Curd Your Enthusiasm pt. 1

Session Notes (2/20/22)

Game: WFRP

Scenario: Curd Your Enthusiasm

Players: 5

Two weeks prior we met online in discord.  We spent 2ish hours creating WFRP characters for our intended 3-6 session game arc.  I’ve always wanted to try playing the game.  I own WFRP 4e, Zweihander, Warlock! And WFRP 1st edition, but have never played any version of the game (unless you count Warhammer Fantasy Battle, which I ate up as a middle and high school kid.  Which would have been the 6th edition of the game… but I digress).  I’m familiar with the world, and my OSR sensibilities had me thinking that Warlock! Or WFRP 1st would work best, but I made the decision to just “go with it” and try 4e out: lots of players online do like it, maybe as many that dislike it!

We used jodri the bot to help us out during character creation and during play.  Our characters were Harteena the halfling bawd, Roderick the racketeer, Romilda the thief, Verena the bounty hunter, and Vaenteur the priest.  Verena’s player asked if it was ok to use one of the Cult Deities as a name for her character which seemed fine to me.  Vaenteur’s player is still deciding who he is a priest of.  Roderick’s player is familiar with Warhammer lore, and both he and Romilda’s player have played Age of Sigmar and some other related games.  The other three players were completely ignorant of anything that didn’t directly come up during character creation.  In our session, this did work out well: Roderick’s player was able to roleplay being a little “in the know” about dark and ruinous powers, which he could then convey in character.  It was neat.

Side note: I should probably start writing my session 0’s as their own posts

I chose “curd your enthusiasm” because it was listed as a one shot and it was short.  I really don’t like reading pages and pages of material in order to prep a little scenario, but I do like using scenarios as a way to help me scaffold running a new game.  The scenario was just the right mix of investigation, NPC interaction, and a little fight at the end.  It seemed perfect to introduce the game.  I encouraged everyone to enjoy making cheese related puns, and as a content warning asked if bowel movements were triggering or too gross.

The session went incredibly well!  Vaenteur, Verena, and Romilda were only really familiar with D&D, and so were a little shy at first but they swung into the game readily after a few scenes.  Harteena and Roderick had more experience with investigative gameplay and dove in early.  But by the end everyone was really vibing as a group.  Through roleplaying various character interactions they came to realize that 4 of them were poorly dressed, bad smelling, low class people... with one priest hanging out with them.  This colored many conversations and by the end they were dreaming about using their hard earned coins to pay for a bath!  The cheese puns were delightful, and we found a wonderful tone of dark humor in the grim and perilous game.

The scenario leans heavily on a single location, with many different NPCs: a cheese shop with several apartments above it.  Each apartment has different NPCs to interact with and dispense mysterious clues, all of which only really require a polite conversation to obtain.  The mystery leads to the cellar, where they find the answer to the mystery.  It's all very simple but in play it was really fun and the players were suitably curious about what was going on and who was up to what.

I made one alteration to the scenario as presented: there is a scene where a ghostly voice calls out to her love.  When the players met this man earlier in the scenario I described his voice as sounding exactly like Vaenteur’s.  I did this so that later his player would feel like he should respond to this ghostly voice… and it worked!  The moment the voice spoke, all the players looked at him and nudged “pretend to be him!”.  It was a very fun moment in play.  Secondly, when they first met the character, the voice sounding the same was such an odd detail for them that they were all struck dumb and didn’t know what to make of it.  Very humorous.  WFRP has a long tradition of “mistaken identity” and doubles/look-alikes so I thought this “sound-alike” would be a fun spin on it.

Rules-wise the game is certainly much heavier than I would initially like, but we decided up front to use a “ruling now, look up the real rule later” system that worked perfectly.  I was able to use a list of skills as a cheat sheet to call for various skill checks at appropriate times.  My biggest annoyance was the intuition skill: I’m not a huge fan of reading intent/lie detector skills but I think I made it work.  Looking it up after the game it seems it also applies to environments, which is neat.  The other major rule was “assistance”.  I totally spaced on how it worked and invented a much more complex system than was offered by the book: +10 to a test, as long as the assistant has an advance in the skill and that their help is reasonable.  So simple!

In the future, I will also be employing the degrees of success on dramatic tests.  In play, I just used simple tests, and when I used success levels, I just used the numbers vaguely as a guide to how well or how poorly the action went.  But there is a nice chart that lays out the “yes and”, “no, but” etc. which I think would be a useful way to rule on results.

I forgot to review Fate, Fortune, etc. at the start of the game, so nobody used any!  I will rectify that in the next session.  We did get to do corruption however, and that worked fairly smoothly.  Now all I need to do is review how to break down a door…