For the last year I’ve been running a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1e) campaign running through the classic “The Enemy Within” series (with a little bit added or subtracted here and there).

We play almost every second week, and are almost 30 sessions into the campaign now (and our math indicates we’re looking at another 46 sessions to get to the end).

Some time (18 months?) ago, Cubicle 7 had the full Warhammer FRP 2e collection up on Humble Bundle, and it came with the 1e rulebook too. And they announced that they would be releasing the Enemy Within in PDF also. Excited by the chance to pick them up, I decided I would run it finally (after being part of a botched playthrough once as a player). So I started shopping around online and somehow now I have just about the whole 1e collection in print.

One thing with the Enemy Within – it is a pretty open-ended campaign where the players can easily “go off the rails” and stop running through the campaign as written and run off and do their own things instead. This is something I love as a GM – but I also really want to run the campaign in its entirety. So that was the deal when I put out the call for players. We would be playing WHFRP1e as written, and we would try to keep things on track to stick to the adventures in order to play through them all.

With that social contract in place, we’ve only had one occasion where we’ve actually had to stop play for me to tell the group that I love their plan, and I would run with it and have a great time, but it would mean ditching the adventures as written and moving into running whatever the party gets into at that point. So the party took it as a “if we lose now, we know that we really survived this already with our main plan”, and then metagamed a few ideas as to why they would stick it out instead of skipping town that night. A few other times we had a bit of metagaming regarding their next step (I’ve never had such a hard time getting a group to take a free vehicle to segue into the next adventure!)

I’ve been taking a lot of notes during the progress of the campaign, and instead of keeping them locked away for the players and I to read, I figured I would start posting the game reports here to the blog. The actual play reports the players get are also stuffed full of maps and illustrations from the adventures we are playing, but those are all copyright by their respective owners, so they won’t be appearing in the blog formatted play reports.