The End of Death On The Reik

Battling the Skaven

This week the RPG crew came round and to see out the final points of "Death On The Reik". This whole published adventure has been good fun, but I've enjoyed this final assault on the Castle especially. No one encounter really tests the characters to the edge of death, but there are so many of them, all in one long night, there is no chance of stopping and resting up for a day. This relentless pace meant that by the time the band were confronted by only 4 skaven some were almost reluctantly engaging them in battle. Geddi the Dwarf (currently a Judicial Champion) has had a more healing potion than ale; Kronenburg the mage is all but out of magic points and having to resort to throwing an enchanted rope at the enemy; Kislev and Heindrich (the two human fighters-ish) are just swinging wearily away; Grendel the thief/cleric is having to wade into the fight; and Max the Ranger type is at the back holding the coats, having lost the use of an arm, limping badly, and low on health (and fate points) from fights in the last two sessions. To cut a long story short - all's well that ends well, which in the Warhammer world translates to they escaped with there lives and little else. Scant reward for their all efforts - at least they've finally got a chance to spend some XP!

Gone but not forgotten

Additionally at the end of this session everyone (or at least the two players in question) agreed that we should scale down the party. At the start of the whole "The Enemy Within campaign" we started off with 4 players (and 4 characters) but 2 players left after only a few sessions, leaving the other 2 to look after the characters as T.E.W. can't really be played with on 2 PCs. Gradually a couple of extra players have come in but opted to play their own characters, which is fine, but I've felt for a while that not only was party too powerful for most encounters, which is easily patched by adding a couple more enemies. More importantly it was taking away from the character roleplaying element of the game for the two incumbent players, as they had to deal with their extra hanger-on characters and couldn't fully get "into the zone" for either their original chosen character or their extra charge. So with this break in the adventure Kislev (the ex-footpad with mercantile ambitions) and Kronenburg (the mage) are taking their leave to follow their paths elsewhere. Who knows if and how they may meet their former colleagues again??