Greetings!
Today you are witnessing something truly extraordinary and magnificent. In addition to the blog's usual narrative battlereports, campaign updates, painted models and the occasional short story, I'll start posting a longer story in chapters of around 15 to 30 pages a piece.
How is this so extraordinary? I have never posted anything written that was grander than my pseudo-philosophic hobby-ponderings, campaign (and one-off) short stories and battlereports. Today is the day I exceed myself by posting the first chapter of Mortenhoff Chronicles, a write-up of my Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay group's adventures in a campaign I'm currently GMing for them.
Your eyes are not deceiving you. I am actually writing the constantly evolving story of my players' exploits in the Warhammer RPG in a novel format; dialogues and all. It is a story of what has actually happened to the players in the game: a combination of my memory, my GM notes, the player notes and a tiny pinch of artistic freedom.
We are playing by the 2nd Edition rules, and most of the adventures so far have taken place within the Empire. The Imperial Year is 2522 and the Old World is just as you remember it from the time before the Storm of Chaos. I wanted my players (many of which were not familiar to the setting) to experience a more lively Warhammer world, so I cancelled the entire war. Yeah, I did. It's in my power, I'm the GM.
There are also some minor changes I've done to the world in order to fit it into my campaign, things like new towns and villages, fixes to population sizes and (non-canon) alternative fates and behaviour for some lords/ladies of the realm.
Chapter 1 begins with the introduction of the player characters as they meet each other for the first time. This is basically what happened in our first game session. Before the session, however, each of the players got to play a short introductory solo-mission that I had tailored to their unique backstories: missions that got them all in the same location for the first group session. I found this the best solution for introducing players to the basic mechanics of the game and the feel of the Warhammer world: each of them got to interact with the game world alone with the GM and to figure out the way they wanted to roleplay their characters. By having the chance to actually live through some of their own backstories, I feel the players were more confident in roleplaying and simulating their character's decision-making once we started the group sessions.
I have the Chapter 2 ready and waiting, and I'm currently working on the third. It will probably take up until the 4th Chapter for me to catch up with our group's current situation, but I'll get there eventually! In the meantime I'll be dropping these previous chapters for you folks to read through.
The story itself is told through the viewpoints of the player characters, but as my players are also reading this (I'm actually writing this for them, you lucky dastards just get a glimpse at it on the side), I will not be revealing anything crucial about the PCs or their backstories in the Chronicles until something comes up in the game itself.
A HUGE thanks to my dear players for bringing life to the pile of .txt-files and notebooks that is my campaign! All the hours I spend preparing the material and coming up with crazy stuff would be for naught if it weren't for them turning it into a wonderful adventure with their dedicated roleplaying and intriguing characters. They were also kind enough to let me share their heroic deeds here in the blog!
