WFRP 1 Easter Eggs: The Enemy Within, Part 2

WFRP 1 Easter Eggs: The Enemy Within,... WFRP 1 Easter Eggs: Warhammer City

WFRP 1 Easter Eggs: The Enemy Within, Part 2

The last post covered in-jokes and pop-culture references in The Enemy Within and Shadows over Bögenhafen. This time, let’s take a look at Death on the Reik.

The name of this adventure was a riff on the title of Agatha Christie’s murder mystery Death on the Nile. The 1978 film version, starring Peter Ustinov and an all-star cast of suspects, had long gone from cinemas by that time, but was shown in television at least once a year ever since.

Even though neither Hercule Poirot nor Alphonse Hercules de Gascoigne was anywhere to be seen, Death on the Reik didn’t lack for movie-star power, courtesy of artist Martin McKenna.

For example, the cultists pictured alongside the generic cultist stats at the start of the adventure are clearly comedy-horror stalwarts Peter Lorre and Vincent Price. In the adventure, I named these characters Loorbeer and Kuhn. That was my schoolboy-German attempt to render the names Laurel and Hardy, because I didn’t expect the players to take them seriously. It’s probably as well that I didn’t tell Martin McKenna that – having them drawn as Vincent Price and Peter Lorre is going quite far enough…

Tangent: Peter Lorre’s birth name was László Löwenstein. A character by this name – give or take an accent or two – appears in Kim Newman / Jack Yeovil’s Warhammer novel Drachenfels. Unsurprisingly he is what one commentator described as “a creepy actor.” Under his own name, Newman wrote extensively on films.

The determined-looking lady holding the lantern in the section about the Dwarf town is none other than Greta Garbo, in her role as Queen Christina in the 1933 movie of that name.

The racketeer Luigi Belladonna has a passing resemblance to Marlon Brando in “The Godfather.”

Corrobreth the druid is a little more modern – or rather, he was more modern at the time. He’s based on Ian McShane, who played the roguish antique dealer Lovejoy on British TV from 1986 to 1994.

Herbert Marcuse the Innkeeper looks suspiciously like veteran British actor Stanley Holloway.

And, of course, there are no prizes for spotting that the vampire Graf Orlok was inspired by movie Dracula Bela Lugosi – though it’s a little unfortunate that I stole his name from a completely different movie with a very different vampire: Nosferatu.

Vintage actors weren’t the only star turns:

Hans-Peter Schiller the Wizard’s Apprentice was based on Polish mathematician, astronomer, and all-round clever-clogs Nicolaus Copernicus. Polish WFRP fans are among the game’s most loyal and passionate supporters, and I’d love to say this was a deliberate tip of the hat to them, but at that time we didn’t know about them, so far away in Nottingham.

The name, of course, comes from the German playwright, poet, and philosopher Friedrich Schiller.

Kurt Kutzmann is based on Steve “BiL” Sedgewick, who was a graphic designer at GW at the time. He was also the creator of the Gobblebdigook cartoon strip, which ran for several years in White Dwarf. Here he is from Death on the Reik and from Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, by Martin McKenna both times.

Kurt von Wittgenstein is Charles “Chaz” Elliot, who was also a graphic designer at GW at that time. Of course, the Wittgenstein name was stolen from another German philosopher.

And then, there’s the Wittgenstein monster.

Ludwig von Wittgenstein, of course, is stolen from Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis.

The moment where the PCs encounter the Goblin chief in drag (on the logical — if stupid – pretext that he’s wearing one of the lady wizard’s dresses and expects it to grant him the same magical powers that she has) is one of the definitive “Warhammer humor” moments, to my mind.

GW policy at the time mandated that every WFRP adventure should come with a miniatures deal, just like the Warhammer battle packs had done. Death on the Reik was the last of these, because no roleplayer would ever pay a hundred pounds or more for miniatures for a single, one-use adventure. Nonetheless, Kevin “Goblinmaster” Adams sculpted the miniature, and as expected, it sold miserably. The Citadel sculptors hated having to make miniatures for WFRP adventures, not least because royalties made up a large proportion of their income.

The town names of the Reikland are worth a look. It’s not easy to come up with a hundred or so place names at the drop of a hat, so gags, puns and pure stream of consciousness have played their part.

For example, you’ll see the names of a lot of people who were at Games Workshop at the time. There’s Anseldorf, Priestlicheim, Halheirn and Merretheim — the last being named after Alan Merrett, who was production manager, or some such title. The Hahnbrandt mine is named after Paul Cockburn, as best as my little German dictionary would allow.

There’s also a series where someone (not me, but I don’t know who) must have been in a very bad mood: there’s Braundorf, Naffdorf, Brasthof and Ripdorf; I thought there was also a Pissdorf, but it looks like cooler counsels prevailed there.

Others include Wurfel (German for dice), Stockhausen (named after the composer), Sprinthof and Barfsheim, and if you take a German dictionary to the rest you’ll find that most of them have some meaning or another.

The NPC names in Death on the Reik are not as silly as those in the previous Enemy Within adventures. Instead, there’s a strong philosophical theme running through them: Wittgenstein is the most obvious, but you’ll also find Schiller, Rousseaux, Eysenck, and Hegel among the NPCs. There may be more — I never was much good at Spot the Philosopher.

Frau Blucher, Rousseaux’s housekeeper, is named after the character in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. Remember her? Every time her name was mentioned, the horses would rear and whinny in panic.

Of course, there are some silly names. Shiv Doppler, for example (from Doppler Shift), and Anjulls Isembeard the Dwarf Engineer — not a very Dwarven name, but a pun on the celebrated 19th-century engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

The Chaos Warrior Ulfhednar the Destroyer gets his name from a group of berserkers I read about in a Norse saga — I think the name translates as wolf’s hide, or something like that. If memory serves, I actually gave that name to a miniature (naming minis being one of many duties that fell to the writing team), and he was taken across to the adventure lock, stock, and wolfskin cloak.

I’ve always been in favour of giving NPCs names that are connected to their professions: after all, that’s how we get names like Butcher, Baker, Fletcher, and so on today. So Renate Hausier’s name means pedlar, and Bernhardt Dampfer’s name means some kind of ship – a steamship, I think, which is a bit incongruous.

Finally, the Seer Unserfrau (not strictly an NPC, I suppose, since the PCs only see his writings, not the long-dead sage himself) is Nostradamus, translated literally from Latin to German.

By this stage in the campaign, we were starting to worry about the Purple Hand appearing to be the only Chaos Cult in the Empire — ironic, really, considering that this plotline was never satisfactorily resolved. Anyway, that is why there are mentions of the Red Crown and Jade Sceptre cults. By the way, “jade sceptre” is a euphemism used in ancient Chinese erotic literature for – well, I hardly like to say. I have to admit that one was mine, and I was probably the only one who knew its meaning. Management didn’t for sure, or it would never have seen print.

So there you are. Next week, I’ll move on to Warhammer City, which was a part of the campaign even though it wasn’t an adventure. See you then!

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