Roll to Save

Enemy in Shadows Companion: Review

• Iain Wilson • Season 1 • Episode 70

Share episode

Get in touch with us!

Join us as we crack open Cubicle 7's supplement for the Enemy Within campaign, The Enemy in Shadows Companion - the essential guide to adventuring in the Reikland (allegedly).

Is this a storehouse of useful added extras, or something that trades on nostalgia for nostalgia's sake?

Listen along and find out...

Contact us at:

EMAIL: roll.to.save.pod@gmail.com
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/rolltosavepod
WEBSITE: https://rolltosave.blog

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).

Iain:

Welcome to Roll to Save, 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 are going to be diving in and reviewing Cubicle 7's the Enemy in Shadows Companion all 128 pages of it.

Iain:

Now, as I mentioned in the last episode when we talked about Enemy in Shadow, as I attempted to run this back when I was 12 years old and if you've ever seen or imagined a 12 year old trying to run a complex conspiracy thriller involving political intrigue, religious cults and moral ambiguity, it probably goes as well as you would imagine I distinctly remember turning the entire thing into what was essentially our early renaissance version of the A-Team, complete with the party building elaborate traps for cultists and my NPCs delivering exposition, with all the subtlety of Saturday morning cartoon characters, the political nuances of Bogenhafen's Merchant Houses. Yet completely lost in me, the creeping horror of discovering corruption in the very heart of the Empire yep turned into a straightforward good versus evil slugfest where the bad guys had all the moral complexity of Cobra Commander from GI Joe. However, we had an absolute blast. And here's the thing about the enemy within it's kind of robust enough to survive even the most enthusiastic meddling by inexperienced 12 year old GMs, which brings us on to our topic in hand. Does the enemy in Shadow's Companion honour that legacy, or is it a cash grab disguised as essential content? So if we look at what cubicle 7 is promising here, the enemy in shadows campaign is touted as the essential companion to campaigning in the right land. I don't know about you, but whenever I see the word essential in marketing, my spidey senses start tingling. Essential to whom, exactly? And essential for what purpose?

Iain:

The book positions itself as kind of the special features from those DVD collections which we all used to buy, you know, back when we actually owned physical media, actually owned physical media. This is actually an issue I'll come to later on in the podcast, but I have this with a lot of the enemy within material that Cubicle 7 are putting out for Warhammer. A lot of the references are fairly dated. Now, if I'm an RPG company nowadays, presumably I am trying to bring in a new audience. I'm not making Warhammer for Warhammer nostalgia's sake, so presumably I'm wanting my Gen Z and Gen Alpha people to be playing this. I'm not sure they're going to get the reference to DVDs special content. They're not a generation that grew up with director's commentaries, behind the scenes material and deleted scenes that you used to get on DVDs. However, that is the metaphor we're meant to be going with here. What we've got is a book that doesn't necessarily contain core campaign material. It's the extra stuff that the completionists and superfans would probably want.

Iain:

So let's dive into it. What we get at the beginning, it really goes right from the off for this director's commentary view, and we get two guest commentaries from Graham Davis and Phil Gallagher, two of the writers behind the original Enemy Within campaign in the 80s, and these are a genuinely delightful read. They share war stories from the campaign's development and provide context for the creative decisions that shaped this legendary campaign. There's also an Easter eggs chapter which explains all the terrible puns and cultural references from Warhammer's first edition of the Enemy Within. I was never a great fan of these. I always found the tone slightly jarring. Never a great fan of these. I always find the tone slightly jarring. You're touting your game as being this grim world of perilous adventure and then putting a character in called Baron Von Saponatime, which really kind of kills the mood somewhat. It's apparently the best kind of terrible joke, but it's not something that sat well with me Anyway, my grumpiness aside, and this gives you a little rundown of all the terrible puns that existed in the first edition of the Enemy Within.

Iain:

But with that out of the way, we go on to a chapter on expanded Empire material. It's about 10 pages of core content about the Empire and I have some mixed feelings about it. On the surface this provides really useful world building that helps GMs understand the political and social context of the campaign. We get information on Zygmars realm, details about how towns function and insights into the relationship between the Emperor, the electors, the guilds, the various minor nobles. It's all good stuff. But here's the thing that bugs me. Most of this material has been lifted directly from the original 1986 Enemy Within supplement. We're kind of paying for reprinted content that's nearly 40 years old now. I understand that not everyone has the original books, but it feels a bit cheeky to present recycled material in a new context.

Iain:

Most frustratingly though, this information feels like it should have been in the main warhammer fantasy role play, fourth edition rulebook. In the first place, if you remember the first edition rulebook, it didn't just give you information about the reek land, it gave you the entire old world, you details about bretonia, the border, princes, kislev, the whole lot. Fourth edition's core book only covers the right land, and even then it's pretty sparse on the political detail. So we have a situation where cubicle seven is artificially separated content. It should have been core material and they're now selling it back to us as a supplement. That being said, this political information is genuinely important for the campaign. Without wanting to spoil anything, I could tell you the later volumes of the enemy within focus heavily on political shenanigans, so understanding the empire's power structure becomes crucial. So while I'm annoyed at having to buy this information separately, I can't deny it's actually going to be useful to people running the enemy within the campaign.

Iain:

Now, with that out of the way, we get into some chapters where the book really starts to provide genuinely useful content, and this comes in the form of its treatment of travel and transport. It provides vehicle rules that are comprehensive and genuinely useful. Finally, we've got proper guidelines for coaches, karts and all the other various ways your characters can get around the Empire. There's even rules for sedan chairs for those characters feeling very hoity-toity. The mishap tables are particularly excellent. Nothing quite captures that grim and perilous feeling like having your horse throw a shoe just as bandits appear on the horizon.

Iain:

These tables all add real consequence and flavour to what could otherwise be boring travel sequences, but there's a particular part of the presentation that frustrated me. The rules do include daily travel rates, but they're buried in the text as mathematical calculations you have to work out yourself. So to quote from the book. So if I want to know how far my riding horse can travel in a day, I need to multiply its movement rate by the hourly rate, then by the number of hours, factor and rest period. Come on Cubicle7,. Just give me a table and abstract it. This is exactly the kind of practical information that should be presented clearly, not buried in a paragraph of text requiring me to do mental gymnastics. That being said, even if I had this table that conveniently showed me how far my draft animals or my riding horse could travel in a day, there's no real indication in this supplement, or any of the other Warhammer supplements, on how far apart settlements actually are. So without knowing the distance between, say, altdorf and bugenhafen, I can't use these travel rules effectively. The system tells me how to calculate travel time but doesn't give me any baseline distances to make those calculations meaningful.

Iain:

And, speaking of myth guidance. They have a wonderful section on travel stages, what you can do in each stage of a journey, and it gives you various fun, thematically appropriate travel endeavours, which are things players can do on long journeys to split it up. So, for example, they might want to practice skills, they might want to keep watch for trouble. These are things that mean that journeys aren't just hand-waved away or they aren't just boring descriptions of countryside as you travel. Stuff happens. However, the travel rules don't establish what one travel stage actually represents in terms of distance. Is it 5 miles, 10 miles, 20? Actually represents in terms of distance. Is it five miles, 10 miles, 20? There's a how far is it? Sidebar that provides some examples, but it all feels pretty arbitrary. Don't get me wrong. These are great rules but as a gm, I'd appreciate more structured guidance on pacing these travel sequences out. And for those of you who haven't run the enemy within before, the enemy within involves a lot of travel. So these rules would be great for providing colour in journeys and not turning it into just a series of random encounters.

Iain:

Anyway, that aside, we get into chapter six and that covers road wardens, and this is a lot of solid, practical material that helps bring the empire's roads to life. The road wands aren't just generic guards who happen to be on the road. They're a specific institution with their own culture, methods, limitations and jurisdictions. Think of them as the highway patrol or state troopers of the empire. This chapter provides useful guidance on how road warden patrols operate, their relationship with tall houses and coaching inns, and how they might interact with travellers. I also particularly appreciate how the material presents roadwardens as more than just the cops. They are information brokers, local contacts and potential allies or obstacles, depending on what mishap shared characters get into. It's actually this kind of detail that makes the Warhammer world feel lived in and original and not just generic fantasy kingdom number two. So we then get to a chapter where this book absolutely excels, and that's the npc gold mine for your campaign entitled road riffraff, which is really hard to say and I've had to do about three takes on.

Iain:

This chapter is genuinely excellent. It gives a whole bunch of fully started characters with personalities, motivations and potential plot hooks. These aren't just stat blocks with names. They're genuine characters with backgrounds and stories to tell. There are some genuinely clever NPCs in here. I particularly love Kitty Uala, who's a foreign trader selling something called cafe, an exotic drink. The advice in using her as an entry point to merchant circles in Bogenhafen is excellent, and it also helps cement that really xenophobic attitude that the old world have in a way that feels natural rather than preachy and tacked on. What I particularly appreciate is how the NPCs come with detailed suggestions for integration into your campaign through these little boxes they call them shadow cast boxes that explain how to weave them into the main plot. These aren't just random encounters. There are potential recurring characters who can add depth and continuity to your story. We see that a lot throughout the Enemy Within. Even in the original campaign they introduced NPCs who they wanted to serve as continuity points across the whole campaign, so it's lovely to see this done here as well.

Iain:

However, there is a problem here that I alluded to earlier, and it's just this broader issue that comes with updating classic Warhammer material for modern audiences. Some of the humour and cultural references are painfully dated and uniquely British. Now, this was fine back in the 1980s, when the creators assumed that their little pretendy goblin game would never reach foreign shows. But we're in the 21st century. Now there's new generations of gamers playing and presumably they're selling to a global audience, which means that a lot of this stuff doesn't work. Humour is always the first thing to show its age. Humour is always the first thing to show its age, so it's baffling that, in a chapter that is all new content, that the authors would choose to include references to British comedy TV shows from the 80s. It's just going to fall flat on new gamers and it feels outdated and out of touch. That being said, the chapter is genuinely excellent. It has a lot of great content that can be added into your campaign, which will really enhance it. This is exactly the sort of stuff that these companion books should be doing providing enhancements to the ongoing campaign, and that continues in chapter eight.

Iain:

Chapter eight is all about mutants, and the treatment here is genuinely excellent and shows a real understanding of what makes Warhammer special and different. This isn't just about rolling in mutation tables, though there are plenty of those and they are good. It's about understanding how mutation affects individuals and their families and how mutants survive in a world that ultimately wants them dead. The section on mutant society is particularly valuable, giving GMs insight into the hidden communities and desperate measures that keep the Empire's changed citizens alive. It presents mutants as more than just stock bad guys to throw at the players when you haven't had a combat for a while. They are tragic figures, victims of cosmic forces beyond their control, struggling to maintain their humanity in a world that sees them as monsters. That's the sort of nuanced world building that Warhammer does at its very best, and it's great to see it's represented here. We then have information on Chaos, sorcery and Demons, and this is fantastic. It fits perfectly in a campaign whose focus is on hidden Chaos cults. The new spells, talents and creature stats provide mechanical support for the supernatural corruption that drives the campaign's main themes In the chapter on the purple hand the breakdown of the cult's structure, cell organisation, recruitment methods, the way they manipulate secular organisations.

Iain:

It creates antagonists who feel genuinely threatening because they're embedded in the world's existing power structures. They're not just moustache twirling villains. They represent insidious corruption that can come from anywhere. Hey, surprise, surprise, the enemy within. However, there's a significant problem with this chapter that speaks to larger issues, with the campaign as a whole.

Iain:

The Purple Hand information, whilst detailed, has clearly been written without any overall direction for the campaign being established. It provides rough information about the cult without actually detailing their endgame or ultimate objectives. Instead, we get a lot of hand-waving to the effect of well, they're very decentralised and nobody knows what anyone else is doing, rather than solid details about what they're actually trying to accomplish than solid details about what they're actually trying to accomplish. As with a lot of the rest of the campaign, it feels like the whole direction wasn't planned out in advance. All in all, the information in the Purple Hand chapter is useful but frustratingly vague. As a GM, I want to understand the cult's goals so I can foreshadow them properly and create meaningful opposition to my player characters. Now we get to the final three chapters, and if I was writing a blog about this, I'd probably have a heading here saying the Problem with Nostalgia, because these chapters are where my patience with nostalgia for its own sake finally runs out. These are titled as Bonus Short Adventures, but they're actually reprints from White Wolf magazine in the 80s and they're every bit as dated as you'd expect.

Iain:

Chapter 10's on the road. It's harmless enough, it's a few encounters, and Imerata the Shapeshifting Hunter has some interesting elements. But it does specifically call out the fact that none canon anymore and it feels like filler when you're actually paying for new content. But it's chapter 11, the affair of the hidden jewel where things get genuinely problematic. For me, this adventure has a completely different tone from the rest of the campaign. I could see the previous adventure being in chapter 10 being fitted in as a roadside encounter. But the enemy in shadows? It carefully builds an atmosphere of creeping dread and moral ambiguity. The Hidden Jewel is a swashbuckling romp, complete with dastardly counts and hidden treasures. The adventure literally comes with editorial notes telling GMs to ham it up, and this stands completely at odds with the tone that's been set for the rest of the campaign.

Iain:

Modern Warhammer tries really hard to sell itself on being grim and dark and perilous to stand out from the myriad other fantasy games that are on the market. I mean, this is a game where you can literally die of exposure or the common cold, which isn't very noble and glamorous. Including this adventure in your enemy within campaign would actively undermine the tone that is trying to be set and that's what really marks this out as filler. Early Warhammer included a lot of kind of winking, nudging humour in some of its supplements, but the real silliness was confined to the pages of White Dwarf magazine. I remember reading some adventures and thinking why has my grim, dark role-playing game suddenly become all Monty Python-esque. That is where this sort of adventure firmly belongs. It's a daft one-shot that you would run. It's not something that belongs in a companion for a campaign. That's about creeping, horror and corruption.

Iain:

Chapter 12, the pandemonium carnival, is also a baffling inclusion, mainly because the fact it deals with a traveling freak show and one of the main parts of enemy in shadows is is a travelling freak show. Having two of these in the same campaign serving similar narrative functions feels redundant in the worst possible way and unlike the main one in Enemy in Shadows, which feels like it could fit into the world. Even in the 80s when this was printed, it felt tonally slightly at odds with the setting. This is a freak show that is filled with captive mutant beast men. This simply does not fit tonally with modern Warhammer, where the slightest taint of chaos is burnt out quite literally by the church. The very existence of this thing just stretches credibility to breaking point and the book itself acknowledges it and launches into all sorts of elaborate explanations and plot devices about imperial licenses and pacts with ancient dwarfs that allow it to exist. But it feels absolutely absurd and again it feels like padding for padding's sake. There already exists within the main campaign, a similar attraction that fulfills a very specific narrative purpose. So why include this one other than nostalgia?

Iain:

This is where my frustrations about the companion come in. The first nine chapters are absolutely solid. They show what this book should have been throughout Practical tools, atmospheric details, new NPCs to include plot threads for the main campaign it's all good stuff that understands what the enemy within campaign is and, more importantly, enhances it. Now imagine if those final 30 or so pages of the book had been filled with new adventures or new adventure hooks that built on the main campaign's themes, picture original encounters that explored the political tensions of the right land, or maybe investigations tied into the purple hand conspiracy. We could have had material that enhanced the campaign's central concerns and which followed the theme of the enemy within. Instead, we get these museum pieces that feel disconnected from both the main campaign and the canon of the modern game as a whole. It's particularly disappointing because the strong material in the early chapters show that Cubicle 7 clearly understands not only what makes Warhammer special, but what makes the enemy within campaign special when they focus on it. So where does this leave us?

Iain:

Well, the Enemy in Shadows Companion is a book I genuinely like, despite its questionable editorial choices. When it focuses on expanding the campaign with practical tools and atmospheric detail, it's genuinely excellent. The road travel rules, the NPC collection and the background material on mutants and chaos cults they will all improve your Enemy in Shadows campaign. But those reprinted adventures feel like padding, pure and simple. You know the sort of thing. That would have been a great pdf download for nostalgia hunting, grog dance, but they absolutely do not belong in a premium supplement aimed at modern players, and even amongst old players I don't know anyone who's been like man. I've been really waiting for a fourth edition update to the Affair of the Hidden Jewel. Overall for groups that are actively running the campaign, I'd recommend this book for the first nine chapters, but either ignore the rest or explore it with skepticism. The content that you get in the first nine chapters is genuinely useful and the NPCs alone will enhance your campaign for months, if not years, to come. However, with the other old adventures, don't feel obligated to inflict Wolfgang's Carnival on your players just because you paid for it. So I will give this an overall rating of 3 out of 5.

Iain:

Freak shows. I like a lot of the content in it. A bit annoyed at some of it Should have maybe been in the main rulebook and slightly irked by some of the padding. And that's it for today's episode. We hope you enjoyed it. We are a semi-regular podcast on the history of RPGs. For new listeners, we have a back catalogue of around 70 episodes now dealing with history, roundtables, interviews, product reviews and some actual plays as well, so please feel free to delve into that. If you want to get in touch with us, you can do so on email at rolltosavepod at gmailcom, or you can find us on social media. We're on Instagram, but not on Twitter anymore, for all the reasons that people aren't on Twitter anymore. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us five stars. We'd really appreciate that. It helps with visibility and encourages us to make more episodes. So until next time, keep your powder dry, your faith in Zygma strong and remember, in the grim world of Perilous Adventure, sometimes the real enemy is shameless nostalgia-baiting.

People on this episode

Contributor

Iain Wilson

Host
Contributor

Jason Downey

Co-host
Contributor

Steve McGarrity

Co-host