Five grim and perilous scenarios by Graeme Davis!

Let me tell you of the Gravin Maria-Ulrike von Liebwitz of Ambosstein, and her deadly quarrel with Baron Otto von Dammenblatz. It's unlike any tale told before, a truly epic drama to astonish and amaze, featuring evil witches, profane daemons, deceitful assassins, and murder most foul. And, of course, the biggest draw of them all: an evening at the opera with the Grand Countess of Nuln as Detlef Sierck, the finest actor the Empire has known, entertains us all on stage! This is a story worth the telling, so draw close, and let us begin...

Rough Nights & Hard Days contains five phenomenal scenarios for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, written by WFRP veteran Graeme Davis. These exciting adventures can be played individually, or combined into an epic five-part campaign, where our bold heroes become embroiled in a bitter dispute between two quarrelling noble houses as they clash across the Reikland. Rough Nights & Hard Days also introduces an entirely new playable species, Gnomes, and presents a variety of pub games to amuse even the most hard-bitten adventurer.

A Rough Night at the Three Feathers was an adventure for WFRP 1st edition, published in issue 94 of Games Workshop's White Dwarf magazine in November 1987. I wrote it largely as an experiment, to see whether multi-plot adventures could even work in a roleplaying game. It had never been done in roleplaying games before, but there were strong precedents in other media. On the stage, colliding plots have been a vital element of farces since Roman times, and I wanted to capture their manic action in a roleplaying game. I also wanted to ensure that the adventurers did not have the place all to themselves as soon as everyone went to bed. Caper comedies of the 60s and 70s were another source of inspiration, facing their protagonists with all manner of unexpected problems that challenge more than just their Rogue Skills.

Today, WFRP fans count A Rough Night at the Three Feathers among the game's best adventures. It was reprinted in two WFRP 1st edition compilations: The Restless Dead, published by Games Workshop in 1989; and Apocrypha Now, published by Hogshead Publishing in 1995. In 2005 — eighteen years after it first appeared — it was adapted for WFRP 2nd edition in the Black Industries collection, Plundered Vaults.

In the years that followed, I wrote two more adventures in the same style. Nastassia's Wedding was first written in the days of WFRP 1st edition. I couldn't resist continuing the plot of Gravin Maria-Ulrike von Liebwitz of Ambosstein and her feud with the von Dammenblatz family of Wissenburg from the first adventure. When I wrote The Edge of Night for WFRP 3rd edition, I included a chapter set in a swanky Ubersreik mansion, where more nobles got into a lot of different types of trouble.

For Rough Nights & Hard Days, I have updated and expanded these three adventures for the new edition of WFRP, and added two new chapters: one set in the law-courts of a large town, and the other in a glittering opera house in one of the Empire's great cities. The story of Gravin Maria-Ulrike and House Dammenblatz forms the main thread of the mini-campaign, but as in the original scenario, the adventurers' lives are complicated by the fact that there is much more going on in each of these bustling locations than they initially realise.