Section 8:
The Oldenhaller Contract
This is Councilor Oldenhaller, and this adventure features him somewhat.
FrankT:
Many games in the eighties featured a prepackaged adventure in them. Mostly, these were very simple affairs. Shadowrun had a simple shootout in a grocery store, Champions 4th edition had a dustup with some Mexican villains, and so on. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay's sample adventure is more famous than most, both because it tied into a big campaign and because this book remained the core book's only edition for nineteen fucking years. So anyone who has ever played WFRP has probably played at least part of the Oldenhaller Contract, possibly more than once.
The section begins by telling you what you'll need to play, which includes some dice and a pencil and such. The book has now told you
three times that you need some d4s, some d6s, and some d10s to play. Some of this is doubtless the lack of editorial control when work is being put together with typewriters and pasteboards by a group of people over months and years, and some of it is just that this adventure was probably considered for being a stand alone product at one point. In any case, the adventure comes with four pregenerated characters and suggests you use them rather than take the time to generate new characters. This was standard practice in the mid-eighties, but it really underscores the different thought processes that went into games of this period. Rolling up a WFRP character takes a couple of minutes and involves very few choices, but even
that was considered to be more time than a player would want to spend. Today, games like 4th edition D&D and 5th edition Shadowrun don't even
have a procedural character generation option, and you're expected to spend points and choose things off lists for even one-shot games. And they don't even really pretend that there are pregenerated characters that would be reasonable to use.
You get one pregenerated character of each race, and as far as I can tell it's basically there to rub your nose in how shitty humans are. The Elf is a fricking Wizard's Apprentice, the Dwarf is a god damned Troll Slayer, and the Human is a
Hunter. The Elf and Dwarf both have real careers that go on to real things where they can be genuine wizards and warriors. The Human is a Hunter. Their only advanced career option is “Scout.” And that's a career whose only real calling is that at least you can get to some interesting places from there (Outlaw Chief, Mercenary Captain, and Explorer). But remember: the wizard's apprentice is better with both axe and bow than the hunter, because elves are better than you. The only reason the Elf
academic isn't essentially the best melee user in the party is that she starts with a dagger. The moment she gets even a club, the Human is outshined in his core competencies.
AncientH:
It's hard to emphasize how important the campaigns were for WFRP 1st edition, because there were not many of them (
Enemy Within and
Doomstones are the big ones), and they essentially dominated a lot of the official and unofficial material put out for the game for the entirety of the edition. Seriously, you'd run across a WFRP scenario in
White Dwarf and there would be copious space dedicated to how you could work this in to the Enemy Within campaign, usually as a prequel, sidequest, or interqual of some sort. I suppose the bonus being that your characters were so unlikely to survive the campaigns and the publishing schedule for
Doomstones being so fucking long that the chances of you ever finishing were slim - and by the time you were done, you were probably ready to roll up new characters and do it all over again.
Fun fact: the White Dwarf is an actual character for WFB. They also had a Chaos Dwarf character called 'The Black Dwarf,' but he didn't survive the one scenario he was featured in.
Anyway, a word as to the plot of The Oldenhaller Contract: there isn't much of one. Your gang of adventurers arrives in the city of Nuln, and immediately get treated like you've stepped into a 1983 video game, where you're expected to explore every available room until the time counter clicks down to the next pre-generated decision-tree event. It's not too dissimilar to early Shadowrun adventures, albeit seemingly borrowing more from adventure gamebooks of the period than is healthy and in a highly condensed format.
The
point of the adventure is to get the PCs to meet up with Oldenhaller, a shady merchant-politician who expected to take possession of a gem from a gang of thieves, but they have failed to make delivery. Which essentially makes the PCs repo men. Turns out the first gang of thieves was wiped out by a rival gang, and the PCs need to deal with the this new group...ha, I kid, they're supposed to murder them all, in the process of which they end up in the sewers, and then a minecart, and then facing down a bunch of Nurgle cultists. Assuming any of them survive, they can return the gem to Oldenhaller for a reward, earn enough EP to get out of their crappy initial careers, and go on to their next death-defying adventure,
Shadows over Bogenhafen.
FrankT:
Each encounter in this adventure is named an “episode” and they are numbered. Basic choices are laid out, which are sort of choose-your-own adventurish. If the team follows the footpads, go to episode 2. If the team wanders around Nuln until they get bored, go to episode 3. It's fairly linear, but there is enough branching to make it feel at least a little bit open.
Speaking of footpads, the introductory combat is against some crappy humans with leather jackets and clubs. This is actually better equipment than the players start with, frighteningly enough. They will run off after taking a total of 5 wounds between them, which could seriously happen in the first player character attack. But the game is so random for starting characters that the player characters can seriously just
lose to the starting footpads. That is a thing that actually happened to some friends of mine. Starting characters don't even hit half the time even if they are “specced for melee,” and many of them can drop or even die from one good hit with a club. The footpads only hit a third of the time each, but having them all connect on the first turn is well within the realms of possibility. Before the players get any armor, which is where the adventure traditionally starts, a total party wipe is extremely plausible.
After that, you're asked to make a strength check to open the front door on an inn. Basically, this is the tutorial section, but in my own case it just reduced the whole game to basically medieval Paranoia. A flurry of misses in combat dragged out for like four rounds an essentially tutorial fight against untrained men with sticks, and then our dwarven warrior found himself failing to push open an unlocked door. It was all very sad and made me disrespect the characters. In retrospect, this section was supposed to ease you in to the mechanics of the game (this is how you make an attack roll, this is how you make a strength check, etc.), but the tasks were so lame and the characters so bad at them that it made me think of the characters in the game as retarded cartoon characters good only for slapstick. I don't think that was the intention, so I have to say the tutorial failed at its job.
AncientH:
To say that The Oldenhaller Contract is ambitious as a beginning module is an understatement. Aside from a bunch of players and a gamesmaster presumably all trying to master the basics of the system, this game features an elaborately plotted run across the rooftops, a fight against rats, a better-than-even chance of catching a magical disease, a night in jail, a raid on an asylum, an Indiana Jones-style trip in a minecart, and all the assholes that really want to kill you seem to have crossbows.
FrankT:
One of the things that characterized gaming of this era was the bizarre insistence on player telepathy. You get a room, but if you don't ask more questions about it, the GM doesn't tell you the windows are unlatched. If you don't say you latch the windows, then thieves come in through the window in the middle of the night. This is basically a training session for Gygaxian fuckery. Back in the 80s, if you didn't
say you poked the ceiling with your spear, you
didn't poke the ceiling with your spear. And if you didn't poke the ceiling with your spear, your character was surprised when the ceiling turned out to be a fucking manta ray and ate you.
This meant that veteran D&D players developed routines for investigating new rooms that involved tossing rocks, poking things with poles, and throwing handfuls of flour before even setting foot inside the doorway. Kind of neat in a way, but when it comes down to it, this was all time consuming bullshit. And WFRP was doing their level best to encourage the same kinds of behavior, which was a huge mistake. The actual adventure is on a notice board in the morning, and there is a damn lot of time that can be wasted before getting there. Specifically, it's the third job on the notice board, and the other two are just dead ends to waste your time. If the players decide that they are being trolled by the notice board and give up after the first or second piece of bullshit, I guess the adventure is over. It's really not an exquisitely designed hook to get you into the adventure proper, and the players can just miss it.
AncientH:
The maps are fairly typical hand-drawn black outlines on graphing paper, full-pagers, and there are four of them. I told you this was an ambitious adventure, didn't I?
FrankT:
Each of the locations you get sent to is in essence a small “instance dungeon.” There's no indication that the Asylum even exists until you get sent there by Oldenhaller, no indication that the sewers are large enough to walk around in until you get the plans, and seemingly no cove until you get there by mine cart. Once you leave areas, they are removed from play completely – tunnels blow up behind you and shit. These places are so inaccessible without following the script of the adventure that they might as well be written into computer code.
That being said, the basic dungeon crawl scenarios they send you through are in fact horrendously deadly in this game. The starting characters basically aren't better than random guards. And when the adventure tries to get you to run move from one area to another because there's a rat swarm... rat swarms get ten fucking attacks! Ten! They are only Strength 1, but to Toughness 3 characters, that's an
average of a bit over five wounds per round. The sample PCs only start with 6. Basically, if the gamesmaster doesn't tell the players right away that they have no fucking chance in the world against a rat swarm and need to start running, they have a very good chance of just getting TPKed by that shit. Of course, the players should have learned by then just how
amazingly incompetent their characters are, so when it comes to an actually dangerous sounding monster like a rat swarm, they should already be running.
AncientH:
Thinking outside the box isn't discouraged as much as completely absent from the general logic. For example, the rat swarm would probably go down to a judicious gunpowder bomb and a few flasks of burning oil...maybe. I think in part the whole "let's not give individual monsters XP values" was supposed to encourage the occasional running away, but I don't think I've ever seen player characters run away when obviously outgunned. Ever.
FrankT:
The finale of the adventure has basically nothing at all to do with the characters in any way. There are seven gangsters who you can get to fight the seven cultists. The leader of the gangsters is literally and specifically worth more than any two of the PCs. The cultists are trying to summon a Beast of Nurgle, which is tougher than all the PCs combined, and they will either have successfully summoned it or not when the PCs show up based on how the GM is feeling vis a vis how much time has been wasted. Remember that in the prologue to the adventure, the tutorial kicks you in the teeth if you
don't play a game of twenty questions about every little thing, so I'm guessing that most teams show up with the beast of nurgle already in the house.
Beast of Nurgle
Carrion Crawler
The Beast gets a d6 attacks every turn and is Toughness 5 with 15 wounds. Each of their attacks forces a save versus paralysis which none of the sample characters will pass even half the time. It's basically an AD&D Carrion Crawler, and it will kick your ass. The players could potentially
win this fight, but largely they would do it by having NPCs do most of the fighting for them. The climactic battle is, in short, the tale of the GM banging action figures together making “pew pew” noises. The influence the PCs have over the proceedings is minimal.
AncientH:
And remember, the PCs all get a chance of contracting Nurgle's Rot, which
makes their dick rot off turns them into a plague-bearer/minor daemon. Which is a really dick end to the adventure, even if you "win."
FrankT:
The adventure pays out pretty well. Two advances and 100 GC each, plus the fact that even footpads and cultists start better equipped for adventuring than you do. It's quite a haul once you Greyhawk everything. Of course, there are also several ways in this adventure to contract “nurgle's rot,” which is a special disease that is invariably fatal and totally incurable. So the chances that you have to scrap the entire party and start over again in the next adventure with new characters is pretty high.
AncientH:
The character sheets at the end were, hilariously, all filled out by hand and include small character portraits of Bianca (wood elf wizard's apprentice), Jodri (dwarf troll slayer), Mellory (human hunter), and Soho (halfling thief-burglar). They're hilariously sparse - the elf has a dagger, ordinary clothes, and 5 GC, and is ready to start some shit.
Amazingly,
the book is still not finished. There's another 40 pages of appendices to this thing! I told you it was a beast.