Ashes of Middenheim (Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying 2e) - A Review

 Ashes of Middenheim was the first major adventure book publish specifically for WFRP 2e.  It is set in the city of Middenheim, the location which had been covered most in WFRP 1e so there was lots of earlier source material to build on.  It also builds on the sample adventure in the WFRP 2e core rulebook, Through the Drakwald.  

The book consists of a background section which has details of the city and its sewer and tunnel systems - and a new career, the Sewer Jack.  It also contains some adventure seeds for a bit of inspiration for side-quests and additional adventures.  The second half is given over to the adventure proper.

The story is quite a roller-coaster ride although some of the dynamics can seem a bit 'same-y'.  Macguffins are found and handed over, which then causes the characters to be sent on the next investigation, possibly to find more macguffins, which are then handed over etc.  Invariably chaos-inspired ne'er do wells of various sorts are involved and try to stop the characters.  The tone and atmosphere are generally fine although the whole setting is now in a slightly post-apocalyptic phase (in the aftermath of the Chaos invasion).  Personally, I don't like this variation of the setting but to be honest it doesn't impact too much on this particular adventure, except that several of the most important political figures are absent with the army.  As long as the GM can think of any reason to have these figures outside the city - or just inaccessible - then it can run fine in whatever setting. The general WFRP elements are all there though, so it does deliver on the minimum promise: an exciting adventure in a Warhammer-themed story.  It is another story which exploits the Ulrican-Sigmarite cult divisions which WFRP writers have found so inspiring over the years.

Although the over-arching plot is fine for a Warhammer game and lots of the individual incidents are exciting enough, it a highly railroaded adventure: there are many bits where the characters will definitely end up in a certain place or doing a certain thing and the only question is how much fighting the characters do on the way, or how inventive they have to be to unlock the next plot coupon.  There are lots of problems with all of this, so let's go through them:

It takes away player agency (although a good GM may be able to disguise this somewhat) since que sera, sera at nearly all points. 

It privileges combat skills over other types of skills, since there is no way of avoiding many of the combats and "dying" is the easiest way to fail.  The non-combat orientated characters are then mainly valued for how they can buff up other characters in combat OR if they can reduce the number of combats.  But there is little sense that a non-combat orientated character can achieve as much.

It can feel like one is collecting plot coupons, like a video game.

There is relatively little replay value in the adventure.

I think this highly railroaded approach might be very good for novice players and GMs since the adventure itself is programmed to keep you on track but for more experienced players, they may sense the limitations.

As an aside, one thing I have noticed in playing through this game is that the combat dynamics have changed a lot as a result of armour being much more effective than in 1e, characters having more wounds (i.e. hit points) than in 1e and going to a d10 based system (which reduces somewhat the chances of exploding damage).  Against armoured enemies, missile-focused characters are a lot less useful than they were in 1e because there was a much higher chance of causing some catastrophic damage. Some of the comments in the book strike me that some of the authors might not appreciate this, and they over-rate the importance of marginal differences in Weapon Skill versus the importance of armour. Conversely, multi-attack armoured characters are even more valuable than in 1e.

One distinctive element of the adventure is the opportunity for a set piece in which the players take on different characters briefly to conduct a trial.  The adventure does not insist on it being done this way but I imagine a few groups might quite enjoy that.

Successfully concluding the adventure should get a character through most of the advances in one career, possibly up to starting a second career (although obviously this can be varied to taste).  The enemies in the book are reasonably well-calibrated to be challenging but not more than that for a group of 4-6 first-career characters.

One area in which this adventure is much less good than the WFRP 1e adventure set in Middenheim, Power Behind the Throne, is that the characters are somewhat less memorable.  The baddie isn't bad but the supporting cast just didn't engage me the way that some of the splendid PBtT characters did.  Partly this is a function of the much higher attrition rate, partly just that they are genuinely less inspired.  There are some characters on the players' side (mostly) which are heavily inspired by a certain TV show.  They are fine, but somehow they don't catch alight on the page the way they might have done.  Perhaps the writers were subconsciously assuming that everyone would know what these characters personalities were so they didn't have to be emphasized, which was a bit of a mistake in retrospect.

In summary, it is a solid 6 out of 10: there isn't anything horrendously wrong with it, there is plenty of atmosphere and plot twisting - but it never really fires me up in the way it might have done and the railroading is a bit too obvious, on the assumption it has to be there at all.