The Enemy Within Campaign

The Enemy Within Campaign

The Enemy Within campaign (commonly abbreviated to TEW) is a series of adventures for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (WFRP) and was originally published by Games Workshop in the late 1980s. Widely praised by fans of WFRP, including being voted the best RPG campaign of all time by Casus Belli magazine, the Enemy Within campaign has remained an important part of the game for more than 15 years.

Composition

This multi-part role playing adventure was made up of several linked adventures:

  • The Enemy Within / Mistaken Identity Graeme Davis, Jim Bambra, Phil Gallagher
  • Shadows Over Bögenhafen
  • Death on the Reik
  • Power Behind the Throne
  • Something Rotten in Kislev Ken Rolston, Graeme Davis (editor)
  • Empire in Flames

Throughout its publication by Games Workshop and, later, Hogshead Publishing, the individual adventures were variously bound and combined. Most often, The Enemy Within was bound together with Shadows Over Bogenhafen in a single volume. Power Behind the Throne was sometimes combined with City of Chaos (originally titled City of the White Wolf), a supplement covering the city of Middenheim in detail. Something Rotten in Kislev was quite a departure in terms of plot and style from the other parts of the campaign. It works as a side-quest where the characters are sent out of the Empire to take care of business at the Graf Todbringer's request. Its main purpose is to fill the gap between Power Behind the Throne, in which the Empire is threatened but still holding strong, and Empire in Flames, occurring an undertermined amount of time later, in which, as the title suggests, the Empire is about to crumble. Something Rotten in Kislev is thus meant to make this sudden context change more believable, since the characters were away for a while and did not receive news of the Empire during that time.

The first four episodes of The Enemy Within were generally regarded as the most popular and successful. Something Rotten in Kislev departed significantly from the theme and setting of the previous adventures in the series, while Empire in Flames was viewed by many fans as being an unsatisfactory resolution of the plots developed in the earlier episodes, as well as being considerably more linear than the previous volumes.

When Hogshead Publishing held the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay license, a new ending for the campaign, entitled Empire in Chaos, was created to replace the unpopular Empire in Flames. The project was abandoned when Hogshead returned the WFRP license to Games Workshop in 2002, but fan-produced alternatives such as Empire At War continue.