The Enemy Within

Designed by Games Workshop in the good old days when they still created roleplaying games as well as selling uncounted hordes of little toys to children, the Enemy Within series is one of the crowning glories of British RPG publishing. The incarnation of the campaign that I play in is run by the versatile, the beavering and the inspiring James D Hogg. Having run through the GW-published products, we have been waiting for the final instalment to be published by someone. Anyone? Please?

But we have not been idle. Taking a villain from Something Rotten in Kislev and running with it in a big way, James has had us lurching posthumously all over the Old World in a quest to rid ourselves of the Undeath Plague, battling spectral revenants sent by the dying curse of an ancient necromancer, and now we have journeyed across the ocean to a strange land of mighty rivers and madness-inducing jungles in a quest to thwart an invasion.

Of course, being who we are, we are indulging in a little privateering, drug-smuggling, freelance theft and general mayhem, and several of us are insane. We have somehow offended a band of mysterious individuals with powers that would not seem out of place on comic-book superheroes, we have far more understandably attracted the murderous wrath of an entire order of zealot warrior-priests, and we have set out into the jungle with laughably little preparation. Several of our hired seamen have fallen victim to the local flora and fauna (and in one case to a daemonic sword that could give training seminars in perseverance to timeshare salespeople). Poor sods, they may as well have been wearing red tunics.

My character in this campaign is the pretentious, bourgeois, clever, learned, sometimes even scrupulous Doktor Sir Henrik Falkenstein SK KP MMCP BChir. The letters after his name are:
Star of Kislev (he has the second class of the order as well as a far-more-prized honorary doctorate from the University of Kislev), granted for thwarting a serious threat to the land of Kislev, in the shape of a city full of zombies)
Knight Panther, conferred upon him as a way of dragooning him into the service of the Graf of Middenheim and getting the Graf out of an irksome obligation without the expenditure of real military manpower; it is a title he is even tempted to forget, coming as it does with an oath that technically requires him to kill himself forthwith
Member of the Middenheim College of Physicians and bachelor of surgery, definitely the qualifications Henrik regards as real.

Henrik started his career as a Physician's Apprentice. While moonlighting as a fearless investigator thwarting a Chaotic plot to overthrow his home city, Middenheim, he also completed his studies as a Physician. A certain group of oddball companions provided much hands-on medical practice for him by getting themselves wounded and injured rather frequently. Semi-exiled to the cold east, he fell in with a dabbler in the occult, beginning studies as a Wizard's Apprentice. Arkanis his tutor provided an object lesson in how not to handle body-warping substances and self-propelled machinery of destruction safely, and the same adventure saw Henrik receive an indelible impression of how unwise and wrong it really is to unwittingly traffick with daemons. So he was mightily glad to continue his studies in the arcane arts at the University of Kislev with the respected illusionist Thor Janacek Grisbowski and his delectable graduate student Katya. However, Henrik only attained the first level of mastery as a Wizard before his other life intervened. A mysterious map once belonging to the evil necromancer beckoned once more to adventure and so Henrik took to the studies of far-off lands, changing his career to Scholar. Upon arriving in the New World, Henrik again altered his way of life, becoming a Merchant and then Explorer, the career of his current advance scheme. He's now finally figuring out how to look after himself in the frequent fights that his companions start, and learning a few practical skills for survival in the wilderness.

Henrik's companions in his foolhardy quest include the quixotic sociopath Baron Ludwig von Reuter, whose capacity for precipitating dire situations is locked in a titanic struggle with his talent for getting out of them again through skill at arms, chutzpah and sheer jaw-dropping jamminess. Henrik would love never to see him again, even if he does have a social standing that Henrik would give body parts for. Also a founder member of the party, from the time before Henrik was caught up, is Jinx Kaglich. Mistress of a number of silky skills, Jinx has a conscience even more relaxed than that of the Baron, but tempers it with greater degree of level-headedness and practicality, which occasionally makes her an unexpected ally in Henrik's counsels of caution. Joining Henrik during his adventures in Kislev were two more companions. Felix is an apparently-practical and reasonable man, purporting to be a trapper by profession, but beneath the plausible surface Henrik is sure that he is all deception and no substance. But Katya Dulenya Zhivago, gentle-born illusionist, is a beautiful, learned, intelligent woman of drive, character and good heart. Henrik continues on these foolish quests only so he can find sufficient fortune to persuade her blue-blooded family to allow him to make an honest woman of her. Hired for the sea voyage to Lustria were a shipload of assorted individuals, but some have stood out and joined the expedition's partners in key operations. Jakob the carpenter seems simple and easily-led, and peaceful to a degree that frustrates even the good Doktor, but he has proven to be capable of a bestial range when severely tested, and at these times barely seems human. Recently met, stranded in a ruined city and menaced by the walking dead, is the wizard Alexis, master of elemental forces.

The Enemy Within campaign has something of a PC roll of honour. Apparently before my time there was a boatman called Julio Moritas ('about to die', presciently enough) who "did very little other than become a mutant and get killed by a witch hunter". Then there was Celeriac the sadistic wood elf archer, whose hobbies included torturing halflings, crashing river barges and getting knocked unconscious. Celeriac dallied with the idea of Khorne-worship before executing an incredibly incompetent boat-jacking and ending up at the bottom of the Reik.
I did meet, and certainly remember Ivor (you can pronounce Eever Ivor way), the nature-communing druid, who, when manifesting the speed of his totem animal the rabbit, became a whirlwind of fearsome blades. He was an unpredictable but stalwart member of the group, until their cavalier attitude to the darker powers drove him to ally with their enemies and turn against them with murderous intent. Tragically he was slain at the hands of his erstwhile companions. Nor will songs cease to resound of Fiatheral, the windswept and interesting Elven wood-ranger, who went out in a blaze of glory, taking down with him a real live Dragon.
Father Kafradin, the stern-minded and battle-ready dwarven Cleric of Sigmar, is "on sabbatical" for mysterious reasons, but Henrik is an ocean away from his intermittently-flexible theology, and knows not whether he will ever see him again. Fink the halfling navigator fearlessly joined his employers on their jaunt upriver, but losing a foot in the jaws of a great river-lizard, has retired from the quest and is seeking to return to the ship.

Update - The party, now including as PCs the seasoned privateer Captain Mendoza, who still doesn't know what the northlanders did to his ship before following him upriver, and Thor the artillerist, taken on in Norsca as a hireling but now playing a fuller role, had the misfortune to be captured by Amazons. Never trust the strategic acumen of a people whose most famous battle preparation is self-mutilation. Pausing only to demonstrate the futility of relying on chained and driven slaves in your front line, the warrior women were roundly defeated and apparently carted off by a tribe of mountain-dwelling ear-piercing religious fanatics. The chained and driven slaves (us) suffered a similar fate, so the last episode ended with Our Heroes working their way up through the ranks of temple slaves in a city so fabulous and plot-filled it has to be the scene for the finale of this section of the campaign. Henrik is sulking because Katya was with the Amazons and hasn't been seen since. But he's not sulking as badly as one of the three remaining NPC deck hands, who volunteered to mind the harem and can still barely walk after his surgical on-the-job training. Alexis the elementalist has joined the roll of honour, after running through three fate points in record time (cast your flight spell before you jump, boys and girls) and his place has been taken, hopefully for longer this time, by a heretic native priest, Orixiel, who seems to view the ability to transform into a snake as not worth mentioning. Felix has been revealed as a Chaos-worshipping sorcerer, but claims his heart isn't really in it. Well, let he that is without the mark of a Damonic Power on his body light the first brand, that's what Henrik says. He trusts Felix about as far as he ever did.

(fellow-players, I'm sure I've misrepresented your characters somewhere. If you think it is a mistake, rather than in character, please do let me know)