It’s fairly common knowledge by now that Something Rotten in Kislev was not in the original plan for the Enemy Within campaign. Ken Rolston became available and GW management thought that his name on a WFRP product would help boost U.S. sales. I don’t know how much of a brief he received – I think Phil Gallagher handled that – but his adventure was given the resources and the schedule slot that had been earmarked for The Horned Rat, which of course never appeared.

In the very early days of its creation and development, this adventure was thought of as a one-off, but eventually the word came down from Bryan Ansell that it should be incorporated into the campaign. This made sense, in a way: every adventure we’d published so far had been part of the campaign, and adding this one both avoided a long wait for the next instalment, and slapping the Enemy Within logo on the cover certainly wouldn’t hurt sales.

Ken’s working title for the project varied, but I remember Death Takes a Holiday (presumably inspired by one of the several movies of that name, which also inspired the 1998 Brad Pitt vehicle Meet Joe Black) and Way Too Many Dead Guys (which might have been no more than Ken’s way of describing the adventure.

The adventure was left unfinished when Ken departed for home after a couple of months in-house at the GW Design Studio, and it was left to me to fill in the missing bits and develop the whole thing. That’s why I got a co-author credit.

Over the years, readers have commented on the difference in tone between this adventure and its predecessors, and despite my efforts to link it to Power Behind the Throne it never sat comfortably there. That is acknowledged in the various mentions I added of playing Something Rotten as a stand-alone mini-campaign separate from The Enemy Within, and it is also why I replaced it with an all-new adventure based on Phil’s an my memories of the plan for The Horned Rat, when I came to create the Enemy Within Director’s Cut for Cubicle 7 a few years ago.

The limited involvement from the original Enemy Within writing team meant inevitably that this adventure has fewer Easter eggs an in-jokes than the earlier adventures, but here is what I remember.

I vaguely remember being told that the hatted, smiling figure on the cover was a self-portrait of artist Richard Dolan, but I didn’t know for sure whether that’s true. He certainly seems more cheerful than the circumstances warrant, though.

Eberhardt von Kreuzzug gets his name from my pocket German dictionary. Since he is a knight of a martial order, I looked up the word for “crusade” and left it at that.

Zuvassin and Necoho are nonsense words that I just made up. Ken’s original draft had Malal as the counterbalancing force in the Ancient Allies, but he was stricken from Warhammer canon at about that time, so I made up these two to replace him. You can find more about them in this post from a few months ago.

Chernozavtra means “black tomorrow” in Russian. Phil Gallagher had studied Russian at Cambridge and helped Ken out with a few names and titles. The name reflects the doomed nature of the village.

The Latin names of the plants in Durgul’s Chaos garden are from Ken. I think they were chosen more for atmosphere than precise meaning. At least, I have never found any Easter eggs in them.

The name of Creetox the miniature dragon is also Ken’s, though he followed my lead in having a lot of dragon names end in ‘x’. This had started before my time with Kegox, and I continued it in various box-back stories.

The Dolgans were Ken’s invention, and this was their first appearance in Warhammer lore. They seem to have been revived in later editions, though at the time they were created to justify Krogar’s existence as a Conanesque barbarian.

The names of the pregenerated characters are Ken’s. Guido Vermicelli is a standard Italian stereotype name of that time, while “Lucky” Teufelmist’s name translates as “devil dung.”

Dolgan Jim and Krogar were based on Carl Critchlow and his comic creation Thrud the Barbarian. Ken met Carl at a Dragonmeet or Games Day while he was in Nottingham, and the two got on so well that Ken decided to pay tribute to the pair in the adventure.

I lent Ken my Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology to research Russian lore, and that is where the Kislevite nature spirits come from. The chapter on Slavic mythology includes a number of stunning illustrations, mostly by Ivan Bilbin, and Martin McKenna copied a lot of them very faithfully.