Zweihander Session 1: Night of Blood

Last week my group and I played our first session of Zweihander: Grim and Perilous RPG I was GMing the whole ordeal and was very excited to finally get the chance to show this wonderful game to my players! I decided to run the WFRP classic Night of Blood from White Dwarf #87 after seeing it put to good use by Vorpal Mace and the games creator Daniel Fox.

White Dwarf #87

My players have never really played anything other than D&D so I was interested to see how they would take to a game that wasn't all about murdering for loot and xp. I did explain before hand that things would be rougher for their characters and that they wouldn't be as durable as they were used to so they should exercise caution when the chance of combat would arise, but enough preamble let's get to the action!

Our protagonists for the night were:

• Prudence, a zealous human camp follower with excessive body hair and a wooden foot.
• Patrisha, the mysterious dwarven (wo)man-at-arms
• Duoomel, the hotblooded ogre guttersnipe who was alarmingly frail and possessed only one leg.
• Ye' Dreg' Leo, the cowardly elven militiaman, Bowen's brother and easy on the eyes.
• Bowen, elven trapper, Ye' Dreg' Leo's haughty brother who would never share his true name to "lower" races.

The session opened up with the group trying to make their way to Nuln on foot, thanks to a lack of funds. The group had been marching for the better part of the day and making surprisingly good time all things considered, that is until the storm clouds began to move in. Within minutes the group found themselves in the middle of a torrential downpour, with night quickly approaching they tried to double their pace hoping to find an inn to escape the storm. But with the howling winds working against them and the ogre's fake leg constantly getting stuck in the mud their progress was slowed to a crawl, they soon found themselves out in the woods after dark, a scary place indeed...

Cold, wet, and miserable Ye' Dreg' Leo heard between the clap of thunder shrieks coming from the woods followed by loud braying. Prudence immediately uttered the word "Beastmen!" and urged the party to push forward. They tried their best to support the ogre as they were dogged by more shrieking and braying luckily salvation appeared in the flash of lightning, just ahead was an inn and it looked like the lights were on.

At the gates Patrisha tried her best to open them only to find that it was barred from the inside, Duoomel boosted Bowen over the fence and was able to open it from the other side. The party b-lined it to the front door and before knocking Prudence and the others schemed that she should pass herself off as an official member of the church. The sounds of a celebration could be heard inside but that all stopped abruptly once they knocked on the door, the sound of scrambling feet and dragging chairs erupted and after a few moments the door was opened and they were greeted by the sight of a grotesquely obese man who they assumed was the inkeeper. Prudence did her best Axel Foley impression fast talking her and the party into the inn to the bewilderment of the innkeeper, finding themselves a seat before he was finally able to ask for proof of identity. Here the party hemmed and hawed trying to find an excuse before pleading for the rotund man's sympathy, the innkeeper grew red in the face and called for Hans Jinkerst, a road warden, to throw these vagabonds out. 

The warden approached trying to calm Otto the innkeeper down before grilling the newly arrived guests, he told them that the inn had suffered a recent bandit attack and accused the party of being bandits themselves. In a huff Otto demanded that the party leave immediately and withdrew into the back, Duoomel was able to talk things out with Hans and explain their current predicament as well as the threat of a potential beastmen attack on the inn. Hans found himself convinced and went into the back to negotiate with the innkeeper to let them stay, while he was gone the only other soul left in the room with the party was a bug eyed boy who was mopping behind the bar and stared at the party giggling mindlessly. The ogre took offense and began to hobble over to the boy ready to give him a few choice words, he retreated to the back with his mop and bucket just as Hans came in and calmed Duoomel down saying not to take it personally as the boy had been kicked in the head by a horse. The road warden told the party that he was able to talk Otto down and that they would be able to stay in the common room upstairs as that was all he had left to rent. Moments later Otto appeared with soup, bread, and ale (served in dirty glasses) for the table.

By now the players were pretty unnerved by the entire situation at the inn, they didn't like how everything went quiet when they knocked on the door, the bug eyed kid creeped them out, Ye' Dreg' Leo's player couldn't get over how fat Otto was, (I had described him as wide as he was tall) the only thing that kept them from completely freaking out was Hans' charming personality and reassurances that everything was alright and Otto was just worried about more bandits coming in the night. Still Duoomel and Bowen would not eat their stew while everyone else dug in, Patricia went and had Bowens's bowl too while Duoomel tried to split his portion into the rest of the empty bowls to look like everyone had eaten their share but couldn't finish their meal. 

After dinner Otto showed everyone to the common room and bid them goodnight closing the door and locking it from the outside. After a half hour of inspecting their room and discussing their plans the party realized that their food had been spiked, those that ate all managed to make their resistance tests except poor Patrisha who passed out promptly. Prudence immediately set to work trying to tie sheets together and open the room's window which had been painted shut while Duoomel tried to pick the doors lock and Bowen and his brother tried to wake the dwarf. Chanting began to rise up through the inn as the party worked on their escape plans the guttersnipe opened the door and began to check the other rooms on the second floor with Ye' Dreg' Leo. Unfortunately they had all been locked and the party agreed it wasn't  worth the time to pick them or risk discovery by bashing them down, Bowen had finally slapped the dwarf awake and Prudence finished preparing their "Plan B" escape. It was at this point the group began to talk about just burning the inn down with Prudence's bottle bomb and be done with the whole thing! 

Luckily Duoomel decided to sneak his way down the strairs while Ye' Dreg' Leo watched him from the balcony to investigate where the chanting was coming from at least. The ogre spotted a hatch leading into what they assumed was the cellar and went to investigate when he was suddenly ambushed by the bug eyed boy! Ye' Dreg' Leo and Patrisha rushed down stairs and made quick work of the would be assassin caving his skull in. A woman's scream rang out from below (while the fire plan was still on the table this did give them pause) Duoomel opened the hatch and spotted a trail of blood that end abruptly at one of the stone panels, the group climbed down and discovered a hidden stairway under the panel that led deeper underground and was bathed in a bright green glow...

Downstairs the party discovered Hans conducting a profane ritual in front of an altar of Tzeentch, sacrificing the actual denizens of the inn who were tied up along the wall. Along with him was the "innkeeper" Otto, a man who's bottom half was that body of a spider, and a man with a skull face and a child's voice. Patrisha was the first to enter the chamber and upon seeing the distressing scene of the ritual site took a healthy hit of mental peril but charged into the fray nonetheless along with Ye' Dreg' Leo' engaging with Hans and the mutants.

What might have been...

The battle was fierce Patrisha was only able to land one good hit on Skull Face who retaliated with a litany of hatred that incapacitated the dwarf, leaving poor Ye' Dreg' Leo' to fend for himself. Prudence and Bowen tried to provide ranged support before being over ran by the man-spider and Otto who had inflated himself like a balloon and began floating in the air. Bowen and Duoomel were able to dispatch the man-spider with some ease but Prudence wasn't so lucky. A particularly brutal strike from Otto's club had broken the camp follower's rib and caused some internal bleeding, luckily Duoomel was able to hobble his way over, and with an impressively coordinated stab from his stiletto, kill Otto causing him to fly against the wall and deflate into a fleshy heap. Meanwhile Ye' Dreg' Leo' held his own against Hans and Skull Face who's attacks were either deftly parried by the elf or just missed entirely. The elf managed to take Hans down by himself in a devastating blow that left the cultist in a gory heap, the rest of the party came in after to slaughter Skull Face with little difficulty (Prudence took his head for proof of their righteous deeds.) During the confusion Patrisha had crawled her way to the hostages who had been drugged like herself and began to get to work waking them as well as cutting their bindings.

After the battle Ye' Dreg 'Leo and Prudence destroyed the statue of Tzeentch with one combined blow (thankfully avoiding having to fight the guardian demon trapped inside) and the party escorted the captives back upstairs who began to bind their wounds, the actual innkeeper was the last to wake and began to ask about his wife and child who were not accounted for. The party confirmed that his wife was the first to be sacrificed by Hans unfortunately, they prepared her body for viewing and brought her back up stairs then began to search the grounds for the boy. The search didn't take long, their first thought was to check the stables and atop the hay loft they discovered the body of the innkeepers eleven-year-old son, a sword blow to the head had killed the poor child but more distressing was that it appeared as though someone had been feeding on his flesh.

The innkeeper was distressed to say the least but Prudence tried her best to console the grieving man with the words of Sigmar while the rest of the party went about securing the inn to the best of their abilities and then rested for the night, in shifts of course. In the morning a group of roadwardens arrived and escorted the group to Nuln where an official report would be made about the night's incident.

I really enjoyed running this adventure,if I were run it again I would play most of the mutants with the underling rules though just to speed things up a bit. The system was a breeze to use for the group after a quick and dirty run down before we began, although they didn't use too many of the combat maneuvers which I had to remind them were available. But the group really enjoyed the game it was really fun watching the group adapt to a game where they didn't have many safety nets and become much more paranoid because of it!

If you're interested Zweihander Grim and Perilous RPG you can check out the free version of the game here and if you're interested in running Night of Blood for Zweihander the games creator released monster conversions for the adventure here.