(Being a series of quick game notes trying to account for the events of many sessions of playing through The Enemy Within using the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1e rules.)

Session 19

Death on the Reik

• Martin [Scout]
• Wilfried [Fence]
• Larry [Bodyguard]
• Talbberry Grumble [Scribe]
• Othmar [Charlatan]
• Wilhelm [Wizard]
• Gottlieb [Bounty Hunter]
• Oscar Jager [Bodyguard]

Concocting a foolproof plan, the group established that dwarves only go missing during the night (but don’t forget the curse! I never fall off scaffolding, and I fell off it on the first day!) and always the dwarves on watch.

So tonight the group took up watch positions of their own instead. Gottlieb climbed to the highest point of the scaffolding to provide sniper support, Larry took the standard dwarven watch position on the lower scaffolding by the upper entrance into the partially complete tower (along with a fake dwarf made from a sack of potatoes dressed in dwarven clothes), and Martin and Wilfried took up positions inside the tower itself where they could keep an eye on Larry’s post.

And then of course it turned out that the cause of the disappearances was coming from inside the tower, and a potent ghoul snuck out of a secret trap door and immediately started wreaking havoc upon Wilfried and Martin. Wilfried immediately fell to the foul beast and Martin put up more of a fight before being paralyzed and incapacitated (and then killed as he was dumped into the secret door covered shaft).

In fact the beast may have managed to get away (and eaten Martin and Wilfried) had it been even a slight bit luckier. But in the end it was slain and both Martin and Wilfried slowly recovered from their wounds and the cold feeling of death within them.

The Ghoul wore a strange key around its neck – a six-inch long tubular key with a five-pointed star in cross section at the end. This magical key didn’t fit in any lock, but the trap door in the tower floor opened automatically when within a yard of the key.

The secret door opened to a shaft that was directly in the middle of the tower. At the bottom of the shaft is a glowing hexagram with a six-pointed star-shaped hole at each point of the hexagram. There is also a doorframe in the stone, but it seems to have been completely blocked off with a plate of metal.

Testing the key around the tower the next night, they found that it opened a second secret door on the side of the old tower also. Within they were accosted by terrifying shambling zombies, and all attempts at organized combat against them failed as various party members failed their fear checks whenever it was most important. But even disorganized heavy resistance is heavy resistance, and the zombies were unable to keep the group from plundering the interior of the tower.

Each of the five slain zombies also wore a tubular key around their necks. These keys have six points each, and when tested they mesh perfectly with the keyholes in the hexagram… However there are only five (one on each zombie) and a thorough searching of the structure did not turn up the sixth.

Within they found most of the walls, floors and ceilings were chalked up with various esoteric calculations – mostly astronomical. In the various rooms they found:

• A large, leather-bound book hand-written in the Magickal Arcane Language. Once studied and learned (in the same manner as a spell), it enables a wizard to control skeletons, zombies, and ghouls if they are summoned by a necromancer with the wizard’s assistance.
• A plethora of alchemical apparatus.
• A battered notebook, whose yellowing pages are covered with complex calculations in a spidery hand – it attempts to predict the orbit of the Chaos moon Morrslieb.
• A collection of maps of the Reikland and the western marches of Talabecland with a number of intersecting lines marking the orbits of Morrslieb. One intersection (roughly over the area listed as “the barren hills” on most Imperial maps) has been circled.
• A number of unlabelled painted portraits – likely of members of the same family based on the commonality of aquiline noses, high foreheads, and bushy eyebrows (unless of course the artist just had a tendency to exaggerate such things).
• An ornately carved wizard staff that makes it so the person carrying the staff will not be attacked by zombies within the structure.
• A library of books on a variety of subjects from alchemical treatises to ‘novels’ of a somewhat dubious literary nature.

Collecting their pay from Master Artisan Aynjulls Isembeard at the end of the week, they continued down up the Reik towards Kemperbad and eventually Grissenwald.