Review of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay adventure Slaughter in Spittlefeld, written by Ben Scerri for the first Ubersreik Adventures book.

In Short: Slaughter in Spittlefeld is tightly focused closed adventure that leans heavily on investigation and social interaction, but with a nice dash of horror and violence.

Spoiler-Lite for Players:

Slaughter in Spittlefeld has a simple opening and clear objective. The party wakes up in a tenement building locked-down due to a mysterious disease. The Characters need to find a cure to escape the quarantine, and so must deal with the colourful denizens of the building. Explaining any further ventures into spoilers, but the setup is simple, and the objective immediately clear, making for an easy session to use as an opening to a campaign, a one shot, or a short diversion for a party in Ubersreik (or any large settlement).

The adventure takes up a healthy 16 pages, complete with NPC portraits, stats, a full-page map, a full-page table, and plenty of GM advice. The narrative is easy to follow thanks to a clean layout, with the main bulk of the adventure sandwiched between a page or two of introductory and scene setting, a similar amount of extra suggestions for modifications at the end, broken up with asides and background information that never get in the way of the main text. As with any prewritten material, I do wish there was a simple chart of the adventure, but it’s not all that complicated to sketch out your own bubble or flow chart. I do wish that there was a player-facing map, a common problem throughout Adventures in Ubersreik.

The adventure can be run in a single three-to-four-hour session if the players are proactive and don’t dally around too long, though my group took it easy and spent about two three-hour sessions to complete, allowing for some extra material at the beginning and end to fit it into our ongoing campaign. For our group, it acted as a bridge between the end of the Making the Rounds from the Starter Set into our more freeform exploration of Ubersreik and beyond. The adventure is aimed at relatively low experience Characters. While my players’ Characters weren’t combat-oriented, they had a good chunk of experience. Luckily there are plentiful suggestions for beefing up the adventure.

Overall, Slaughter in Spittlefeld is a very simple, contained adventure, with its most useful quality being how easy it is to slip into a short session at relatively short notice. The cast of NPCs is fun, the mystery is neat, and there are lots of strings for the GM to follow into future adventures if they so choose.

Slaughter in Spittlefeld can be found in Adventures in Ubersreik (1), available on Cubicle 7’s site, DriveThruRPG, Amazon, or your friendly local game store if they’re cool enough to stock it.

Before you go, maybe you would be interested in some of the below reviews or replays?
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While the adventure is mostly an investigation up until a final confrontation, it is fairly linear route. While players will find the most unexpected ways to work through the tenement, the ‘hints’ all generally lead from one to the next. The basic progression of the adventure is:

Party wakes up in tenement, talks to the Ogre manager or gossip with other denizens, leading them to a sick doctor who tells them to get her journal. Either more talking or using their eyeballs reveals a kid stole the journal and is hiding in the walls. The party proceeds to get the kid out of the walls through rat-catching skills or talking with the ex-boxer orphanage runner. The only person in the building who can read the journal is an elf upstairs. Interlude to deal with some rambunctious dwarves. Elf reveals the sickness is caused by a vampire lairing in the basement. Party goes through the mazelike trash in the basement and finally confronts vampire.

It’s all easy to manage and can be run as-is without much preparation or adjustment. Lots of fun and varied NPCs to act out, and between the dwarves, elf, ogre, ex-boxer, and Tilean doctor, the GM has lots of options to bring back reoccurring characters. The hunt through the basement is fun, with a big table of random events to run into. My party had zero experienced trackers, so it took a good while to finally find the vampire, and the constant failed rolls resulted in a good half dozen run ins with mouldy mattresses, rat traps, loose nails, and the like.

The vampire fight itself is geared towards low experience Characters. She only has 59 WS and Bite +8, though some traits like Fear and Regenerate help her be a bit more than a complete push over. Even a group of low experience Characters should be able to deal with her by ganging up, and as my group already had a good chunk of experience, she wouldn’t stand a chance. There are a few suggestions in the text for beefing her up. One I really like is to make the vampires twins – when the Characters enter the vampire lair, they find her looking in a mirror at her reflection. Give the players a second to wonder why she would have a reflection… then the reflection steps through the mirror, revealing there to be two vampires. Fun stuff, and even with base stats, having two lets the GM control the battle a bit more to make things more interesting.

Once again, Slaughter in Spittlefeld is a simple but nicely atmospheric little adventure with a fun cast of NPCs and neat final act with the basement trash-maze and a vampire fight.

Slaughter in Spittlefeld can be found in Adventures in Ubersreik (1), available on Cubicle 7’s site, DriveThruRPG, Amazon, or your friendly local game store if they’re cool enough to stock it.

Before you go, maybe you would be interested in some of the below reviews or replays?
MJRRPG scenarios, Chaosium-released scenarios, Miskatonic Repository scenarios, Japanese scenarios