Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay- Death on the Reik

The long and winding River Reik has many places to adventure, but none so fearsome as Castle Wittgenstein. Just look at the Ian Miller cover, it is all kinds of awesome. Death on the Reik is a great module and I was fortunate enough to play it just as it was reaching America. We started playing the seminal, masterful series the Enemy Within right after (or there abouts) after THE CAMPAIGN. I do recall us playing a proto-warhammer campaign where I was playing a bounty hunter with a Strength (S) score of 2! Not much came of that.

As I noted here (Small, but vicious dog) my second character in WFRP was a rat catcher who got killed by a bird winged mutant, Alas poor Wilhelm! I can still remember his corpse being draped across some branches, ahhh good RPG times! Thinking back on it I'm pretty sure when started the Enemy Within campaign, the ratcatcher was not my original character. I started with the elf from Shadows over Bogehaufen, the minstrel Malmir Giluviel. Whether he died or not I can't recall, but by the time we reach Bogenhaufen I was playing
my rat catcher. He is the character I think of when I look back at this module, but he was one of many I played. Funny aside, when we reached the  castle many of the original
characters had perished, not just mine.

Since we did participate Shadows over Bofenhaufen and Dave's character was a Boatman we quickly saw the value of the boat early in the module. Aside from the fatality of my rat catcher we secured the boat and made our way. We didn't really need much prodding as we were quickly discovering that traveling by water was much safer then by road, recent fatalities not withstanding. Since we very, very poor we quickly grasped the principals of trading and did a bit to get us better weapons and armor. I think at this point I was playing (temporarily) Johann "Rowlocks" Dassbit a boatman from Shadows over Bogenhaufen (he may have been Pete's character who was showing up less and less) whom we had along as an NPC. Unlike the previous AD&D games my luck was none-to-good in WFRP. On the death of my rat catcher I played a bunch of the NPCs until I got assigned an outlaw (see below). Not sure why I wasn't allowed to roll a new character so I bounced from NPC to NPC.

We made it through all of the early encounters without too much trouble: the Cult of the Purple Hand (I don't recall who looked like Kastor Lieberung), Wisebruck, the signal tower, Kemperbad and the Barren Hills). The signal tower was great fun and it felt very spooky and old as we poked around it. The fight with the skeletons and the skaven in the Barren Hills went too well for us: it made us overconfident going into Castle Wittgenstein proper.

The GM did a great job utilizing the numerous NPCs in the series especially when character deaths happened which was often. As noted above my character was dead for several weeks of real time and I wanted a more combat oriented character. We werediscovering that some character classes were better then others in WFRP. So the GM gave me Hild Eysenck, an Outlaw (renamed and gender flipped to male) version of Hilda Eysenck to run from the module. It was a smart move as we needed more warrior types. He was a bit of wildcard, but helped us get through the brutal exploration of Castle Wittgenstein. Even the lower dungeons were a grind from my recollection and looking over the module. Again, we were not that high in terms of powered up characters and very of us were actual warrior classes which are a must in WFRP.

The town of Wittgendorf was fun, well at least looking back on it. Fortunately I wasn't the one that looked at the foul spider baby to gain Insanity Points. I think we did start a fight at the pale lady encounter and slew some of the guards as Lady Margritte rode off. Additionally, we did find the warp blade in the ruined Temple of Sigmar. I don't recall who carried it, but it did help immensely in the fight(s) in the castle later on. We rummaged around the town only briefly after fighting the guards and did not encounter Jean Rouaeaux or his brew house and horror filled basement.

Playing the part of my new character I led the party to Sigrid the outlaw chief. In short order we agreed to explore the secret way in (Under the castle/ areas #1-11). We did assault the guards at area 8 and secure our boat again. Why we didn't pilot it out and leave I'll never know ;) as it were we took the stairs that ended up in the ruins of the Outer Baily among the mutated beggars. Since we were fairly stealthy and had not fought any guards other then the ones by the river gate the alarm had not been raised. Carefully picking our way we made it all the way to inner areas where we encountered  the chaos warrior Ulfhednar the Destroyer (Jeff also used the mini for his BBEG in THE CAMPAIGN) who put a hurting on us. (he was not in his guest room so we encountered him much closer to the entrance). My memory is hazy, but after fighting him we hightailed it back to outlaw camp. Somehow we encouraged them enough to assault the castle with us heading back through the secret entrance and creating diversions.

I don't recall us adventuring much after this. I'm not entirely sure we made it to the end to confront Lady Margritte and her monster. Reading through the module many years later as a GM I  felt let down by the Frankenstein rip-off of the ending. If I ran it again I'd change the ending to something less cliched. As it was the only time I GMed it the party never got close to area 61-62.

We did not play much more of  the Enemy Within proper as around this time we started to play more Warhammer Fantasy Battle as it took less time, plus we we're all were starting to drive and serious girlfriends beckoned. I don't recall us playing much of Power Behind the Throne. I know for a fact we did not play Something Rotten in Kislev or the lukewarm at best Empire in Flames ( I have it but don't think I'd ever use it as is*)  In the end it was fun and I have fond memories of Death on the Riek. Years later I ran my current gaming group through it and had fun but they were much, much more wary then my original group.

Some random thoughts:

• * Much like Q1- Queen of the Demonweb Pits at the end of the GDQ series
  it feels stilted, as in not part of the overall flow of the modules. Q1
  needed a much better ending and in my opinion was done better and more
  in character here. So fans banded together and produced Empire at War (I've not read through the whole thing yet so I can't vouch for its quality). 


• Death on the Reik is regarded as one of the best RPG modules of any system and I'm not going to disagree. It was fantastic to adventure in and I loved every minute of it, PC death and all, well aside from the in my opinion tepid ending


• Another thing that I always remember is the spooky weirdness of Castle Von Wittgenstein. The maps were uber-cool and the atmosphere dark and grim with mutants living in the courtyard! The graphic/design cartography was always top notch in WFRP products but Death on the Reik was perhaps at the pinnacle.


• When I've GMed Warhammer the players were curiously reluctant to explore more of the castle or were much more cautious... I wonder why that is????


• The River Life of the Empire section is fantastic. It really is full of very useful information for a campaign set in the Empire. Couple this with pages 4-38 of Shadows over Bogenhaufen and you have more then enough material for a Empire based campaign. 

In closing I give Death on the Reik a 9 out of 10, it's just that good. Its also certainly the best out of the Power Behind the Throne modules with the last two, Something Rotten in Kislev and the lukewarm Empire in Flames were mediocre at best... If you are lucky enough to play it you wont be disappointed.

Of hanging paper gravestones on the DM screen...

Gravestones on the DM Screen: A High School Foray into Ravenloft

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, high school was a golden era of gaming for our group—and few sessions were as brutal or memorable as our run through I6: Ravenloft. This isn’t a formal review of the module. Instead, it’s a blood-soaked recollection of how one sadistic DM tossed us headlong into the Barovian meat grinder—and gleefully hung gravestones for every fallen PC.

The players were mostly the same usual suspects: Dave, Jim, Daryl, Tom, Mike, and myself. Jeff, of course, was behind the screen. We'd just wrapped THECAMPAIGN and dabbled in some Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Twilight 2000 before returning to AD&D for this deadly one-shot.

Jeff gave us some leeway with character creation, including a starting XP allotment and a short list of magic items (subject to DM approval). I rolled up a 6th-level human cavalier named Sir Alexander Silverglade—an absurdly noble name for a high schooler to dream up, though apparently I went all-in: Alexander William Christian Edward Kenneth Silverglade. Upper-Upper Class. Tenth in line to something or other. Clearly royalty, and clearly doomed. Naturally, Sir Alex for short.

I still have the character sheet. He wore full plate, carried a shield +2, and wielded a Rod of Lordly Might Jeff had forgotten the functions of—thankfully for me. My attempt to sneak in a +1 Flame Tongue sword was denied and replaced with a vanilla +2. But with high stats (18s in STR, DEX, and CON), full armor, and a preposterously low AC of -6, he was built like a tank. Cavalier perks from Unearthed Arcana gave him damage absorption, fear immunity, and mind control resistance.

Did it help? Only just, perhaps not even.

We were allowed three magic items. I picked strategically—borderline exploitative, really—but it didn’t save us. The adventure began in classic Ravenloft fashion: dropped into Barovia at dusk, wolves howling, villagers fearful, and death already sniffing around the edges.

We made a brief stop at the “Blood on the Vine” Tavern, then poked around Bildrath’s Mercantile and scraped together what we could. It wasn’t much. With night fast approaching, we barricaded ourselves inside an abandoned house to wait for dawn before approaching Castle Ravenloft.

Big mistake.

If you’ve read I6, you know the nighttime random encounters are no joke. Every three turns, 1–2 on a d6? With encounters like wolves, zombies, wraiths, ghosts—and oh yeah, Strahd himself, with his bat and wolf entourage? We got the full buffet:

• Strahd showed up with wolves and bats.
• Zombies broke through.
• Wraiths seeped in.
• A ghost floated through the walls.
• At least one PC was level-drained.
• My character was aged 40 years by the ghost.

I argued (rules lawyer alert) that my cavalier’s immunity to fear should also cover the ghost’s aging effect. Jeff didn’t buy it. Sir Alexander aged from 22 to 62 in an instant. The following week, Jeff reduced it to 10 years—maybe out of mercy, maybe not. Either way, I claimed a moral victory.

But the real gut punch came when Jeff unveiled a house rule (and a flair for the dramatic): whenever a character died, he’d hang a printed gray tombstone on his DM screen with the fallen’s name written in Sharpie. The first casualty? My squire, William, mauled by wolves in a side room. Jeff hung his gravestone like a trophy, grinning as the rest of us sat in stunned silence.

By the end, the screen was covered in tombstones.

We eventually made it into Castle Ravenloft—barely. Through random encounter rolls and pure chance, we ended up starting on the upper levels, near the “Rooms of Weeping.” I was the party mapper, so I still recall the progression ending abruptly near rooms K36–K46. We didn’t get much farther. Supposedly the hilt I carried was the Sun Sword, and the blade was in K41. Not that it mattered.

The final battle was a bloodbath. I remember Strahd attacking with a pack of specters and wraiths. Our cleric died almost instantly. I think I was the only fighter type left standing. Thanks to my AC and cavalier resistances, I tanked most of the assault while the rest of the group got drained or shredded. I was eventually dropped to 4th level by two wraith hits—but I lived. Barely.

Sir Alexander was the sole survivor.

The game ended there.

Jeff ruled that the mists of Ravenloft wouldn’t let him escape, so in my headcanon he found refuge at the chapel in Barovia, helping Donavich defend it nightly. Still aging, still armored, still bitter. I always thought that if I ever ran I6 myself, I’d reintroduce him as a weary old knight clinging to his code in a world long since lost to darkness.

We never played Ravenloft again. Our group wasn’t that into gothic horror, and while I later picked up the module (still in pristine condition), I’ve always felt the random encounters were more dangerous than the rest of the dungeon. Still, it was a hell of a session—especially the gravestones. That image of Jeff’s DM screen, covered in the names of fallen PCs, has stuck with me for decades.

And no, I’m not being paid for this—but if you want a legal, affordable copy of I6: Ravenloft, you can find it here.