Tuesday, 9 September 2014

RPGaDay Day 29 - Most Memorable Encounter

#RPGaDay

Day Twenty Nine – Most Memorable Encounter

I’m giving this a whole post to myself because it amuses me. Husbit is less amused.

This is the other time Husbit ran WFRP’s for us – I mentioned one under Day 13 (most memorable character death) in which he achieved a TPK. Something about him running WFRP’s it seems…

We were playing a group of people from the same village, strictly human and strictly pastoral-style careers. I started as a goatherd with the intention of becoming a druid; I forget what the others were. Husbit wanted us to appreciate that we were from a rural backwater in the Empire – somewhere clinging to an older, more druidic faith, very anti-unnatural things like machinery and the undead and stuff.

Something happened to cause us to have to team up and leave our village (it probably burned down), and off into the big, wide Warhammer world we went.

The scenario Husbit really wanted to run was one he’d adapted from Ravenloft, his favourite setting. It was a murder mystery, maybe film noir-esque scenario – one I would love to revisit and actually solve. One day. When I’ve won the lottery and never have to worry about money again so can spend my days reading, writing and roleplaying…

Anyway, in passing during a session not all players had made it to, Husbit stated that we shouldn’t be alone. My memory is that this was told to us by an NPC, although it may have been GM speech and I think that’s Husbit’s recollection. It turned out to be rather important, so we were rather cross that it wasn’t reiterated to us in or out of character at any point, such as the start of the next session or when it was clear we hadn’t remembered/noticed and all split up.

Once every character had had a moment of being alone, we all awoke in a dark chamber, somewhere deep underground. It was quickly explained that, in that moment we’d been alone, we’d been killed and some form of doppelganger put in our place in the town outside so the other players didn’t notice. The wizened man before us had then resurrected us…

And this is where it all fell down and Husbit learnt a valuable lesson in ensuring players have the right information: in the Warhammer world, there is no resurrection. Returning from death makes you undead. Husbit had made quite a point of this, and we were playing rural, old faith characters who hated the undead.

So when the man we’d never met before tried to convince us we really were alive again, we weren’t having any of it: if we’d been dead, we were now undead. The guy explained we needed to solve the murders before the worm thing he’d put into us ate into our hearts and killed us again – destroyed us. We refused.

I wanted to go to the surface, to die finally with the sun on my face, but my companions pointed out that abominations such as we’d become we didn’t deserve sunlight and so we sat there, in the dark, until the worm things killed us.



With thanks again to Autocratik.

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