(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 57

The Missing Children of Regendorf

• Gottlieb [Assassin] – I 63
• Larry [Mercenary Captain] – I 58
• Othmar [Spy] – I 56
• Brother Nate [Witch Hunter] – I 54
• Wilfried [Templar] – I 53
• Karl Morgenthau [Artillerist] – I 45

They take the road to Regensdorf, leaving the Two Bawdy Countesses under the care of their pilot in Delberz.

Regensdorf is ruined. Not a building is standing in the village, all burned down. Even Gascon’s forge appears to have been burned and then torn down stone-by-stone. All that remains is the temple of Taal almost lost in the woods, and the baron’s estate on the far side of town. The crops lie rotting in the fields and the mud sucks at boots and wheels alike.

At the baron’s estate, the gate is ajar and the butler (Montgomery from Albion) greets them but offers no food, for he is the last resident of the estate and currently survives on old cheese and millet. You see, the group is dreadfully late for their dinner invitation, and the baron Lord Enum has departed, heading north towards up the Altdorf-Middenheim road. The baron had taken his two men at arms, eight suits of full plate armour, portions of his library, and the skull of his father.

A key finding (in addition to his travel route), is a portrait of the Baron as a young wizard when he went to school in Altdorf (instead of Nuln, where his family expected him to get a good noble education to take up the family “business”). In the portrait is the family heirloom sword, a library of odd tomes, and the black anvil that the party seeks. It is beginning to look like the anvil really is key to this.

Out by the road, where criminals are hung (and it appears the last such man to be hung here was none other than Gascon who’s neck was quite thick), they are hailed by Reinhold Homrighausen, Witchhunter. He has been trying to follow the trail of the Black Anvil and has just received word that Baron von Enum is currently in Delberz where he is trying to hire a boat to get to Marienburg, but none of the captains would rent to him who also had large enough boats.

Planning a pincer move on the Baron, Homrighausen takes Othmar with his men and heads up the road to Delberz. The rest of the team makes the two day trip to Altdorf where they hire a boat, load on their battlewagon, and head up the river.

And as they feared / expected, two days out of Delberz they see the Bawdy Countess II coming down the river – no doubt commandeered by Enum and his team of fully-armoured men at arms.

As they prepare to board, they fire the bolt-thrower at a man in full plate in the wheelhouse of the Countess – a perfect hit through the sternum, the bolt goes straight through both the man and the wheelhouse. Much to everyone’s surprise, the man steps out of the wheelhouse at that point and joins the others on the deck of the ship. In total there are ten suits of plate mail, none appearing to have a human within them. Eight are the suits from the Baron’s home, and two more are darker, dustier, and bear the markings of Nurgle and the hogmother’s rough handicraft. The second of these walks up on the deck with the Baron himself held by the collar – black-eyed and bleeding. The armour-piercing ability of the bolt thrower appears to be a detriment in this battle instead of a benefit, as the bolts go straight through their targets.

Soundly trashing the suits of animated armour (and throwing a few overboard into the river Delb), they “rescue” the Baron before executing him for withcraft and sorcery most foul. The Black Anvil was a relic he had rescued from the tower of a powerful necromancer, its purpose to build an army to take over the empire… and once this army had become numerous enough it took over and commanded the Baron instead of the other way around.

The family sword, Dragonbane, becomes the side arm of Wilfried, who is now a Knight Templar in career as well as title. At the town of Suderburg, they take over the forge of Askan Furst where

they heat the flail head to an incandescent red glow while it howls and screams like three children being tortured. Many of the townfolk witness the team of Knights Panther placing the screaming flail head on the anvil where it chatters and twists and hisses, and then witness as it is destroyed by hammerblows until it twists in upon itself and shatters, speckling a few of the team with shards of Nurgle’s iron.

The anvil is then given to the church of Sigmar in Altdorf for them to destroy (which they agree to do instead of sending the templars on yet another “fetch quest”), and the Countess heads up the Talabec for Kislev.