears as a major factor in all of one story, "The Call of Cthulhu", and then is relegated to an off-hand reference in stories that don't feature him at all. Derleth and other subsequent writers used him somewhat, but the only other time Cthulhu was actually used by one of the OG Mythos writers was when Robert E. Howard used the name with a drastically different spelling as a kind of Atlantean Fu Manchu in his serial Skull-Face. Which I highly recommend that you read; it's a fantastic story, but his interpretation there of Cthulhu is wildly divergent than anything Lovecraft wrote, having in common only the notion that he came from the depths of the sea. All of the Mythos writers did this, actually. Their monsters are singular; they appear as a plot device in one story, and then they are (maybe) referred to off-hand after that, if at all.

This is where most Cthulhu-themed RPG products have gone completely wrong, in trying to make their games like a guided tour of the Mythos rather than the Mythos being more of a theme and approach instead of a specific look at the mi-go, for example, or the dark young of Shub-Niggurath. And this is where Warhammer feels more Lovecraftian in many ways than Call of Cthulhu, even though the Warhammer chaos gods are not really at all like stereotypical Lovecraftian entities. In other ways, though—they're an absolutely perfect fit. 

I do find, however, the puns and pop culture references kind of unusual. The fact that the adventure takes place in the land of the von Saponatheim noble family (say Once Upon a Time in an over-the-top Dracula voice and you'll be right) or that there's character who's very clearly Groucho Marx with even some of his trademarked catch-phrases is... I dunno. I can't decide if it's occasionally clever or off-putting, or both depending on my mood.