WFRP: The Enemy Within - Session 9
After a long break, here's the next installment of my WFRP write-up.
Session 9 - The Fall of the House of Teugen
When we last saw our PCs, they were ready to leave Bogenhafen and hide somewhere far away from daemons and conspiracies and dangerous magical diseases. After they were approached by a penitent conspirator, Magistrate Richter’s friend, Friedrich Magirius, they saw a chance to avenge Rose’s death. And also to make 100gc each, as Magirius hired them to eliminate the rest of the group, and even gave them the time and location of their next meeting.
Due to me being an idiot, the notes from this session are non-existent. Laptop -> floppy disk -> PC, files overwriting files… at least it wasn’t a full novel this time… As such, this is a fairly abridged recounting of the session.
The biggest stumbling block that the group can see to carrying out the contract on the Ordo Septenarius’ Inner Council is the shitstorm that the sudden deaths of most of the town’s worthies will cause. The decision is made to get out of Bogenhafen as soon as possible after the assassinations. To this end, Iris secures the purchase of a horse and cart, to speed them up marginally. The plan is made to lay low for the rest of the night after the attack, before heading down to Magirius’ lawyer’s office first thing for the other 250gc of their fee. They would then disappear the throng of travelling entertainers and traders that were packing up at the end of the Schaffenfest with the aim of being anywhere except Bogenhafen.
The group head out to Warehouse 42, the scene of their crime, at about nine in the evening, an hour before they (in the guise of hired security muscle) were due to arrive, to check that everything’s in order. The warehouse is deserted and, they realise as they go inside through the man-sized side door, filled with barrels of wine and brandy.
Highly flammable brandy.
Not bad quality brandy, either, Iris notes, skimming off four small casks into the back of her cart, which is stashed in a nearby alley, in case a quick getaway is needed.
An open space within the warehouse has clearly already been set up for a ritual, with the nine-pointed star of the Ordo Septenarius marked out in chalk within a copper ring that has been hammered into the wooden floor, surrounded by four tall candle-stands. As it was in the sewer shrine, a T-shaped crucifix has been set up between the horns of the beast on the star. This time, the wood is clean of blood.
The set-up for the trap is swiftly improvised: Iris will wait inside the warehouse, on the rafters above the ritual circle. With her, she will have half a dozen pots of Johann’s lamp oil and a tinderbox. The main sliding doors to the warehouse are bound together by rope through the door handles. An open-topped four-wheeled wagon will be rolled in front of the side door, blocking the Inner Council’s escape when Iris hurls the blazing lamp oil down at them. Before they can force their way clear, the brandy barrels will have caught light and incinerated the entire building.
At eleven bells, the first coach arrives. A podgy man alights, wearing fine clothes, but with a folded bundle under his arm. He sends the coach to go back home.
Johann directs him around to the side door and Ulrich lets him inside.
From her hiding place in the dark rafters, Iris watches as the merchant removes his coat and unwraps the bundle he was carrying. He produces a long, hooded monk’s habit and struggles into it.
About five minutes later, a pair of merchants arrive on foot, accompanied by a group of burly men in chainmail and carrying clubs. As they see Johann standing by the gates to the warehouse yard, they thank them and send them off to the pub, to return at about two o’clock. Alexa and Jarla are also putting on a show of being hired thugs, but are lurking in the shadows, to disguise their gender a little. The men join their co-conspirator inside and, observed by Iris, also don habits.
Three further coaches arrive. The first contains a middle-aged merchant who places a handkerchief over his mouth as he steps out into the ‘fresh’ riverfront air. “What a stench,” he mutters. “At least it’s an improvement on the last place we found.”
Three people alight from the next coach: two brothers holding a woman between them. She is wearing lower class clothes and her head lolls about as if drunk. Or drugged.
The brothers nod at the ‘guards’ as they go past and take the woman inside. Johann, Jarla and Alexa look at each other awkwardly. The plan doesn’t take into account an innocent bystander - or rather, victim - being trapped inside the burning building. Reluctantly, they agree to stick with the plan, even if it kills the intended sacrificial victim. Ulrich and Iris each independently come to the same conclusion.
The final coach contains two men with a recurring rose-and-cross motif on their clothing. Johann recognises this from the time they went onto the Adel Ring and saw the merchants’ mansions as being the symbol of House Teugen. That would make this Johannes and Gideon, the horns of the Beast.
Gideon stops by Johann and sends his cousin on ahead. He fishes a gold coin out of his belt pouch, holds it up to glint in the wan light of Morrslieb, and hands it to Johann. “Please accept this as an expression of my personal thanks for your assistance this evening, and may fate walk with you.”
Johann accepts the tip, but is disturbed by the knowing smile Gideon gives him as he heads off to join the rest of the Inner Council.
Up in the rafters, Iris sees the two men enter Warehouse 42. From the greetings given to them by the others, she works out that they are the Teugens.
“Are we all here?” Johannes asks, doing a headcount in bad light. “We’re short one,” he says, completely failing to mask the frustration in his voice. “Sigmar damn him, where is Magirius?”
“He was a bit unsettled when I saw him this morning,” one of the coven members remarks as he straightens his habit. “Quite out of sorts.”
“Probably because of Heinz Richter,” another comments. “They are close.”
“We need nine!” Johannes Teugen roars, shocking his brethren into silence. “We need nine,” he repeats, calmer, “or the ritual will not work.” With the candle-light enhancing her halfling night vision, Iris notices spots of sweat beading on his forehead.
The man who mentioned Richter’s illness gasps and raises a hand to his mouth. “Oh, I’m sorry Johannes, your brother…”
“Fuck my brother,” Johannes retorts. “We need this ritual.”
Gideon steps into the circle. “Cousin, gentlemen, it is not yet eleven. We have another hour for Friedrich to join us.”
“He’s normally early,” someone comments. The others are looking restless. Iris realises they’ll soon start getting suspicious. In the light from the window beside her, she strikes a spark and ignites the cloth wadding on the first flask of oil, before using that to light the others.
The merchants panic as the clay flasks tumble in and explode around them. One man is hit, his habit catching fire rapidly as the burning oil sprays across his shoulder, chest and back. Rather than stay to watch, Iris lowers the prepared rope from the window and scrambles down to join the others outside.
Already, the doomed merchants are hammering at the doors, crying out for help. Ulrich double-checks the wagon by the side door. “It’ll hold,” he says, grimly.
“It’ll take a few minutes for the brandy to start cooking off,” Johann says. In a previous life, he was a charcoal burner, so he understands fire intimately.
They hurry from the warehouse, only to be deafened and knocked flat by a momentous column of smoke and fire that shatters the brick and timber warehouse and leaps skywards, twice the height of any of the other buildings in the district.
Words slide sideways into reality, creeping lies as clear as truth. They come in no particular order, but amongst them, as if a secret message is being revealed, is a phrase: “You thought to cheat me, Johannes, but you cannot cheat Fate…” A mocking giggle trails away into the night. Iris realises with a start that it was the same laugh she heard when she killed the daemon in the sewers.
Dazed and confused, the party pick themselves up, only to find the streets milling with panicked individuals. A fire, in a heavily-timbered town, is a great cause for concern.
“That’s them, sir!” someone shouts.
Reiner Goertrin, the watch captain, bustles through the crowd towards the party, flanked by half a dozen halberd-wielding watchmen.
“They was lurkin’ about earlier, sir. The ‘alfling and the big guy,” one of them says, indicating Iris and Ulrich, “spot ‘em anywhere.”
“You better have a bloody good explanation for this,” Goertrin snarls at the party. “It’s not enough to harass people about that bloody goblin, so you’ve got to blow up the riverfront!”
Outnumbered, and probably outclassed, the party allow themselves to be taken into custody. The rest of the night is spent at the watch barracks, not in a cell, but definitely not as guests, as the three armed watchmen left in the room with them signpost clearly.
They are individually taken in to be interviewed by Captain Goertrin. It soon becomes apparent that Heinz Richter’s written comment about the ‘captain’ smiling at him during his visit the previous day being unusual; at some point in his career, Reiner Goertrin obviously took a sword blow to his face, severely damaging the muscles of both cheeks.
Everyone tells the truth about their encounters since arriving in Bogenhafen (leaving out the inheritance fraud plot and instead claiming to have come for the Schaffenfest).
Once he has finished with them, Goertrin addresses them all together: “You’re lucky, your stories match the confession of Friedrich Magirius; he turned himself in about an hour ago. As little as I like to put my trust in the word of a self-confessed heretic, your stories all match his, and what little I have managed to get from Magistrate Richter, and it looks like your little arson might not actually be a capital offence after all.”
“So, can we go?” Jarla asks, after a long pause.
“You can, Fraulein Eckhardt,” he nods. “Stay at the Crossed Pikes tonight, and all of you come to the town hall and speak to us again tomorrow. I’ve had a word with one or two of the council… the surviving members of the council, that is, and I have a lot on my plate tonight.”
He turns to leave. “Incidentally,” he adds, “the drugged woman. She survived without a scratch. Strange how fate works, isn’t it?”
In the morning, there is no question of skipping town; the Watch will be, well, watching them. Instead, they stop by the lawyers’ office on the way up to the town hall and collect the rest of their money from Magirius.
“You’re lucky,” the clerk says as he hands it over. “That letter over there, with the town seal on - it’s freezing Herr Magirius’ assets. He asked me not to open it until after you’d been in, as a ‘final favour’ to him, he said. A good man, Friedrich Magirius. I’m sure whatever it is will get sorted out.”
The rest of the morning is spent assisting the Watch with their enquiries. Magistrate Richter, fully recovered from his illness, albeit a bit pale and with heavily bloodshot eyes, permits the party to assist in the search of the Teugen mansion in search of any further evidence of the Ordo Septenarius’ crimes. Various occult texts are recovered from the house, along with a number of artefacts of suspicious origin. Additionally, correspondence is discovered between Johannes Teugen and a woman called Etelka Herzen suggests that she was responsible for supplying Teugen with the directions for at least some of his rituals and it appears that she and Johannes Teugen were extra-curricular students of the black arts together while they were at the University in Nuln.
From the letters, the council surmise that the Teugens could not have corrupted the great and good of Bogenhafen anywhere near as much as he apparently did if it weren’t for Etelka’s advice, support and assistance. As such, the council rapidly vote to place a 1000 crown bounty on Etelka Herzen’s head and offer the contract to the party.
It’s a very tempting offer. Johann has a question, though: “Why not just tell the witch hunters? Isn’t this their job?”
Richter smiles grimly. “I feel that, in the aftermath of the war, the witch hunters are preoccupied with dealing with heretics in the north. It may be months before they even come as far as Bogenhafen, and we are less than a week from Altdorf.”
Iris grits her teeth. She’s not a violent person, but last night she got her revenge on the men who killed Rose. Now it seems this Herzen woman was involved in the plot as well.
“We’ll do it,” she says.
The End.
Coming Soon: The Enemy Within, Part 2: Death on The Reik
Mutants, goblins, witches and barges!
Session 9 - The Fall of the House of Teugen
When we last saw our PCs, they were ready to leave Bogenhafen and hide somewhere far away from daemons and conspiracies and dangerous magical diseases. After they were approached by a penitent conspirator, Magistrate Richter’s friend, Friedrich Magirius, they saw a chance to avenge Rose’s death. And also to make 100gc each, as Magirius hired them to eliminate the rest of the group, and even gave them the time and location of their next meeting.
Due to me being an idiot, the notes from this session are non-existent. Laptop -> floppy disk -> PC, files overwriting files… at least it wasn’t a full novel this time… As such, this is a fairly abridged recounting of the session.
The biggest stumbling block that the group can see to carrying out the contract on the Ordo Septenarius’ Inner Council is the shitstorm that the sudden deaths of most of the town’s worthies will cause. The decision is made to get out of Bogenhafen as soon as possible after the assassinations. To this end, Iris secures the purchase of a horse and cart, to speed them up marginally. The plan is made to lay low for the rest of the night after the attack, before heading down to Magirius’ lawyer’s office first thing for the other 250gc of their fee. They would then disappear the throng of travelling entertainers and traders that were packing up at the end of the Schaffenfest with the aim of being anywhere except Bogenhafen.
The group head out to Warehouse 42, the scene of their crime, at about nine in the evening, an hour before they (in the guise of hired security muscle) were due to arrive, to check that everything’s in order. The warehouse is deserted and, they realise as they go inside through the man-sized side door, filled with barrels of wine and brandy.
Highly flammable brandy.
Not bad quality brandy, either, Iris notes, skimming off four small casks into the back of her cart, which is stashed in a nearby alley, in case a quick getaway is needed.
An open space within the warehouse has clearly already been set up for a ritual, with the nine-pointed star of the Ordo Septenarius marked out in chalk within a copper ring that has been hammered into the wooden floor, surrounded by four tall candle-stands. As it was in the sewer shrine, a T-shaped crucifix has been set up between the horns of the beast on the star. This time, the wood is clean of blood.
The set-up for the trap is swiftly improvised: Iris will wait inside the warehouse, on the rafters above the ritual circle. With her, she will have half a dozen pots of Johann’s lamp oil and a tinderbox. The main sliding doors to the warehouse are bound together by rope through the door handles. An open-topped four-wheeled wagon will be rolled in front of the side door, blocking the Inner Council’s escape when Iris hurls the blazing lamp oil down at them. Before they can force their way clear, the brandy barrels will have caught light and incinerated the entire building.
At eleven bells, the first coach arrives. A podgy man alights, wearing fine clothes, but with a folded bundle under his arm. He sends the coach to go back home.
Johann directs him around to the side door and Ulrich lets him inside.
From her hiding place in the dark rafters, Iris watches as the merchant removes his coat and unwraps the bundle he was carrying. He produces a long, hooded monk’s habit and struggles into it.
About five minutes later, a pair of merchants arrive on foot, accompanied by a group of burly men in chainmail and carrying clubs. As they see Johann standing by the gates to the warehouse yard, they thank them and send them off to the pub, to return at about two o’clock. Alexa and Jarla are also putting on a show of being hired thugs, but are lurking in the shadows, to disguise their gender a little. The men join their co-conspirator inside and, observed by Iris, also don habits.
Three further coaches arrive. The first contains a middle-aged merchant who places a handkerchief over his mouth as he steps out into the ‘fresh’ riverfront air. “What a stench,” he mutters. “At least it’s an improvement on the last place we found.”
Three people alight from the next coach: two brothers holding a woman between them. She is wearing lower class clothes and her head lolls about as if drunk. Or drugged.
The brothers nod at the ‘guards’ as they go past and take the woman inside. Johann, Jarla and Alexa look at each other awkwardly. The plan doesn’t take into account an innocent bystander - or rather, victim - being trapped inside the burning building. Reluctantly, they agree to stick with the plan, even if it kills the intended sacrificial victim. Ulrich and Iris each independently come to the same conclusion.
The final coach contains two men with a recurring rose-and-cross motif on their clothing. Johann recognises this from the time they went onto the Adel Ring and saw the merchants’ mansions as being the symbol of House Teugen. That would make this Johannes and Gideon, the horns of the Beast.
Gideon stops by Johann and sends his cousin on ahead. He fishes a gold coin out of his belt pouch, holds it up to glint in the wan light of Morrslieb, and hands it to Johann. “Please accept this as an expression of my personal thanks for your assistance this evening, and may fate walk with you.”
Johann accepts the tip, but is disturbed by the knowing smile Gideon gives him as he heads off to join the rest of the Inner Council.
Up in the rafters, Iris sees the two men enter Warehouse 42. From the greetings given to them by the others, she works out that they are the Teugens.
“Are we all here?” Johannes asks, doing a headcount in bad light. “We’re short one,” he says, completely failing to mask the frustration in his voice. “Sigmar damn him, where is Magirius?”
“He was a bit unsettled when I saw him this morning,” one of the coven members remarks as he straightens his habit. “Quite out of sorts.”
“Probably because of Heinz Richter,” another comments. “They are close.”
“We need nine!” Johannes Teugen roars, shocking his brethren into silence. “We need nine,” he repeats, calmer, “or the ritual will not work.” With the candle-light enhancing her halfling night vision, Iris notices spots of sweat beading on his forehead.
The man who mentioned Richter’s illness gasps and raises a hand to his mouth. “Oh, I’m sorry Johannes, your brother…”
“Fuck my brother,” Johannes retorts. “We need this ritual.”
Gideon steps into the circle. “Cousin, gentlemen, it is not yet eleven. We have another hour for Friedrich to join us.”
“He’s normally early,” someone comments. The others are looking restless. Iris realises they’ll soon start getting suspicious. In the light from the window beside her, she strikes a spark and ignites the cloth wadding on the first flask of oil, before using that to light the others.
The merchants panic as the clay flasks tumble in and explode around them. One man is hit, his habit catching fire rapidly as the burning oil sprays across his shoulder, chest and back. Rather than stay to watch, Iris lowers the prepared rope from the window and scrambles down to join the others outside.
Already, the doomed merchants are hammering at the doors, crying out for help. Ulrich double-checks the wagon by the side door. “It’ll hold,” he says, grimly.
“It’ll take a few minutes for the brandy to start cooking off,” Johann says. In a previous life, he was a charcoal burner, so he understands fire intimately.
They hurry from the warehouse, only to be deafened and knocked flat by a momentous column of smoke and fire that shatters the brick and timber warehouse and leaps skywards, twice the height of any of the other buildings in the district.
Words slide sideways into reality, creeping lies as clear as truth. They come in no particular order, but amongst them, as if a secret message is being revealed, is a phrase: “You thought to cheat me, Johannes, but you cannot cheat Fate…” A mocking giggle trails away into the night. Iris realises with a start that it was the same laugh she heard when she killed the daemon in the sewers.
Dazed and confused, the party pick themselves up, only to find the streets milling with panicked individuals. A fire, in a heavily-timbered town, is a great cause for concern.
“That’s them, sir!” someone shouts.
Reiner Goertrin, the watch captain, bustles through the crowd towards the party, flanked by half a dozen halberd-wielding watchmen.
“They was lurkin’ about earlier, sir. The ‘alfling and the big guy,” one of them says, indicating Iris and Ulrich, “spot ‘em anywhere.”
“You better have a bloody good explanation for this,” Goertrin snarls at the party. “It’s not enough to harass people about that bloody goblin, so you’ve got to blow up the riverfront!”
Outnumbered, and probably outclassed, the party allow themselves to be taken into custody. The rest of the night is spent at the watch barracks, not in a cell, but definitely not as guests, as the three armed watchmen left in the room with them signpost clearly.
They are individually taken in to be interviewed by Captain Goertrin. It soon becomes apparent that Heinz Richter’s written comment about the ‘captain’ smiling at him during his visit the previous day being unusual; at some point in his career, Reiner Goertrin obviously took a sword blow to his face, severely damaging the muscles of both cheeks.
Everyone tells the truth about their encounters since arriving in Bogenhafen (leaving out the inheritance fraud plot and instead claiming to have come for the Schaffenfest).
Once he has finished with them, Goertrin addresses them all together: “You’re lucky, your stories match the confession of Friedrich Magirius; he turned himself in about an hour ago. As little as I like to put my trust in the word of a self-confessed heretic, your stories all match his, and what little I have managed to get from Magistrate Richter, and it looks like your little arson might not actually be a capital offence after all.”
“So, can we go?” Jarla asks, after a long pause.
“You can, Fraulein Eckhardt,” he nods. “Stay at the Crossed Pikes tonight, and all of you come to the town hall and speak to us again tomorrow. I’ve had a word with one or two of the council… the surviving members of the council, that is, and I have a lot on my plate tonight.”
He turns to leave. “Incidentally,” he adds, “the drugged woman. She survived without a scratch. Strange how fate works, isn’t it?”
In the morning, there is no question of skipping town; the Watch will be, well, watching them. Instead, they stop by the lawyers’ office on the way up to the town hall and collect the rest of their money from Magirius.
“You’re lucky,” the clerk says as he hands it over. “That letter over there, with the town seal on - it’s freezing Herr Magirius’ assets. He asked me not to open it until after you’d been in, as a ‘final favour’ to him, he said. A good man, Friedrich Magirius. I’m sure whatever it is will get sorted out.”
The rest of the morning is spent assisting the Watch with their enquiries. Magistrate Richter, fully recovered from his illness, albeit a bit pale and with heavily bloodshot eyes, permits the party to assist in the search of the Teugen mansion in search of any further evidence of the Ordo Septenarius’ crimes. Various occult texts are recovered from the house, along with a number of artefacts of suspicious origin. Additionally, correspondence is discovered between Johannes Teugen and a woman called Etelka Herzen suggests that she was responsible for supplying Teugen with the directions for at least some of his rituals and it appears that she and Johannes Teugen were extra-curricular students of the black arts together while they were at the University in Nuln.
From the letters, the council surmise that the Teugens could not have corrupted the great and good of Bogenhafen anywhere near as much as he apparently did if it weren’t for Etelka’s advice, support and assistance. As such, the council rapidly vote to place a 1000 crown bounty on Etelka Herzen’s head and offer the contract to the party.
It’s a very tempting offer. Johann has a question, though: “Why not just tell the witch hunters? Isn’t this their job?”
Richter smiles grimly. “I feel that, in the aftermath of the war, the witch hunters are preoccupied with dealing with heretics in the north. It may be months before they even come as far as Bogenhafen, and we are less than a week from Altdorf.”
Iris grits her teeth. She’s not a violent person, but last night she got her revenge on the men who killed Rose. Now it seems this Herzen woman was involved in the plot as well.
“We’ll do it,” she says.
The End.
Coming Soon: The Enemy Within, Part 2: Death on The Reik
Mutants, goblins, witches and barges!