Archive
Normal Service will be Resumed Shortly
I’m going through a rough patch, both personally and professionally. I had intended to post on the never-released GW Frankenstein game, but time got away from me. Soon, I promise.
For now, here’s an update on my Monster of the Month Club Patreon campaign. Please back it if you can – even $1 a month makes a difference – or buy me a coffee at https://buymeacoffee.com/graemedavis.
Anything is greatly appreciated.
Here’s the most recent post:
The Pooka is now posted for paying members, and voting is open for November’s Monster of the Month! Choose from:
1. Banshee
3. Hag
4. Basilisk
5. Redcap (Borders ogre type)
Vote in the community channel that corresponds to your membership level!
GW Memories: Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb
I’m interrupting the series on WFRP 1 in-jokes and Easter Eggs because I just stumbled across an unboxing video for this little game, which I had almost completely forgotten. I’m putting down what I remember about it while it’s still fresh in my mind.
Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb was a boxed boardgame designed by Stephen Hand, the designer behind Chainsaw Warrior, Fury of Dracula, and Chaos Marauders. I believe it was the last game he designed for Games Workshop before quitting, unhappy with management and his role in the company. In a way, his experience paralleled mine: boardgames and roleplaying games both suffered as GW’s focus on miniatures became all-consuming. I remember (half) joking at the time that it would be more honest if the company was called Miniatures Workshop.
The title was stolen from a lesser entry in Hammer Films’ roster of mummy movies. I recall that Steve was a huge fan of classic Hammer and Universal horrors, as well as more contemporary horror. After leaving GW, he wrote the novelization of Freddy vs. Jason, among many other things.
One of the more novel design elements was the 3D board, which was assembled from carboard components in the box. The playable characters were miniatures chosen from GW’s Gothic Horror line, and I wrote up a few more miniatures as playable characters in a support article for White Dwarf. I suspect that in the eyes of GW management, the whole thing was as much an attempt to shift some more of those minis as a sequel to the well-received Fury of Dracula.
And that’s all I really remember of this game. The unboxing video will tell you everything you need to know about it, except for one thing: at the time, there was an effort to make a third gothic horror boardgame, which never came to fruition. I’m not sure it was even announced.
Perhaps I’ll blog about that in the future.
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And Also…
September’s Monster of the Month is posted on my Patreon page.
The nuckelavee is a demonic monster from the Orkney Islands, which spreads pestilence and terror in equal measure. This 4-page, system-agnostic, PDF monster toolkit includes:
- Stat guidelines for d20-based, d100-based, and – through comparisons with common creatures from most settings – all other tabletop roleplaying systems.
- A full monster description with lists of basic and optional skills and traits.
- Three adventure seeds, covering fantasy, historical, and modern settings.
As a member of The Monster of the Month Club, you can expect regular, in-depth treatments of creatures from worldwide myth and folklore—some familiar, some not—in a system-agnostic format that is easy for an experienced GM to use with the tabletop rpg system of their choice.
Join us on Patreon at patreon.com/MonsteroftheMonthClub, follow us @MotMClub, or email [email protected].
WFRP 1 Easter Eggs: The Enemy Within, Part 2
The last post covered in-jokes and pop-culture references in The Enemy Within and Shadows over Bögenhafen. This time, let’s take a look at Death on the Reik.
The name of this adventure was a riff on the title of Agatha Christie’s murder mystery Death on the Nile. The 1978 film version, starring Peter Ustinov and an all-star cast of suspects, had long gone from cinemas by that time, but was shown in television at least once a year ever since.
Even though neither Hercule Poirot nor Alphonse Hercules de Gascoigne was anywhere to be seen, Death on the Reik didn’t lack for movie-star power, courtesy of artist Martin McKenna.
For example, the cultists pictured alongside the generic cultist stats at the start of the adventure are clearly comedy-horror stalwarts Peter Lorre and Vincent Price. In the adventure, I named these characters Loorbeer and Kuhn. That was my schoolboy-German attempt to render the names Laurel and Hardy, because I didn’t expect the players to take them seriously. It’s probably as well that I didn’t tell Martin McKenna that – having them drawn as Vincent Price and Peter Lorre is going quite far enough…
Tangent: Peter Lorre’s birth name was László Löwenstein. A character by this name – give or take an accent or two – appears in Kim Newman / Jack Yeovil’s Warhammer novel Drachenfels. Unsurprisingly he is what one commentator described as “a creepy actor.” Under his own name, Newman wrote extensively on films.
The determined-looking lady holding the lantern in the section about the Dwarf town is none other than Greta Garbo, in her role as Queen Christina in the 1933 movie of that name.
The racketeer Luigi Belladonna has a passing resemblance to Marlon Brando in “The Godfather.”
Corrobreth the druid is a little more modern – or rather, he was more modern at the time. He’s based on Ian McShane, who played the roguish antique dealer Lovejoy on British TV from 1986 to 1994.
Herbert Marcuse the Innkeeper looks suspiciously like veteran British actor Stanley Holloway.
And, of course, there are no prizes for spotting that the vampire Graf Orlok was inspired by movie Dracula Bela Lugosi – though it’s a little unfortunate that I stole his name from a completely different movie with a very different vampire: Nosferatu.
Vintage actors weren’t the only star turns:
Hans-Peter Schiller the Wizard’s Apprentice was based on Polish mathematician, astronomer, and all-round clever-clogs Nicolaus Copernicus. Polish WFRP fans are among the game’s most loyal and passionate supporters, and I’d love to say this was a deliberate tip of the hat to them, but at that time we didn’t know about them, so far away in Nottingham.
The name, of course, comes from the German playwright, poet, and philosopher Friedrich Schiller.
Kurt Kutzmann is based on Steve “BiL” Sedgewick, who was a graphic designer at GW at the time. He was also the creator of the Gobblebdigook cartoon strip, which ran for several years in White Dwarf. Here he is from Death on the Reik and from Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, by Martin McKenna both times.
Kurt von Wittgenstein is Charles “Chaz” Elliot, who was also a graphic designer at GW at that time. Of course, the Wittgenstein name was stolen from another German philosopher.
And then, there’s the Wittgenstein monster.
Ludwig von Wittgenstein, of course, is stolen from Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis.
The moment where the PCs encounter the Goblin chief in drag (on the logical — if stupid – pretext that he’s wearing one of the lady wizard’s dresses and expects it to grant him the same magical powers that she has) is one of the definitive “Warhammer humor” moments, to my mind.
GW policy at the time mandated that every WFRP adventure should come with a miniatures deal, just like the Warhammer battle packs had done. Death on the Reik was the last of these, because no roleplayer would ever pay a hundred pounds or more for miniatures for a single, one-use adventure. Nonetheless, Kevin “Goblinmaster” Adams sculpted the miniature, and as expected, it sold miserably. The Citadel sculptors hated having to make miniatures for WFRP adventures, not least because royalties made up a large proportion of their income.
The town names of the Reikland are worth a look. It’s not easy to come up with a hundred or so place names at the drop of a hat, so gags, puns and pure stream of consciousness have played their part.
For example, you’ll see the names of a lot of people who were at Games Workshop at the time. There’s Anseldorf, Priestlicheim, Halheim and Merretheim — the last being named after Alan Merrett, who was production manager, or some such title. The Hahnbrandt mine is named after Paul Cockburn, as best as my little German dictionary would allow.
There’s also a series where someone (not me, but I don’t know who) must have been in a very bad mood: there’s Braundorf, Naffdorf, Brasthof and Ripdorf; I thought there was also a Pissdorf, but it looks like cooler counsels prevailed there.
Others include Wurfel (German for dice), Stockhausen (named after the composer), Sprinthof and Barfsheim, and if you take a German dictionary to the rest you’ll find that most of them have some meaning or another.
The NPC names in Death on the Reik are not as silly as those in the previous Enemy Within adventures. Instead, there’s a strong philosophical theme running through them: Wittgenstein is the most obvious, but you’ll also find Schiller, Rousseaux, Eysenck, and Hegel among the NPCs. There may be more — I never was much good at Spot the Philosopher.
Frau Blucher, Rousseaux’s housekeeper, is named after the character in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. Remember her? Every time her name was mentioned, the horses would rear and whinny in panic.
Of course, there are some silly names. Shiv Doppler, for example (from Doppler Shift), and Anjulls Isembeard the Dwarf Engineer — not a very Dwarven name, but a pun on the celebrated 19th-century engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
The Chaos Warrior Ulfhednar the Destroyer gets his name from a group of berserkers I read about in a Norse saga — I think the name translates as wolf’s hide, or something like that. If memory serves, I actually gave that name to a miniature (naming minis being one of many duties that fell to the writing team), and he was taken across to the adventure lock, stock, and wolfskin cloak.
I’ve always been in favour of giving NPCs names that are connected to their professions: after all, that’s how we get names like Butcher, Baker, Fletcher, and so on today. So Renate Hausier’s name means pedlar, and Bernhardt Dampfer’s name means some kind of ship – a steamship, I think, which is a bit incongruous.
Finally, the Seer Unserfrau (not strictly an NPC, I suppose, since the PCs only see his writings, not the long-dead sage himself) is Nostradamus, translated literally from Latin to German.
By this stage in the campaign, we were starting to worry about the Purple Hand appearing to be the only Chaos Cult in the Empire — ironic, really, considering that this plotline was never satisfactorily resolved. Anyway, that is why there are mentions of the Red Crown and Jade Sceptre cults. By the way, “jade sceptre” is a euphemism used in ancient Chinese erotic literature for – well, I hardly like to say. I have to admit that one was mine, and I was probably the only one who knew its meaning. Management didn’t for sure, or it would never have seen print.
So there you are. Next week, I’ll move on to Warhammer City, which was a part of the campaign even though it wasn’t an adventure. See you then!
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WFRP 1 Easter Eggs: The Enemy Within, Part 1
Continuing this series on the in-jokes and sight gags in WFRP 1st edition, here’s a look into the first two adventures in The Enemy Within campaign: The Enemy Within itself and Shadows over Bögenhafen. They were originally published separately in module format, before being collected in a sturdier hardback as Warhammer Campaign, and finally bound together with Death of the Reik (of which more next time) in the softback Warhammer Adventure.
Neither of these adventures had any artist in-jokes, perhaps because most of the internal art was commissioned from freelancers and the jokes were very much a Design Studio thing. The same cannot be said of the words, though, which were written entirely by Jim, Phil, and me.
The Enemy Within
The legend of Sigmar was Phil’s creation, although the inspiration for the storms and the comet at his birth came from Shakespeare’s Henry IV.
The Age of the Three Emperors helped to underline that the apparent unity of the Empire was often skin-deep, and foreshadowed future unrest. The beginning of the Dark Ages with the coronation of the Empress Margaritha in 1979 IC was a blatant reference to Margaret Thatcher, who had been in power for seven years by that time and was at the height of her unpopularity.
The names of the noble houses contain a few lame gags — the Holswig-Schliestiens are of course based on the real German province of Schleswig-Holstein, and then there is the -Untermensch family, which upset quite a few German readers. The term Untermensch (literally “under-person” or “sub-human”) was used by the Nazis to cover anyone they considered to be of insufficient racial purity, such as Jews and Gypsies. In hindsight, it wasn’t the most sensitive choice of name. At the time we just thought it would be an ironic name to give to a powerful family — and we never expected in a million years that anyone from a non-English-speaking country would ever read anything we wrote. All I can say at this stage is, it was a very bad idea and I’m glad it was corrected in subsequent editions.
Countess Emmanuelle von Liebewitz, famed for her parties, was named for another Emmanuelle of cinematic renown, whose parties were probably equally as good.
Todbringer, the name of the ruling family of Middenheim, means “death-bringer,” which we thought would be an appropriate name for the ruler of the city where the Cult of Ulric is strongest.
The names of the coaching companies include Castle Rock, named after a local Nottingham brewery, and Cannon Ball Express, a reference to an old (even then) American TV series about a legendary train driver called Casey Jones.
Count Bruno Pfeifraucher’s name means “pipe smoker,” inspired by St. Bruno pipe tobacco. We had grown up with ads like this one.
I have to take full responsibility for the von Saponatheim family name: “once upon a time” with a heavy fake German accent. It’s not one people tend to spot, but they do often groan and throw things when it’s explained to them. However, I didn’t coin the name myself. That credit goes to my college friend Ant Allan, who suggested it when another friend was struggling to name his Austrian parapsychologist character for our Call of Cthulhu campaign, somewhere around 1983. It cracked everyone up at the time, and I couldn’t resist steal… er, recycling it for the campaign.
Most place names are pretty much straight out of my pocket German dictionary: Grunmarkt means Green Market, Weissbruck means White Bridge, and so on.
The Drak Wald owes its name to a typo, which originally said something about “drak forests” instead of dark forests. This amused Richard Halliwell enormously and he was ribbing us about drak forests for days — so one of the Empire’s great forests was called the Drak Wald.
Castle Reikguard, at the confluence of the rivers Reik and Teufel, was named after Right Guard anti-perspirant. Here’s another vintage ad promising that it would change your life.
“Mistaken Identity” includes a lot of silly names: Gustav Fondleburger, Lady Isolde von Strudeldorf (the place must be famous for its pastries) and Philippe Descartes the Bretonnian gambler. Coincidentally, the French publisher of WFRP 1st edition was Jeux Descartes, whose logo is a portrait of the famous scientist and philosopher Rene Descartes and whose name is a play on the French for “card games.” So it wasn’t just us.
And then there’s the law firm of Lock, Stock and Barl, on the fateful letter that sends Our Heroes to Bogenhafen. Better than Sue, Grabbitt and Runne, I suppose, but only just. And of course, there’s also the barge the Berebeli (“beer belly”), a pre-generated PC named Johann Dassbut (inspired by the German cinematic epic Das Boot), and another pregenerated PC nicknamed “Rowlocks.” They’re mostly called “oar locks” these days, I suspect because “rowlocks” had a tendency to be pronounced “rollocks” back then, which of course rhymes with “bollocks.”
The name of the Cat and Fiddle inn in Altdorf comes straight out of long-running BBC radio soap The Archers, while Max Ernst the protagonist was named after the surrealist painter.
Shadows over Bögenhafen
This adventure was actually written before The Enemy Within, and retro-fitted into the campaign. The WFRP writing team had not yet come together, and I hadn’t got fully into the swing of Warhammer humor. So while it’s not entirely devoid of jokes and pop culture references, there are fewer of them and arguably they’re not as funny.
The inspiration for the plot was Faust (Marlowe, Goethe, Thomas Mann, Richard Burton — take your pick), which I changed a little because two things about that story had always bothered me.
First, I never understood why Faust agreed to hand his soul over after seven years, and never seemed to think of the consequences until the final scene when the time comes for him to be dragged screaming down to Hell. So the deal had to include an escape clause: the sacrifice of seven souls in substitution for the original.
Second, given the supposition that demons, devils and the like are ancient and immortal beings, it seems logical that any mortal who tries to make a deal with one will probably lose. After all, the poor mortal will be up against centuries if not millennia of experience, and couldn’t hope to match a demon for cunning. Therefore, the escape clause had to be a trap in itself. allowing Gideon the demon (this was before the “daemon” spelling entered Warhammer canon) to open a dimensional gate in the heart of the Old World, a service for which he might expect to be richly rewarded.
The cult of Ordo Septenarius was named for the seven members of its inner circle. I also thought the cultists needed a rational motive of their own, so playing on their greed, Teugen tries to save his own soul by getting them unknowingly to sacrifice theirs in a ritual that they think will control the market by sorcery and make them all rich. A fable for the Yuppie era, as befits an adventure written in 1986.
Teugen’s name was inspired by Teufel ,which is German for “devil.” I didn’t intend this as an Easter egg, though, nor any of the other names in the adventure. As for the others, Steinhager is German gin that I became well acquainted with on a visit there, Ruggbrod is a Danish form of pumpernickel, and Magirius came from Magirius Deutz, a German brand of truck that I remembered seeing in England from time to time.
Klaus Schattiger’s name translates as “shady,” as befits his nature, while the magistrate is called Richter, which means magistrate. Doctor Malthusius was named after a friend’s Call of Cthulhu character, who in turn was named after someone moderately famous I think, but I must confess to ignorance there. Elvyra Kleinestun’s name literally means “Dolittle,” though so far as I know she neither spoke with animals nor bombed Tokyo. Jim and Phil wrote her in later as a link into Death on the Reik.
The street names in Bögenhafen are more literal, as far as my pocket German dictionary could take me. Handwerker Bahn means “street of the artisans”, Hafenstrasse means “dock street”, and so on. I couldn’t resist calling a street in the metalworker’s quarter Eisen Bahn (literally “iron road”; it is German for railway), or calling the town square Dreiecke Platz (“triangle square” — I never did well at geometry), but that’s about it. The idea for calling the watch barracks on the west bank Fort Blackfire came from an old movie called Fort Apache — the Bronx, about a New York police station surrounded by hostile, lawless territory.
As for the name of Bögenhafen itself, I intended it to mean something like “the port at the bend of the river.” On a trip to Sweden I mentioned earlier, I found out that with the umlaut above the “o,” to Swedish eyes the name read as “the gay port,” But I maintain that in Reikspiel it means “the port at the bend of the river” and that’s the end of it!
So there you are. That’s everything I can remember after all this time, but perhaps some of you will have found other gags and howlers in the text. If you have, please share them with the rest of us in the comments!
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Ask Me Anything: May
Posted yesterday: May’s Ask Me Anything post for free and paid members of the Monster of the Month Club. I talk about Colonial Gothic, Jes Goodwin’s elves, and my favorite non-game monsters.
https://www.patreon.com/MonsteroftheMonthClub
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Free Games for May
(For those of you younger than dirt, the title’s an old Pink Floyd lyric. Hey, it’s my blog, so I’ll do what I like. Grin.)
Feliz Cinco de Mayo! Here’s a little extra for members of the Monster of the Month Club (https://www.patreon.com/MonsteroftheMonthClub).
La Llorona is a complex set of legends, and can be viewed as a simple ghost, a manifestation of an Aztec goddess, or any number of things in between. In a free bonus post for all backers, I try to unravel the complexity and discuss how the multiple versions of this lady can be developed for your roleplaying campaigns. I also included a short bibliography.
And that’s not all. May’s Monster of the Month posted yesterday, and it’s a two-fer, presenting both versions of a creature that is described differently in different folklore sources. If you’ve suffered from siblings (or significant others) taking food off your plate, the Irish Alp-luachra may stir up some uncomfortable memories.
The Monster of the Month club has free and paid memberships, with free posts every Wednesday (and the occasional bonus like La Llorona above). Paid members also get an in-depth, system-agnostic monster treatment on the first Sunday of each month, complete with a stat block (yes – system-agnostic stats are actually possible!); lists of basic and optional skills/traits for maximum customization; story seeds for fantasy, historical, and modern settings; and where available, variants from around the world and case studies from legend and literature.
There are free samples so you can try before you commit, so go and take a look!
Dirty Vortex: The Best Games You’re Not Playing
This week, I’m taking a break from old Games Workshop memories to talk about some newer games.
Once in a while, I come across a game that impresses me to much that I write to the publisher out of the blue and offer to write something for them. For Vaesen, this was Mythic Britain and Ireland. For Dirty Vortex’s game Solemn Vale, I basically said “I’ll write whatever you need – just let me do something!”
I recently reviewed Solemn Vale in a post for free and paid members of the Monster of the Month Club. It’s a rules-lite, highly atmospheric game inspired by British folk horror of the 1960s and 70s. If you grew up in Britain around that time – and I’m guessing that most of you didn’t – you would have been immersed in shows like Quatermass, Doomwatch, The Strange Report, and Counterstrike. You might even have come across one-off TV plays like The Stone Tape, which explained hauntings as psychic vibrations from the past that had been trapped in the crystalline structure of old masonry. You’ll almost certainly recall the original 1973 version of The Wicker Man, with Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward.
Solemn Vale captures that vibe perfectly: everything seems mundane on the surface, but is very creepy underneath. The art – by author and DV proprietor Mark Kelly, who did a lot for Vampire and it shows – supports this tone and atmosphere perfectly, and the Wyrd Abacus system that underpins Solemn Vale (and its 80s, X-Files-meets-Stranger-Things American-based spinoff Summer of Strange) is quick, clean, and flexible, which is everything a rules-lite system should be.
Apart from the mechanics, the structure of Wyrd Abacus adventures is worth mentioning. It sets out several hours (or several sessions) of play in just a few pages, giving the Narrator all they need without drowning them in details. As a piece of design, I’d put it up there with Robin D. Laws’s Dramasystem and James Wallis’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
Now, I said that I’ve written for Solemn Vale (and for Summer of Strange), so am I simply shilling for Dirty Vortex to make some cash? No. I was paid a flat fee for everything I wrote, with no royalties. I’m writing this post because I believe in indie ttrpg publishers – now more than ever, given the increasingly unsettling news from Hasbro – and Dirty Vortex is one of the best.
On their website (https://dirtyvortex.net/) you’ll find a lot for Solemn Vale and Summer of Strange, plus Deco Dice, The Sigma Syndrome, and other goodness. There are also some intriguing tools, such as character and rule generators, which can be fun to play with.
To order Solemn Vale and Summer of Strange (plus the Solemn Vale adventure collection Tales from the Wyrd), you have the following options:
Physical and digital books are available from Backerkit. Many people like it for its trusted payment processing. The page is here.
The Dirty Vortex Webstore accepts PayPal and credit cards.
DriveThruRPG has most (but not all) products, in PDF form only, including a Pay What You Want file of the Wyrd Abacus standalone rules, for those who want to try out the system, or just read it.
Trust me – it’s worth your time.
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Monster of the Month Club: April 2025
April was a good month for the Monster of the Month Club, with another monthly monster treatment for paid members and a free post every Wednesday for all members.
April’s monster, the Fachan from Scots and Irish folklore, overpowered Patreon’s scheduling system and broke out a little early, complete with all the usual features: the club’s unique system-agnostic stat block; a fearsome range of basic and optional traits and abilities; a case study from Glen Eiti in Scotland; variant types from Africa, India, Arabia, and South America; and adventure seeds for fantasy, historical, and modern settings.
The free posts included a reprint of an old article on designing monster-based adventures; a review of Solemn Vale, the roleplaying game of British 1970s folk horror from indie publisher Dirty Vortex; and an Ask Me Anything where I wrote about WFRP, Vaesen, Vampire: The Masquerade, unpublished work, and the best magic system in the history of rpgs. There were also two book reviews: The Undead by Vaesen creator Johan Egerkrans and A Field Guide to the Little People, which has been in my collection for more than 40 years. Plus, I posted some thoughts about the current goings-on at Hasbro/WotC.
The club is continuing to grow, with both free and paid members coming on board during April. Although it’s still my hope that free members will eventually be convinced to switch to paid, I set up a poll to gauge opinion on selling monster treatments individually for those who don’t want to subscribe to the lot. I’m still mulling that.
May promises to be another good month. May’s monster will post this Sunday for paid members, with a surprise bonus for Cinco de Mayo on Monday. As for free Wednesday posts, I’m preparing a book review, a game review, a reprinted article, and an Ask Me Anything as usual – and because May has five Wednesdays, I’m planning an extra post on an interesting piece of monster trivia.
If you haven’t heard of the Monster of the Month Club before, check it out at https://www.patreon.com/c/MonsteroftheMonthClub. There are some free samples under the Collections tab, so you can try before you buy. Both free and paid memberships are available. If you like mythology, folklore, and tabletop roleplaying games, I think you’ll like it!
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40K Silliness: The Catachan Cater-Killer
I mentioned this never-published beast in a previous post, and this week I thought it might be fun to try and stat it for Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader. So here goes.
I should admit that my writing for 40K back in the day was mostly color text, and I’m very rusty on the rules, so treat this as just a bit of fun: late-April foolery, if you will. With that said, though, if anyone wants to discuss and develop it for Rogue Trader or any other edition of Warhammer 40K – well, you know where the comments are, and I look forward to seeing your ideas!
The Chatachan Cater-Killer
It’s something like this, but 60 feet long, 5 feet high, and covered in spines
This huge beast crashes through the jungles of the Catachan Deathworld like a runaway train, devouring everything in its path as it goes on its mindless way. Its vast maw, capable of swallowing anything Ork-sized or smaller, is not its only weapon, as its body is covered in long barbs through which it secretes the toxins and venoms that collect in its system from eating the flora and fauna of this deadly world.
| M | WS | BS | S | T | W | I | A | Ld | Int | Cl | WP |
| 5 | 5 | 0 | 10 | 10 | 9 | 3 | * | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Attacks
1 Bite – on a successful hit the targeted model is swallowed and removed from the table. Do not roll for Wounds.
Spines (special) – every model in base contact with a Cater-Killer’s body takes an automatic S 5 attack causing D6 Wounds, every turn that they remain in base contact.
Models killed by a Cater-Killer do not count toward the victory conditions of either side.
The Cater-Killer in Play
A Catachan Cater-Killer is a moving environmental hazard: it has no points value, and is not controlled by either side. It enters the table at the mid-point of one end, equally far away from each player’s deployment zone and pointing toward the centre of the table.
Each turn, a Cater-Killer moves its full movement allowance in a straight line. It crashes straight through vegetation, eating a path through it, and it only changes direction under three circumstances:
- If it encounters an inedible obstacle, such as a rock or a building, it alters course to get past it. Roll a D6: 1-3 it turns left; 4-6 it turns right.
- If it takes a hit, it turns 45 degrees away from the side where the hit landed. If that’s not clear, it turns away from the source of the hit. Savvy players will quickly hit on the idea of using this to try and steer it toward their opponents’ forces!
- If anyone or anything edible is within 2″ of its front, it changes course to put this directly in front of it.
It is recommended only to use a single Cater-Killer in a game. They are said to converge in some numbers during the mating season, but no-one has observed this from the ground and lived to tell of it.
Making a Cater-Killer Miniature
To make a Cater-Killer in proper scale, cut a strip about 12″ (30cm) long and 1/4″ (7mm) wide from a piece of carpet. Those spiky, commercial-grade carpet tiles are ideal. Cater-Killers come in a variety of colours – perhaps related to their diet – but blue and green are common. Paint one end red to indicate the mouth.
So there you have it: a bit of fun based on a memory from 1986. If anybody actually makes one, send a photo! If anyone uses it in a game, tell us how it went!
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Ask Me Anything: April Edition
April’s Ask Me Anything post is live for free and paid members of the Monster of the Month Club. I write about WFRP, Vaesen, Vampire: The Masquerade, unpublished work, and the best magic system in the history of rpgs.
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Graeme Davis 
