Graeme Davis

Lichemaster was originally titled Return of the Lichemaster, and that title can still be seen on the headers of the even-numbered pages. The title on the cover was changed by Bryan Ansell, who felt that simpler was better. He was also behind the bright (some might say garish) cover colors of many Games Workshop products of the late 1980s. In his thinking, a bright cover and a single-word title in a big font made a product easier to spot on the shelf.

I’ve written about this adventure before, but I haven’t delved into the various jokes that Carl Sargent added when he adapted the 1986 battle pack (and its sequel in the Citadel Journal) for WFRP three years later – or those that Rick Priestley came up with in the original! Here’s what I remember.

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Names

Let’s start with Heinrich Kemmler. Present-day Games Workshop canon maintains that this name ‘is a reference to Heinrich Kramer, author of the Malleus Maleficarum.’ I can’t dispute this – I’ve asked Rick and he no longer remembers – but I have a sneaking suspicion that it was actually a reference to SS chief Heinrich Himmler. As we’ve seen in this series, there are a lot of regrettable Nazi names in WFRP 1 material. If GW has rewritten the past to give Kemmler’s name a cleaner provenance, I honestly can’t blame them, especially given his prominence in Warhammer lore across the board.

La Maisontaal, the monastery at the heart of the adventure, is Bretonnian (well, schoolboy French) for ‘the house of Taal,’ the god of wild places.

I added Adolphus Zwemmer and his Blue-Blooded Bandits during development, to strengthen the storyline. The name Zwemmer has no particular meaning that I recall, but I made the bandits noble scions on purpose, following my policy of basing the behavior of young Imperial nobles on that of the more headline-grabbing young British nobles of the day. Groups like the Bullingdon Club were notorious at the time, causing all kinds of mayhem in the course of asserting their wealth and privilege.

Jean-Louis Dintrans, the master of La Maisontaal, may well be named after French rugby player Philippe Dintrans, whose career reached its peak in the mid to late 1980s.

Rene de Muscadet, of course, is named after a wine. This is not the only time Carl used this source of inspiration for an NPC name.

Frugelhofen’s miller, Hector Brioche, is likewise named after bread. The name of the Krautheim family means ‘cabbage home,’ and may be inspired by the (mostly American) World War II name for Germans. The Giscard family might be named after Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who had been the President of France earlier in the decade.

‘Albi’ Schutz, who also appears in the battle pack, was named after Albie Fiore, an early employee of Games Workshop and the author of ‘The Lichway,’ the very first D&D adventure to appear in White Dwarf (issue 9, October/November 1978). Here he is DMing a game for Ian Livingstone, Steve Jackson, Jervis Johnson, and Ben Elton in a 1984 TV show exploring this strange new hobby.

Cecil de Vere Cholmondely is based on vintage British character actor Terry-Thomas, who played a near-endless succession of posh cads and bounders on screen in the 1950s and 1960s. The name ‘Cholmondely’ is a real British upper-class name, and it is indeed pronounced ‘Chumley.’ A recent instance is Camilla ‘Chummy’ Fortescue-Cholmondeley-Browne, played by Miranda Hart in the BBC drama series Call the Midwife.

Alain Gascoigne, like the celebrated Gnome detective Alphonse Hercules de Gascoigne, is a tribute to Marc Gascoigne, with whom Carl wrote a lot of material for Shadowrun and other games.

Guillaume Lagisquet is named after another French rugby player, Patrice Lagisquet.

Kemmler’s undead minions Bruno Taglielli and Didier Cousteau are named after talgiatelli pasta and French ocean explorer Jaques-Yves Cousteau, respectively.

The Vaswasser river’s name means ‘what water’ in German, give or take a mis-spelling. The town of Grunère may take its name from Gruyère cheese.

And Speaking of Cheese…

The salaud bleu cheese at the monastery translates roughly as ‘blue bastard.’ That name was mine, but I had to tone down the whole scene from Carl’s original, which was basically an excuse to make one or more player characters throw up on their patron!

The Art

Like all Flame publications, images for Lichemaster were sourced primarily from the Games Workshop archives. Some are recognizable from the WFRP 1 rulebook, others from the Bretonnian army list in Warhammer Armies, and others from White Dwarf articles and the original battle back and Citadel Journal scenario. Among the last is an image of a skeleton champions with a flaming skull. This is not a nod to Ghost Rider, as some might think – in fact, it is a rather tasteless joke from the original, referring to an incident in 1984 when the singer Michael Jackson was taping a Pepsi commercial and a pyrotechnic malfunction set his hair on fire.

War Machines

The skeleton chariot and catapult were fairly new models at the time, and in addition to highlighting the less than comfortable fusion of battle and roleplaying in this adventure, they were included in the rather faint hope of encouraging miniatures sales and winning points with Games Workshop management, who were increasingly of the view that roleplaying games could not be made profitable unless they generated sales of miniatures.

Needless to say, it didn’t work.

Finally, the iron man in the monastery was a Dalek in the original scenario. This was because Citadel Miniatures was selling a range of Doctor Who miniatures at the time, including a boxed set of plastic Daleks and Cybermen. It was a good joke at the time, but it had to be changed for this version.

Well, that’s all I remember about Lichemaster, but if you notice something I’ve missed, feel free to leave a comment.

Next week, I’ll be starting on WFRP 1’s ‘other’ campaign: Doomstones.

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And Also…

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The dullahan is a demonic rider from Ireland, who might be the ancestor of Sleepy Hollow’s headless horseman, Ghost Rider, and many others. This 5-page, system-agnostic, PDF monster toolkit includes:

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