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Jim Patching
United Kingdom
Cardiff
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First off, in discussing this campaign I've given a brief over-view of the storyline which may give away some very minor spoilers, so bear that in mind before you read on.
The Thousand Thrones was the last Warhammer book published by Black Industries and unfortunately it’s a bit of a disappointment. It’s got some really excellent scenarios and sections within it, but the campaign as a whole doesn’t add up to the sum of its parts.
The central idea of the campaign is actually really good. Without giving too much away, it’s about a young lad who has strange powers of persuasion who, through a series of unlikely events, a lot of people assume to be Sigmar returned (which may or may not actually be true). A crusade of commoners, vagabonds, priests and knights quickly forms around this child and marches through the Empire heading for the capital Altdorf, in order to attempt to persuade the Emperor to stand down in favour of the child. However, something is compelling the child to lead his crusade further north, towards bleak Kislev.
The PCs are thrown into the adventure in the port city of Marienburg, in the wake of the crusade’s passing. Throughout the course of the campaign the PCs will end up tracking the crusade, travelling with them, leaving them, joining back up with them, perhaps working with them or perhaps working directly against them. In addition to the PCs there are various other groups of characters who each have their own agendas and interests in the crusade, from a group of elven kithband warriors to various groups of vampires and chaos cultists.
As an idea, that’s got a lot of potential, but unfortunately the execution is a bit ham fisted.
For a start, the crusade itself is woefully under-used. The book contains nine chapters and the crusade only really features prominently in three of them. Most of the time the crusade merely serves as a great rolling frame to hang plot hooks off that rumbles inexorably through the Empire.
In addition to this, the motivations and goals of the various antagonists are never really explained to the PCs. As far as the GM’s concerned, the book fills him in on all of the background information he needs for these antagonists and explains why they’re doing what they’re doing and how they’ve got to where they’re needed in the campaign. However, as far as the PCs are concerned they just see these groups of miscreants appearing somewhat randomly to screw with their plans and then disappearing again. There’s worse to come (and this is a spoiler so don’t read the rest of this paragraph if you’re planning on playing in the campaign) - the campaign has a ‘secret’ enemy who is only revealed to the PCs right at the end of the adventure. Again, the book explains to the GM how this character has been manipulating events and drawing the crusade north to her lair in Kislev throughout the whole game, but as far as the PCs are concerned she’s going to come completely out of the blue!
The structure of the game is pretty loose. Most of the chapters were written by different authors and so don’t mesh together as well as they could. The campaign also doesn’t really seem to build up to much of a climax. Ideally for such a long campaign I’d like to see events drawing together and building up for an almighty finale. As it is, it’s basically just a rolling series of encounters that get progressively harder the further through you go.
Oh, and the last chapter is utterly, irredeemably awful!
Now having said all of that negative stuff I’d still say The Thousand Thrones is worth a look. Despite its failings as a coherent campaign I still had a lot of fun running my players through most of the encounters within the book and my players mostly seemed to enjoy it all. As long as you’ve got a group of players who are happy to just try to enjoy the game and can overlook some of the over-arching problems of the campaign, it can be an enjoyable experience. The encounters themselves are a nice mix of combat and intrigue, horror and comedy and if you were so inclined, with a bit of effort you could take a lot of the ideas within this book and actually cobble them together to form a much more solid campaign. In any case, I’d recommend re-writing the last chapter, even if you just reduce it to a single scene (which is what I did!).
As a note, you can find some pretty useful unofficial ‘expansions’ for TTT written by one of the original authors here: http://www.liberfanatica.net/TTT.html
So in conclusion I’d say that The Thousand Thrones is worth a look but if you really want to run it as a serious campaign that makes sense it’ll require a fair bit of work on the part of the GM.
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Simon Crowe
United Kingdom
Sheffield
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Hi Jim, I was one of the writers on this book and I've also run the whole thing, and well I pretty much agree with everything you've said.
As you might note this supplement had about 8 writers. Despite the wonders of the internet age, it's still pretty hard to co-ordinate so many people into writing a coherant campaign - which is why it ends up feeling really disjointed (see The Dying of the Light and others that share a similar problem).
Having run it, individually there are plenty of solid adventures and some great bits. Trouble is the whole backplot gets lost somewhere and the PCs never really get a hold of what's really going on. Plus linking it all together and running the cult, that took a lot of GM improvisation.
Oh and the last chapter... yikes.
(And I'll add that the work Jude and others are doing on the unofficial expansion is very good)
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fen
Wales
Cardiff
The Vale of Glamorgan
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panzer-attack wrote: There’s worse to come (and this is a spoiler so don’t read the rest of this paragraph if you’re planning on playing in the campaign) - the campaign has a ‘secret’ enemy who is only revealed to the PCs right at the end of the adventure. Again, the book explains to the GM how this character has been manipulating events and drawing the crusade north to her lair in Kislev throughout the whole game, but as far as the PCs are concerned she’s going to come completely out of the blue!
This is one of the two biggest crimes in the entire campaign, it seems that the concept of foreshadowing was pretty much thrown out of the window.
For the record I didn't burn my copy in the end, I decided to keep it for the two 'stand alone' chapters (Village mystery and Temple of Morr) as those were brilliant, shame about the rest.
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