Graeme Davis's Blog

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 idea 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.
Join us on Patreon at patreon.com/MonsteroftheMonthClub, follow us @MotMClub, or email rpgmonsterclub@yahoo.com.

I’m going through a rough patch, both personally and professionally. I had intended to post on the never-released GW Frankenstein game, but time got away from me. Soon, I promise.

For now, here’s an update on my Monster of the Month Club Patreon campaign. Please back it if you can – even $1 a month makes a difference – or buy me a coffee at https://buymeacoffee.com/graemedavis.

Anything is greatly appreciated.

Here’s the most recent post:

The Pooka is now posted for paying members, and voting is open for November’s Monster of the Month! Choose from:

1. Banshee

2. Black Dog

3. Hag

4. Basilisk

5. Redcap (Borders ogre type)

Vote in the community channel that corresponds to your membership level!

https://www.patreon.com/MonsteroftheMonthClub

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 rpgmonsterclub@yahoo.com.

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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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 rpgmonsterclub@yahoo.com.

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.

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 rpgmonsterclub@yahoo.com.

The second adventure in the Doomstones campaign, Blood in Darkness was adapted from The Lost Shrine of Kasar-Khan, 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

I think the cover image came from a Warhammer fiction title, but I’ve been unable to confirm that. If any readers know where this image was originally used, please let me know in a comment!

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.

The Names

Kadar-Helgad was a name I made up. In everything I wrote, dwarfhold names all began with ‘Karak’ (inspired by Rick Priestley’s ‘Caraz-a-Carak’) and my intention was that the word ‘Karak’ meant ‘hold.’ Since this adventure involved a shrine rather than a hold, is used ‘Kadar’ for the prefix, intending that to mean ‘shrine’ and to be used in future names for Dwarf shrines. I followed that system when I named Kadar-Gravning in Dwarf Wars (of which more in a couple of weeks), but as far as I know no one else picked it up. The element ‘Helgad’ was inspired by words for ‘holy’ in real-world languages: hellig in Danish (the pocket dictionary I mostly used for creating Dwarven words), heilig in German, and so on. Hence, ‘holy shrine.’

The Ogres in the shrine had names that followed another of my systems, all ending in -agg, -ogg, or similar. My thinking was that ‘og’ might mean ‘Ogre’ in their language, so that Hrothyogg, for example, would mean ‘the Ogre called Hroth.’ Again, I’m not sure anyone else even knew of the system, much less used it.

The name of Xhardja the mud elemental was unchanged from the original AD&D adventure, as far as I recall – but I might be wrong about that.

This adventure might be the first ever mention of the smith-god Smednir. His name comes from the Danish smed, meaning a smith. The -nir suffix was probably inspired by a name from Norse mythology, such as Odin’s horse Sleipnir or his spear Gungnir.

The Adventure

As I had done with Fire in the Mountains, I padded the adventure out with more detailed travel sections in order to hit the target page count. I revisited the Twisted Lands and dreamed up some more chaotic terrain, and I added a section on mountain hazards. I also added the Troll Slayer encounter as a way for the party to replace a fallen PC, if they needed to.

The original adventure included some creatures that were new to WFRP, in particular the parasitic mud-worms and the mud elemental Xhardja. Brad had provided basic stats, but I tweaked them a little and fleshed out the descriptions and rules.

The pattern for the Crystal of Earth was another design from the book Mike Brunton had. I believe the mathematical name for this shape is a stellated dodecahedron. The runes on the crystal’s faces were designed by Tony, inspired by the object’s various powers.

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 rpgmonsterclub@yahoo.com.

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!

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 rpgmonsterclub@yahoo.com.

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 Priestly 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 rpgmonsterclub@yahoo.com.

Just posted for free and paid members of the Monster of the Month Club: August’s reprint is an AD&D1 Deities & Demigods treatment of the Egyptian crocodile god Sobek, from Imagine magazine in 1984.
https://www.patreon.com/MonsteroftheMonthClub

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 rpgmonsterclub@yahoo.com.

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 Flaschflascher 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.

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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 rpgmonsterclub@yahoo.com.