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Three middle-aged nerds dive deep into the golden age of tabletop RPGs, covering the classics from the 80s and 90s that shaped the hobby we love today. Iain and Jason banter their way through gaming history while Steve desperately tries to keep them on topic—and occasionally succeeds.
Whether you're a grognard who lived through THAC0 or a newcomer curious about what to do with all those lovely polyhederal dice you've aquired, we've got you covered with historical deep-dives, roundtable discussions fueled by questionable nostalgia, and actual play episodes where our players' competence is... variable.
All of this released on a schedule that can charitably be called "flexible" at best.
Grab some dice and join us for a trip down memory lane—just don't ask us to commit to when the next episode will drop.
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Enemy in Shadows: A Critical Review
What happens when a beloved classic gets reimagined three decades later? That's the question at the heart of my deep dive into Enemy in Shadows, Cubicle 7's director's cut of the legendary Enemy Within campaign for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.
As someone who first attempted to run this campaign as a 12-year-old back in 1988, this review comes from a place of both nostalgia and critical analysis. The original Shadows Over Bugenhaven was brilliant but chaotically organized – I spent half my time frantically flipping through pages, hunting for crucial information while my players waited. This new edition promises to maintain the brilliance while fixing those organizational nightmares.
The production values are gorgeous, with artwork that perfectly captures the grim darkness of the Warhammer world. The adventure structure has been significantly improved, and the story is refreshingly honest and properly Warhammer.
However, the book isn't without flaws. The "Grognard boxes" are problematic and the lack of a clear campaign vision is concerning.
So, how does the book fare? Tune in to find out!
Have you experienced The Enemy Within? We'd love to hear your thoughts on how this classic shaped your gaming experience!
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HOSTS: Iain Wilson, Steve McGarrity, Jason Downey
BACKGROUND MUSIC: David Renada (Find him at: davidrendamusic@gmail.com or on his web page).
TITLE, BREAK & CLOSEOUT MUSIC: Xylo-Ziko (Find them on their web page).
Welcome to Roll2Save, the RPG history podcast, warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Hello and welcome to another episode of Roll to Save. I'm your host, ian, and today we're reviewing something that's very close to my heart Enemy in Shadows. The fourth edition director's cut of the legendary Enemy Within campaign for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay the legendary Enemy Within campaign for Warhammer fantasy role-playing. Now I need to start with a confession here. This isn't just any review.
Speaker 1:For me, this campaign well, this campaign basically shaped who I am as a player in the games master. Picture this. It's 1988, I'm 12 years old and I convinced I know everything about running games and I'm attempting to run the enemy within for my friends, of course. Back then I was working with what can only be described as the organizational nightmare that was the original Shadows Over Bugenhafen Great adventure, but I spent half my time frantically flipping through pages mid-session, desperately hunting for NPC stats or trying to figure out what was supposed to happen next. Interestingly, though, in the 80s that was just an accepted fact. Modules were usually brilliant but utterly chaotic, and that's just how things went. So here we are, 30 plus years later, and Cubular 7 has given us the director's cut of the animation Shadows 30 years of hindsight. The mechanical improvements of 4th edition Warhammer and the promise of fixing all those organisational issues that plagued the original. Oh, and a promise to wrap up the campaign properly and make the whole thing fit together coherently.
Speaker 1:A little bit of an aside here for those of you who aren't overly familiar with the Enemy Within campaign the original edition had six chapters, but it kind of petered off after the fourth chapter, mainly because Games Workshop realised that they made more money selling small plastic models than they did in writing. Long wiki books, disconnected from what had gone before and also left a ton of plot threads dangling, things that were never resolved, that seemed to be important elsewhere in the campaign. So big expectations for the new version of the campaign. Enemy in Shadows was the first chapter written for the new Enemy Within that would span five chapters and the promise was that this definitive director's cut would address a lot of the shortcomings of the original. So the big question is looking at NME in shadows, does it deliver, or are we just looking at nostalgia wrapped up in better packaging? Let's get into it First. Let's talk about what we're actually getting here.
Speaker 1:Enemy in Shadows is a lovely hardback book containing the first two adventures from the original Enemy Within campaign, mistaken Identity and Shadows Over Buggenhaven, completely updated for 4th edition. Rules classic one. The characters get involved in a plot where they're mistaken for someone else, or rather one of the number is mistaken for someone else, and this drags them into a whole web of conspiracy and intrigue that's going to define the entire five book campaign. They start off coaching in the journey through to the capital city of altdorf, then they settle into the trading down of bugenhafen. Here they get embroiled in a fantastic investigation that is much more Call of Cthulhu than Warhammer, and they end up investigating corruption at the highest levels of society. The production values here are absolutely gorgeous. The art throughout the book perfectly captures that grim, dark tone that makes Warhammer so special. And if you spring for the collector's edition, oh my goodness, it's beautiful. It also comes with handouts that genuinely enhance play rather than just seeming to be pretty decorations. But let's dig into the meat of it.
Speaker 1:The opening chapter, wanted Bold Adventurers, covers the classic setup of a coach journey and a roadside encounter. It gives people some interesting NPCs to interact with in the book. It clearly details who these guys are, what their motivations are and some personality quirks to help the GM bring them to life. They feel like genuine encounters rather than just time wasters that you'd put in to pad out a session. This is also where we begin to see the grognard boxes, special sections intended for veteran players. We'll talk more about these later on and I think in every review that I do of this, I'll probably end up bringing them up, but I find them to be a little bit problematic. Anyway, come to them later.
Speaker 1:The next chapter sees the first combat of the campaign, which helps as a gentle introduction to Warhammer's sometimes crunchy approach to combat, but it also really helps establish the atmosphere of the campaign Without spoiling anything. This really begins to set up the tones of paranoia and suspicion that should be eating at your players, and it also introduces the aspect of mutants in the empire how they're treated, how they're considered and what actions they may take. How they're treated, how they're considered and what actions they may take. The next section sees the players arrive in the imperial capital of Altdorf, and I really like how they present this. It's the same as they did in the original. It gives them enough information about the capital to bring it to life, without being exhaustive and having locations where the players can just wander off here, there and everywhere, and I think Cubicle 7 would rather you bought their book on Altdorf than publish it in here. But the urban encounters are really well structured. It really sets up that feeling of a crowded, bustling metropolis.
Speaker 1:And this is where we get the introduction to the bounty hunter subplot from Mistaken Identity and it's handled with appropriate menace. But one of my favorite scenes in the whole book is when the purple hand cultists try to make contact with the party and one of the characters who do you think is someone else. If you picture this, the cultists approach with secret signs and coded phrases expecting recognition and your player characters just stare blankly at them or in complete confusion. Meanwhile the cultists are equally baffled because their contact isn't responding to the recognition signals. It's a brilliant moment of mutual bewilderment. It really drives home the whole mistaken identity premise. Bewilderment. It really drives home the whole mistaken identity premise. Both sides know something's wrong but neither understands what, and all the while the bounty hunter subplot is weaving through everything, adding a little layer of paranoia.
Speaker 1:But here's where I start to have concerns about the broader campaign and I will say this I'm writing this from hindsight in that I have read all the chapters of the new Enemy Within campaign. But even when I first just read Enemy in Shadows I thought, oh, hopefully this will pay off later on. There's a scene where the characters glimpse the Emperor and there's a big point made that this is a really important scene. You need to throw it in here because this will become really important in future adventures. Except it is never referenced again in any of the adventures that come along, so it feels that the campaign's writing checks that it can't cash. It also feeds my belief that this wasn't actually properly thought out when it was first made, but we'll come on to more of that later on the journey to Bugenhafen that they go through.
Speaker 1:It works well. It builds up the atmosphere of what the empire is like, it lets the characters see some day-to-day life and it also builds some tension as well. The town of Weisbruck it gets competent treatment as a stopping point and while it feels more functional than memorable at first glance, it's actually very clever world building. As I mentioned, I've gone through the other parts of the enemy within campaign and Weissbrück gets revisited in Death in the Rite. So establishing it here as a familiar location for the PCs is much smarter because it means that it doesn't just appear at some random dot on the map later on. Little touches like this really help bring the campaign alive and make the world feel like it's being lived in. So once we've got through all of that, we get to the main meat of Enemy in Shadows, which was what was formerly known as Shadows over Bugenhafen.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to spoil the plot here. I'll be as spoiler free as possible, because it's a really nice adventure, really well structured investigation, and people will still want to play it. But this is also where the director's cut really shows its worth compared to, as I mentioned before, the organisational mess that was the original. Just to drive home here how much of an improvement this new edition is, let me tell you about how much of a mess the original was. I wrote a blog post about this a few years ago after rereading that book as an adult, and it really made me realize just how badly organized it was, and it kind of baffled me how my 12 year old self actually managed to run this.
Speaker 1:So most adventures you'd expect to be laid out logically right, and for Shadows Over Buggenhafen for those of you who've played it before I'd expect it to be something like the introduction, a guide to the city, a timeline, the adventure details, the aftermath and any appendices. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward, and instead what you got was something much more like the introduction, a rough timeline, the start of the city guide, the start of the adventure. Then we cut to the story so far. Then we get the continuation of the adventure. Then cut to the story so far, then we get the continuation of the adventure, then we get a pullout section with more city guide and some NPC stats, then we get a different timeline, then we get a section on common knowledge, then we get some more adventure, then we get key locations, then we got a separate guide to the temples in the city, then we get more adventure, then we finally get the aftermath. It was exhausting to use. Here's a perfect example of how bad it was.
Speaker 1:So, again, without spoiling it, there's this crucial encounter in the middle of the adventure, kind of beginning of the second act, where the powers that be approach the characters and offer some assurance. The usual hey, everything's fine, nothing to see here. Routine. It's a pivotal moment and it gives the players a key contact in the adventure who becomes instrumental in the climax, essential to the plot. So where would you look for this, you'd think the event section, right? Nope, well, maybe it's the npc section, because this is a key character. Nope, and by the way, that section only featured three of the three main NPCs. The rest were sort of scattered throughout the book like breadcrumbs. Where you actually found this really crucial encounter was in the key city location section. And get this. The timeline says that this event happens in the course of their inquiries, implying it's a really important story beat. But as it's written in the key locations, it only triggers if the players do one very specific thing. If they don't, well, good luck in you running the climax, unless you can find some other way to finagle this guy in, because without meeting this NPC, the players are really going to struggle to get near the finale.
Speaker 1:Imagine if the Avengers in Infinity War and apologies if you've never seen this film and have no idea what I'm talking about but imagine they had no idea what Thanos was up to. They missed all the clues about the infinity stones and then suddenly, boom, half of existence just turned to ash around them, with no context. They'd be sitting there like, hey, what happened? Who did this? Why couldn't we stop it? That's what's going to happen to players in the original Shadows Over Bugenhafen if they missed this vital encounter. Suddenly Bugenhafen is on fire and thousands of people are screaming and dying and they have no idea why, other than the GM sprung it on them.
Speaker 1:Thankfully, the new edition has the investigation very clearly structured. There's proper timelines, there's great write-ups of the npcs with their motivations and the ways they would act, so it's spelled out in a crystal clear manner, and the various threads of the mystery are presented. So as a gm, you can actually react the player agency and then go off and doing all the random stuff that players do without completely losing the plot and being able to time them back into the main events. The festival setting needs a particular shout out. It gives excellent colour and tons of roleplay opportunities. I love how the underlying cult investigation maintains the appropriate tension without actually feeling forced, and the climax of the adventure. It offers genuine choices and, more importantly, meaningful consequences. I should say the original offers all of this too, but it's worth mentioning here in the context of this new edition that it doesn't lose any of that quality that the original have. It's also good in that there are several different ways to approach the investigation. As I mentioned there. There's enough of a skeleton here that you can hang your player choices off it. It doesn't feel like you have to railroad them towards some finale. Speaking of which, something which I really loved in the original and which has been retained here is the apocalypse section. The option to actually let the bad guys win and have Boo and Hafen be genuinely trashed is a really great design choice. It perfectly captures that whole actions have consequences theme that is so pivotal to Warhammer.
Speaker 1:There are many adventures for different RPGs that they kind of hand wave away any bad endings. The assumption is the player characters will succeed. This being Warhammer, this includes the option of what if the players don't succeed, and this was one of my very early rpg adventures back in the day, so I was kind of spoiled by this. I went back to other adventures and I'm like, oh, why does this not include an option for what happens if the players fail? So this is great. You have all these other adventures who pull their punches at crucial times. You know they set up these dramatic stakes and then find ways to make sure that nothing really bad happens to the darling players, not this one. This adventure commits to its convictions If your players mess up, bogan Huffin is going to have a bad day, thousands are going to die and the players have to live with that, and that is properly Warhammer fantasy roleplay. Right there Now.
Speaker 1:The book also comes with appendices and they are genuinely fantastic the Buchenhafen Gazette. It's comprehensive and actually useful. It provides enough detail to run numerous adventures in this town if you want to, creating a living, breathing settlement that extends well beyond the immediate confines of this adventure. It actually offers real value, even if you're not running the campaign, although I do have to question who exactly is going to buy a campaign book just to use the appendix. But if you do have this book, you've got a fully realised town that you could use for years as a base of operations for your adventurers or just setting adventures in Bugenhafen. It is that detailed. There are also numerous new rules in this chapter which you can apply to your games if you wish. The NPC creation guidelines in particular are very sensible and time-saving.
Speaker 1:But the real thing I loved in the appendices and it's a really small thing, but I cannot overstate how much I loved it is the section on accents of the empire. It is absolutely brilliant design that should be required reading, not just for every Warhammer GM, but for every GM. Instead of prescribing specific real world accents for various imperial provinces, it gives you a framework to assign accents that make sense in your cultural context, and this solves that long-standing gripe that I have of non-British GMs feeling the need to mangle various British regional accents, usually on actual plays. I've had some truly horrific attempts at Cockney and Yorkshire and Scottish over the years, and this should put an end to countless crimes against pronunciation. It's absolutely brilliant stuff. However, we now need to talk about this book's most significant flaw in my opinion, which is the Grognard boxes. Now, I have to be honest here here.
Speaker 1:When I first heard about these, I was genuinely excited. The idea behind these was having different approaches for running the campaign, alternative takes and classic encounters. That all sounds fantastic. I was imagining expanded content, different narrative paths, maybe some deeper exploration of themes that the original couldn't fit in. The concept seemed really appealing, but what did we actually get? Well, that's a different story altogether. These sections are supposed to provide alternatives for veteran players who remember the original, but instead of offering genuinely different experiences or expanded content, these boxes typically assume veteran players will metagame and therefore provide the adversarial gotcha moments for the GM to trip them up.
Speaker 1:And it's the language throughout these sections that really gets me. It frames this GM player relationship as fundamentally antagonistic rather than collaborative. There are phrases like confuse such presumptuous folks with this that reveal a design philosophy viewing veteran players as problems to be solved rather than as enthusiasts to be engaged. It completely misunderstands why people return to classic campaigns. Veterans don't replay the enemy within, hoping to be surprised by random changes, or because they want to rush to the end using their prior knowledge so they can quote unquote win. They return because they want to share the experience with new players or they want to revisit beloved content with the improved mechanics of the new system. The grognar boxes feel like solutions, desperately searching for a problem that doesn't actually exist, and it's such a missed opportunity. The concept could have been brilliant Imagine alternative villains or expanded political intrigue or different ways to approach the investigation. Instead, we get adversarial design that treats experienced players like cheaters who need to be tricked.
Speaker 1:There's also another issue I have, which I touched on earlier, which is I believe this falls short of being a true director's cut in some very important ways. Most notably, it lacks any overall campaign summary or guidance for the five book arc, which suggests to me that the full vision wasn't actually in place when they wrote this volume. And this is such an important thing. If you're going to invest in a campaign that goes over five books and presumably takes a couple of years to run, you, as a GM, want to know what's going on beforehand, especially if you're going to be changing things. This is doubly important if the people writing the campaign don't actually know where they're heading with it, because they can offer all sorts of supposed changes that you could drop in, but if they haven't decided how this is going to end, what's going to happen if you make the changes? When you're running this brand new book you've got, and in two years time the final book's released and you find out that none of this pays off?
Speaker 1:There's one example in this book that is particularly fascinating. It introduces a demon called the Changeling and suggests that you can use this instead of the primary antagonist in the book. Now, some advice is offered to give you guidance on how to use this character, but there is zero guidance given as to how making this change is going to impact the broader campaign. Now I'll keep this brief and spoiler free, or as spoiler free as I can, but it turns out in the final chapter of the campaign that the antagonist that you replace with the Changeling is actually one of the key players in the plot. If you've replaced this antagonist with the Changeling without spoiling things, it is very, very clear that the original promise from Enemy in Shadows is not realised in the final chapter. Whatever vision that they had for that clearly fell by the wayside during campaign development. It's particularly frustrating because things like this are missed opportunities for genuinely different campaign experiences. So where does this leave us?
Speaker 1:Enemy in Shadows succeeds where it matters most it presents the classic enemy within the experience in a more organised, mechanically sound package that addresses many of the original's flaws whilst preserving its essential character and the things that made it great. The improved organisation alone makes this version worth purchasing if you're planning to run the campaign. The appendices provide some genuine value, especially the guide to the Town and, in my case, the Empire Accents Guidelines, but the book's insistence on treating veteran players, who presumably are the primary audience, as adversaries rather than collaborators and fans really leaves a sour taste in the mouth. Likewise, the incomplete Director's Cut vision and those dangling plot threads suggest a campaign that wasn't fully thought through during the development stage. However, despite these flaws, this is an excellent reworking of one of RPG's greatest adventures. For veterans like myself, it's a beautiful functional update that improves the play experience, even though it occasionally talks down to me. The Enemy Within remains a masterpiece of a campaign design, and Enemy in Shadows proves that some classics genuinely deserve the reputation.
Speaker 1:My advice would be if you're a fan of Warhammer, buy it. Ignore the grognald boxes and enjoy the ride. I'm going to give it 4 out of 5 stars, and that was our deep dive into Enemy in Shadows. We hope you enjoyed it.
Speaker 1:If you've run this campaign, either in the original or the new version, we'd love to hear your thoughts. Either drop us a line on email at roletosavepod, at gmailcom, or on social media. We'd be delighted to hear from you. We're uh well, I was gonna say monthly, because I'm so used to saying that we're not a monthly podcast by any stretch of the imagination. We're an occasional podcast on rpg history. We've got a back catalogue of over 60 episodes dealing with history, reviews, roundtables, author interviews, even some actual plays. So if you fancy checking out, please do, and if you don't mind, please leave us a review. We'd love to see five stars, because that helps us get more visibility. Until then, we will see you in the next episode and keep those dice rolling and remember in the grim darkness of the old world there are no heroes, only survivals.
