(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 36

Power Behind the Throne

• Wilhelm [Wizard] – I 55
• Wilfried [Forger] – I 53
• Larry [Mercenary] – I 48
• Gottlieb [Assassin] – I 43
• Othmar [Spy] – I 46
• Brother Nate [Cleric] – I44

Wellentag Night / Aubentag Morning

With the grave robbers in tow, the party heads back to Morrspark. Following his directions, they find a crypt where the coffin has been (probably) chewed open at the far end and the contents consumed. Behind the coffin they find a fist-sized hole in the wall leading into deeper chambers.

Feeling that this has confirmed their Nurgle hypothesis, they head up to the shrine and Nathander berates the attending priest, one Archibald Moldenhauer about the lax security and the cult right beneath their feet – expecting Moldenhauer to offer up some weak defense or perhaps try to deflect and defend the presumed cult. Instead, Moldenhauer grabs his raven-topped iron staff and charges down to the crypts, sending a messenger to get another priest to watch over the shrine in his absence.

Agreeing with the group assessment that something foul indeed chewed through the walls to consume the body, he uses his iron staff to pull apart a human-sized opening in the masonry of the crypt walls where the hole was – leading into the many dwarven tunnels that supposedly catacomb beneath the city’s sewers that were sealed off by the dwarves during and after the siege of 1812.

Within these passages they find some signs of people having moved through these areas, and many areas have been swept clean. They also find a small alcove containing a ring with some necromantic residue bearing a sigil that Moldenhauer immediately recognized – the crest of Klaus Gurtelrose, the last necromancer to be uncloaked during the “wizard wars” 60 years ago. He had worked with a nurgle cult called The Running Sore who were also exposed and every member of the cult burned as heretics most foul.

Somewhere around this point the grave robbers manage to shake the party off and disappear, which is only noted later…

Further explorations find no trails of the nurgle cult or anyone else alive down here except the fact that everything is swept clean. Finally the party runs into a solitary dwarf coming down a ladder into a dry cistern-like space they had already traveled through. The dwarf (Adeg Branebreaker, not that kind of brain!) demands that they follow him up the ladder. He had heard the group and was investigating the disturbance of the supposedly sealed tunnels.

Upstairs they find themselves (after a few staircases) in the Council Chamber of the Dwarven Engineer’s Guild in the Wynd district where they are confronted by the recently awakened guildmaster, Unron Shattershield. Presented with a group of non-dwarves exploring the passages that they discovered via the Morrspark, Unron explains that not all the tunnels are actually sealed, and a couple are kept open to allow secret travel between the Chapel of Grungni and the Dwarven Engineer’s Guild, and that they of course maintain these tunnels and keep guard for others using the tunnel network.

The tunnels are kept open because they fear that one day their above ground dwellings might no longer be safe, especially as the Graf is now moving against them with this ridiculous tax. While many dwarves believe that the elven minstrel Rallane Lafarel is the voice behind the dwarf tax, the elders of the dwarven community don’t agree on this, and think this is something that extends much further than simple elf-dwarf racial grudges.

Returning to Morrspark, they meet Mombert Wiederman, the youngest priest of Morr, who is much less about smiting necromancers and seeking out evil chaos cults as he is about comforting the grieving over their loss, and helping people come to terms with death.

He also gets a lot of abuse from the group. Doubly so when it is discovered that Waldo the Weasel and Manny the Maggot had not only come out of the crypts after the group went in, but they left carrying at least a body apiece.

A quick morning run to The Windhund Haulage Company doesn’t turn them up, but does turn up the smell of rotting flesh from a number of lockers that contain nothing but a few crawling maggots now, and a secret basement that also contains a number of maggots and the smell of many herbs and botanical unguents – and all the signs that someone had recently departed the premises along with a number of workstations and whatever was upon them.