By James Wallis
Cubicle7
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1e
Premise: Did you give your players too much gold? Divest them of some with this proto-stock exchange bubble themed adventure
What do we get here?
Over 8 pages we get an adventure that is mostly social/investigative with not much combat.
Usability/formatting
As written the adventure is formatted in several long paragraphs so you are likely going to have to break things down into bullet point notes for yourself after reading the whole thing through. You do need to read the whole thing through because some of the details are no included upfront and this adventure has a fair number of moving parts. Thankfully the text does explain things, including how to run a stock market bubble clearly.
Having a passing familiarity with the setting helps because not everything is explained there. It could also be made a bit more explicit the ways to drop hints to the players that this is a scam, the clues are dotted through the paragraphs and would be better off in a bullet point list.
The major NPCs tend to have decent personalities to play around with, especially the halfling broker who is very clearly reminiscent of a certain British tv character of the 80s.
How the adventure plays out is pretty open which is a bit of a double edged sword, great for your players to do as they will but requires the referee to be on their toes.
Portability
With a bit of work you can set an adventure like this one in any city that serves as a major trading hub. How well the adventure will fit into more combat focused systems is hard to say, you could have one potential path be infiltrating elf town and sneaking onto an elf ship to steal a log book which could bring some needed combat. You could also drop in some thug encounters round the city if you make one of the rival groups a bit more proactive and nasty. If you are running something like D&D you could have more success dropping this in as a solo down time adventure for a specific player.
Recommendation
I would not recommend this one to new referees or necessarily for every table/campaign, that being said I really want to run this one when the opportunity arises. There is a ton of fun to be had here, plenty of potential for chaos and a refreshing change of pace from the usual.
You could also find some use for this adventure as edu-tainment, it does do a good job of showing off how insider trading and stock bubbles work.
Yes the adventure does need a re-write to bring the formatting up to modern standards but given that it is only 8 pages long it is not too much of a burden to read through and make your own notes on.
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