Welcome to the third Enemy Within

Developer Diary!
As we are close to the first PDF release, we wanted to share an
exclusive behind the scenes chat with you. Just last week
Cubicle 7’s CEO Dom McDowall and legendary WFRP writer
Graeme Davis had a long chat about WFRP for this Diary. They
talked about their own RPG backgrounds, answered some
questions and shared some new insights on The Enemy Within.
So settle in and read on!

Graeme Davis (above) & Dom McDowall

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Dom and Graeme, can you tell us how your working relationship came about for The Enemy Within
Campaign?

Dom: We’d worked together on a small Cubicle 7 project a few years ago. So when we announced the
WFRP license, I think we both had the same idea and were talking soon afterwards!

Graeme: That’s right. I had worked on all the previous editions of WFRP to some extent or another. The
opportunity to go back to the Old World once more was simply too good to miss!

Dom: The breadth of projects you’ve worked on is awesome.

Graeme: Thanks! A persistent theme for me has been historical roleplay. I studied archaeology in college,
and part of what attracted me to fantasy roleplay was the fact that I was familiar with a medieval level of
technology. My college gaming group were mostly physicists and mathematicians, and I was afraid of
what they might talk me into if I ran a science fiction game! “Oh yes, you can have a pistol that fires point
singularities. That’s no problem at all!” At least with medieval technology I knew where I was.

After I left Games Workshop, and in parallel with my work on Vampire: The Masquerade, I worked on
GURPS Vikings, GURPS Middle Ages 1, and the AD&D Celts Campaign Sourcebook (HR3). Along the way
I did a Rome sourcebook for Green Ronin. Outside of RPGs I did a bunch of books for Osprey Games —
when they were still doing their Dark Osprey line. I also did a couple of books on mythology, which were
really fun to work on.

Dom: The Knights Templar one was great, I really enjoyed that.

Graeme: Thank you. I actually got an interview request from a serious Templar history website wanting
to know how they could get in touch with my fictional historian and access his archives — which was of
course the overarching narrative I created to tie the various conspiracy theories together!

Dom: That’s high praise!

Graeme: Other than those, a highlight was working on the Total War strategy games — which, of course,
Mike Brunton was heavily involved in. I did some consulting on Medieval: Total War — Viking Invasion, and
did six months working on their Empire: Total War 18th-century game.

Dom: How easy did you find the transition into video games?

Graeme: Fairly easy, because my first video game project in 1991 was basically a branching narrative. I’d
already done a bunch of Fighting Fantasy stuff, so I knew how to deal with that.

Dom: Oh, I didn’t know you did Fighting Fantasy?

Graeme: Yes: no. 29, Midnight Rogue. I used to sit two desks away from Marc Gascoigne at Games
Workshop, so I wrote quite a bit for Warlock magazine, back in the day.

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 Art Sneak Peek!
We have selected three amazing pieces to share exclusively in this Dev Diary. Above we have ‘The Schaffenfest’, this shows the
iconics wandering through the stalls of the Schaffenfest. ‘The Lists’ below depicts a knight in Saponatheim colours clashing with
a knight in Bildhofen colours. Further on is an Empire soldier in red and blue State Army uniform, with a huge moustache and
frowning features.
Art by by Matteo Spirito.

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Dom: I didn’t know that — awesome!

Graeme: I eased my way in when video games were less complicated than they are now. Sometimes it
can be as though they are speaking in another language — which I suppose they are!

Dom and Graeme, can you give our Dev Diary readers some background on how the decision to
revisit The Enemy Within Campaign came about. Did the 30th anniversary of the original campaign
play a part in this?

Dom: When I initially talked to Games Workshop about Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, the 30th
anniversary came up in conversation. We discussed early on how we could potentially celebrate such a
big milestone. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was the first roleplaying game I played, and I have a huge
soft spot for the early work. I certainly wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now if it wasn’t for WFRP.

So, I wanted to pay my respects to this amazing game that was such an inspiration for me. Having worked
very briefly before on a small piece of Cthulhu Britannica with you, Graeme, I knew immediately that I
wanted to try to get you involved in doing a Director’s Cut of The Enemy Within. I wanted to present this
campaign to a whole new generation of gamers, and, of course, I wanted a copy that wasn’t quite as
dog-eared as my original!

Graeme: Well, I was very glad that you made that decision! It’s always struck me — despite the number of
editions WFRP has been through and the number of products brought out — just how bound up people’s
idea of the game is with The Enemy Within campaign. Especially the first half of the campaign: it seems
to be Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay in so many people’s minds.

Just the chance to revisit it, build in a few new items and repay the fans who have been so fantastically
loyal over 30 years was an amazing opportunity. It’s been great!

Some of Cubicle 7’s growing Head Office Team

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What do you think it was about The Enemy Within, in particular, that inspired such loyalty?

Graeme: At the time it was very different from anything that had come before. I think D&D was firmly
based in the ‘Hollywood Middle Ages,’ where everyone had masses of blond, back-combed, 70s hair and
perfect teeth — whereas in Britain, we had been brought up on Monty Python and the Holy Grail,
Jabberwocky, 2000 AD, and various other sources that poked fun at that sort of seriousness. We had this
sort of anarchic bent which we liked to indulge — such as people falling into sewers — plus the
investigative side. Call of Cthulhu was relatively new then: I think it had been out for three or four years,
but it had revolutionised people’s view of role-playing, particularly in Britain, I found.

So to cross-pollinate those two and produce what we thought of as the next generation roleplaying game
was a great opportunity. As I’ve said before, we poured our hearts into making The Enemy Within, and it
resonated with a lot of people in that post-punk world.

Dom: I think that there’s something delightful about the balance of setting material and adventure material
in The Enemy Within.

Graeme: That was definitely a conscious decision made when formulating the concept for the original
Enemy Within. While we were producing adventures, we wanted to ensure that they wouldn’t become
useless after they were played. Each one should have some setting and supplemental material to offer
continuing value to players.

Dom: I agree — The Enemy Within had the perfect balance. There was a lot of mystery and enough
setting material to really get you hooked into the Empire, but importantly, it wasn’t too exhaustive. It gives
you a lot of content to really fire the imagination and also leaves blanks for the player to fill in. It really hit
that sweet spot, and I think that really helped the campaign endure so well.

Graeme: Yes. If you succumb to the temptation to define your world and setting completely from the
outset, you restrict your future freedom and you close doors on yourself. It’s better to hint or use the
unreliable narrator principle to communicate through rumours rather than create encyclopaedic
sourcebooks that can be wrong or slightly changed. This allows for more agility in the way the world
develops and players find out what works and what doesn’t.

Dom: So you wanted to make sure you were leaving yourself as open as possible to future developments?

Graeme: That’s right, as you said it intrigues and leaves room for the imagination. We grew up in that
generation of roleplayers where we would buy D&D modules off the shelf, but we would never use them as
written — we’d just plunder all the good ideas and write them into our own adventures. We expected that
the audience for WFRP would be doing pretty much the same thing: give them the tools and some sort of
intriguing possibilities to spark their imagination.

Dom: What RPGs were you impressed with at the time?

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Graeme: I would say Call of Cthulhu’s first edition was the absolute state of the art at the time. It was
a horror game; it involved investigation, and it forced players to think instead of just rushing in waving
swords. The idea of challenging players to think and consider NPC interactions through a more narrative
approach as opposed to a tactical approach was definitely new. It was very intriguing to us.

Dom: One of the things I’ve always liked about Games Workshop was the excellent use of archetypes to
bake strong thematic elements into games.

Graeme: Yes, that came largely because so many people at Games Workshop had a history background.
As I mentioned, I had an archaeology degree, as did Rick Priestley and Nigel Stillman. Everyone had done
some degree of historical miniatures gaming, and had learned various bits of history about that. Tony
Ackland was a fantastic, self-taught genius on military history. Mike Brunton wasn’t far behind him. We
all had ideas of how things were or how they should be and what made things pleasing and harmonious.
Luckily, we all had very similar points of view and it all merged in very nicely!

Dom: Thinking back to the amount of background that went into the Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader
book, for example, there was a real appreciation of the role of narrative in delivering a satisfying game
experience. And the same with Warhammer Fantasy Battle and, of course, WFRP.

Graeme: The Old World underwent a great expansion with the first edition. We had to flesh all that out.
Although we focused on the Empire thereafter, we had developed the Warhammer setting pretty much in
the form that went into Warhammer’s third edition, and which lasted and was developed all the way up to
the End Times.

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Dom: How much have you played the original Enemy Within campaign?

Graeme: Phil Gallagher organised a play test group with me and Jim Bambra. We played quite a bit.
However, sometimes you’re too busy making games to play them as much as you would really like. You
dream of being in the game industry and playing games all day, but you’re too busy making them!

Let me tell you a little snippety insight about the three-legged Goblin — which I was very pleased to see
on the cover! It was my very first WFRP playtest — the rulebook wasn’t finished yet, and I had Rick
Priestley sort of co-GMing to handle the rules. I had written the first chapter and a half of Shadows over
Bögenhafen. So there they were in the Schaffenfest, at the freakshow, and the Goblin escapes. Of course,
Goblins being small creatures, they only have a Movement of 3, so our PCs with a Movement of 4 would
have caught the Goblin straight away. It was vital that it escaped into the sewer so they could follow it and
find the hidden temple. So on the spur of the moment, I said, ‘It’s a Mutant Goblin — it’s got three legs,
and it’s outpacing you!’ And that has stuck ever since!

Dom: That’s great GM-ing on the fly! The event that sticks in my brain is the time that nobody would even
go in the sewer. The GM had done too good a job of building up the threat, I think! Like many people,
simply messing around on boats was a large part of the fun.

Graeme: Yes, we were a little too successful with that part of Death on the Reik — people have
consistently said it’s been hard to get the party to stop doing that and carry on with the campaign. That’s
why James (Wallis) famously burned the barge when he wrote ‘Carrion Up the Reik’ as a new section for
the Hosghead Publishing edition of Power Behind the Throne!

Dom: Oh, and, the Emperor Luitpold — I had just seen Alien, so my memories of playing that have some
similarities to the movie plot!

Graeme: Interesting! That plot was partly inspired by an old Hammer film called Horror Express in which a
monster runs amuck on a train journey across Russia!

Dom and Graeme, has 30 years of playtesting influenced your decisions for this Enemy Within
campaign?

Graeme: It certainly pointed out the things that worked well and the things that worked less well! A good
example of that is finding ways to get people off their boats and on to Middenheim. They were having far
too much fun there!

Dom: Just having all that feedback is very informative. There’s a wealth of content and feedback to draw
from.

Graeme: Yes, and pacing as well, and the organisation of material. In this edition, particularly Death on
the Reik and Power Behind the Throne, I think the information is arranged in a more accessible way. As
we developed the Director’s Cut, I wanted to make sure that all the information — especially when you
consider something more complex like Power Behind the Throne — was accessible so the GM could
easily get a grasp of what was going on.

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Dom: And I guess 30 years of onwards development in RPGs as a format has had an effect on the
decision making process.

Graeme: Yes, and 30 years development of the Old World setting has expanded it immensely and given
us new names, characters and opportunities to work with.

Graeme, can you talk us through the ‘grognard boxes’ and how they will make the campaign even
more exciting, especially for those who have played the original campaign?

Graeme: This was an idea I came up with to keep things interesting and exciting. In doing a new version
of a 30-year-old campaign that players know, love, and revere, it needed to be more than just the same
thing updated. (I’ve heard that some people have even played The Enemy Within five times!) Particular
sections — such as Power Behind the Throne — are so plot-driven that if you go into it knowing who the
bad guy is, even with the best will in the world and if you don’t abuse your knowledge you’re not going to
have so much fun.

So, the idea behind the boxes was to give the GM options to make the campaign fresh and full of
surprises for veteran players by changing a few things. There will inevitably be players who use prior
knowledge to their advantage and, this being WFRP, we need ways to punish, embarrass, and humiliate

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said players! In any other game the idea of punishing players would probably be unacceptable, but given
the humour of WFRP it works perfectly!

Dom and Graeme, can you reveal any more about the maps in The Enemy Within?

Graeme: One of the things we were able to include in WFRP’s first edition was the appendix and maps of
common buildings. We knew people needed it, and it proved very popular indeed.

Dom: I love those! Our Buildings of the Reikland PDF is directly influenced by that, it offers really lovely
bits to drop into any game. The maps in Enemy in Shadows are a mix of those lovely building maps, and
town and city maps inspired by old maps of European cities. I’m a bit of a map geek, so we’ve got lots of
old maps in the office. For future volumes we’re starting to build our big Old World map, so that’s
something to look forward to — I know I am!

Dom, what can we expect from the next edition of the Dev Diary?

Dom: The next one is going to be our first Artists’ Edition — we want to ensure these Dev Diaries offer
many perspectives from the extensive team involved in putting the campaign together. Two of Cubicle 7’s
amazingly talented artists, JG O’Donoghue and Sam Manley, will discuss their favourite pieces from the
campaign and share the process behind how they create the pieces. This will include special art sneak
peeks just for our pre-orderers! We will also be introducing our newly appointed Warhammer Producer
very soon!

Can you share a progress update for Enemy in Shadows and its Companion?

We are delighted to confirm that the Enemy in Shadows PDF will be released this week and we are now
focused on the The Enemy in Shadows Companion, it is finishing being edited and illustrated currently.
There’s a load of great stuff in here! Some of it expands on the information from the original campaign, so
you’ll find more on the Empire, its roads and highways, including more on travel and the Road Wardens
struggling to keep travellers safe. We revisit classic adventures On the Road, The Affair of the Hidden
Jewel, and The Pandemonium Carnival. And there’s mutants, more on the Purple Hand and Tzeentch
magic, and more!

Until next time...

Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd © Games Workshop 2019

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