Write through the pain, as they say. So the nice people on RPGNet asked for a WFRP adventure to help me out of a deep, deep funk. I asked for two words, and three people responded. Figured the result was decent enough for a more general airing:

our words were:

Devil
General
Nurgle
Swine
Jewelery
Potatoes

So here we go with the horrible tale of Die Kartoffelaugen or The Potatoes Have Eyes!


Devils are rare in Warhammer - it's usually daemons we speak of. But there is the Devil's Cauldron, north of Twin Falls, a crater made by falling warpstone. The warpstone itself has been long since claimed by Dagmar von Wittgenstein (see Death on the Reik) but the land around it never recovered. The druids/jade magicians nearby keep an eye on it but they can't reclaim the land. And word of this place reached the ears of one Baron von Rachesucher. Twenty years ago, an upstart young lieutenant made the mistake of marrying Rachesucher's daughter...and then continuing to tomcat around with a girl in every port. Twenty years later, now-General Fuegepanzen retired and was granted by the army, for grateful service, his own plot of land with a manor and villages to tend the fields. Guess who was in charge of deciding which bit of land to give him? And guess where the land just happened to be?

Always a resourceful fellow, Fuegepanzen makes a good go of trying to farm his land in the Cauldron. Unfortunately everything dies, until he hits on the idea of trying potatoes, the new wonder crop from the New World. When his potatoes come up they have eyes...of jewels. Yes, from a sackload of seeds his fields can produce a purse full of emeralds, emeralds which feel warm to the touch. And when he feeds the rotten potato leftovers to his pigs, they become green and bloated and one of them talks with the voice of Feugepanzen's mother. As the last bit of the General's mind slips away he realises that Rachesucher sent him to this place as a kindness, and he must repay that kindness...by sending his brother-in-law these gems at a wholesale cost - which is still enough to make Feugepanzen filthy rich.

The PCs get involved when they stumble onto a job to take a cartload of potato seeds to a village upriver from Nuln. It's a simple job which pays far more than it should, conditioned on a "no questions asked" clause. Basically, nobody who has heard about the Potato Farm wants to take supplies there any more, but the General is rich enough he can pay danger money to keep his seeds flowing in. The money's good enough that the PCs take the job and everything seems mostly normal when they drop it off...except for the screams from inside the manor house and the bloodsedge growing everywhere and the pig the size of a dragon slowly eating its own arse....but Feugepanzen gives them a bonus bucket of emeralds for their trouble and wishes them well.

Before they can run away, nearby villages beg the PCs to help them get their relatives back. Mages and religious folks will spot the evil in the emeralds. Eventually, they'll realise that something ain't right in the manor house and go in, pistols blazing (or sneaky-like). Feugepanzen is a general and is no push-over, despite being a mad worshipper of Nurgle and the PCs will lose buckets of sanity and wounds cleansing the world of this evil. (You can add mutated servants and horrific nurgle-pigs to make it as hard as you need. DEFINITELY keep the pigs. Pigs are scary as all fuck.) Most importantly though they'll discover that the emeralds are being sold to Rachesucher...who has set up shop as a jeweler to make the most of his brother-in-law's find. (which is why they can't just burn the house down from a distance, too).

Racing back to Nuln they discover Rachesucher sitting in his study with two emeralds in his eye sockets and no skin left on his skull, screaming that he can see all the sickness. From here, you can either end the adventure with a massive town-wide scavenger hunt for all the sold pieces of jewelery OR start a massive Old-World-wide campaign-length scavenger hunt for each piece. Thanks to the powers of the Eyes of Nurgle (for that is what the stones are) looking into one can reveal the location of others, allowing the characters to track the remaining stones even without Rachesucher's sales records. The hunt is on!

And by the by, if anyone does want to strap one of the Eyes to their own socket and wait till morning, they lose their eye (-20% to BS) and gain 1d10/2 Insanity Points but the glowing green thing now in the socket grants them Witchsight and the ability to see disease and sickness. The latter grants them +30% to Heal checks and may offer other situational bonuses (such as to tracking). But of course the mutant eye will need to be covered by a patch lest the bearer be burnt at the stake. And Shallyans will never take an Eye, for that would be trucking with the Fly Lord.

Although as you'll see it's becoming sillier and sillier to pretend this is a "3rd edition" in the sense of it following on from 1 and 2 (and indeed, the box doesn't say it's 3rd ed).  It is, as Jay says in the film, a whole new way to engage with the Old World.  Enjoy!

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/media/front-page-player/player.html

Look at the SIZE OF THIS THING. :0

I don't really write to inflame and incite, but I do like to raise some side issues on the fly. 

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=481666

If anybody sends me Mouse Guard, I'll give it a full and proper review.  All I put in that review was what I thought in the two seconds I had to examine it in a store.

Steve

My dearest Ariette,

Thank you again for your many letters regarding your studies. You are one of the very few individuals I have met in all my years and travels with any insight into these matters, and I join your thoughts to mine with the hope of further understanding this world and our condition within it. It is on this matter that I once again write to you.

You are aware that since my blessed return some ten years ago I have striven to do one thing above all, when I found the time, which was to sit and once again have my portrait painted. As the storm in the north abated, I found I finally had the time to spare, and after the untimely death of the artist, hung the work in my gallery next to the reclaimed works from my last reign at Waldenhof. And there I saw what I sought.

The picture drawn from just a few months before the long march to Hel Fenn does not match the one that now hangs next to it, and I do not mean in the differences that must occur as artists change and styles wash across the ages. The faces are not the same. My hair is now all-but vanished, my eyes pulled back, my teeth more prominent. I do not mean to play the fool and pretend I am no longer a handsome man, nor indeed do I feel weary with age.  The simple fact is this: I have changed.  Be it my return to the world from the chasm beyond or simply the passing of endless centuries, I have changed.  Of course we know of Melchior and Zacharias turning to nought but cadavers of leathered flesh and protudring bone; of course we know that although my great cousin Vladimir was thought by many to be Vashanesh the First, of so long ago, yet many who knew who him then could not mark him now as the same man, we knew, in short, that the lash of time and magic could change a vampire's flesh. But I have died but once, and dabbled in magic with care, and honed my body and mind to be as a fortress against all that might assail them. No man - save one! - and one blasted dwarf, too be fair, has marked me with a blade; no magic spell, save one, has ever gone awry in my research.

And yet I age. I am not, as we thought, out of time, but instead His prisoner, just as all mortals, even the elves, though they and I alike think ourselves free in our arrogance. We are but dogs on a leash, falcons on a wire, rusing to the farthrest end of the strain, only to be pulled back when we most thought ourselves out of bondage. No Time and the waves of magic that course through her whoring robes robs me as it robs the briefest seconds of the life of a dung-fly and there will come a day, some time, when if I do not fall to nothingness from Time's beatings, He will have so robbed me of my strength and senses that others will surely cut me down for their own sakes.

There is then, for the first time, a sense of urgency within me. I feel as if to weep, for there are so many worlds to conquer, and now, as never before, so few years in which to do it. The lash of Time is at my back, and with it I run to the wind, sails full, and strive towards fresh conquests. My appetite is whet, and I know now the taste that so often filled my elder brothers' mouths.

More on this in later correspondence. Consider this...but the sound of drums.

Yours,
M

Damn, I really like this idea.

http://www.rpg.net/columns/campaigntoybox/campaigntoybox22.phtml

Grimm now available in PDF form!  All the fun of fairytales gone bad...on the cheap.

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=877

Here's all the piles and piles of stuff you get in your new WFRP 3rd ed box!  Enough tokens and cards to choke a horse! A BIG horse!

Some moron having a hissy fit about this reminded me of this excellent link, which could always use with more rounds.  Simple, clear, hopefully a guide to the future.

http://letterstogaming.wordpress.com/

The awesome podcasters of Oz, Here Be Gamers, interviewed me at GenCon! Woo!  Sorry for the late notice, I have STILL not sorted through everything from Gen Con.  I should be finished by next year's con.

http://www.herebegamers.com/index.php?post_id=536940