Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission James Raggi Dungeon, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission James Raggi Dungeon, and when it was over, I never wanted another.
There shall be spoilers.
I'm working backwards through the Lamentations of the Flame Princess catalog, and Just a Stupid Dungeon is the most recent adventure from James Raggi IV, the OG founder of the Flame Princess. I have a great affection for those early Lamentations adventures like Death Frost Doom, Tower of the Stargazer, and Hammers of the God. They rewarded intelligent play, confronted the players with mortal danger and real stakes, and blended rational designs with absolute weirdness. Most of all, they treated your campaign world with reckless disregard. Those OG Lamentations adventures hit me like a diamond bullet right through the forehead. The genius of them - the perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. (With apologies to the excellent movie Apocalypse Now…)
This adventure isn't one of those diamond bullets to the skull.
The hook for this one is… well, there's a door in the side of a hill and no one knows what's behind it. Go. There are some stats provided for the neighborhood children and hapless villagers who may follow to look at the door… just in case murder hobos gotta murder?
Beyond the door in the hillside is a simplistic 10 room dungeon. The encounter key stretches things to a 24 count by having distinct entries for the doors and corridors. Each room is one kind of nonsensical character trap or another. The sea room that drops you into the middle of an ocean, drowning, unless you drop your heavy gear and swim for the exit. The fire room that burns up all your stuff. The blinding light room. And so on - you get the idea. There are also infinite rats. The hillside has been perfectly tunneled and prepared to supply the dungeon with infinite rats. Infinite. Rats. I had plenty of friends who made dungeons like this when we were in middle school, but none of them approached the task of player disablement with as much seriousness and grim purpose while still offering limited paths to victory.
Lest I leave you with the perspective this is all hateful, there are some fun elements. There's an illusionary demi-lich character that pops up in one of the rooms like a call-back to S1 Tomb of Horrors. Aha, we're in a mad funhouse dungeon! There's a room where a wish can be granted… but the wish involves time travel and 450 years of world-changing labor to grant the wish. That is a brilliant re-interpretation of how to grant a wish to a player. The chord of a half-remembered tune blossoms back into a full song - you feel like you're seeing the real JR 4 band get back together.
The piece de resistance is the world-sleeping trap in the final room, the gas that puts the entire world unconscious for a random period of time. Depending on your point of view, this is either the greatest gift to you as a dungeon master to screw with your own world and send your campaign careening into an unpredictable new direction, or you'll throw the book across the room. On the other side of a keyboard, James is laughing and smugly saying, "You're welcome". The classics treated your campaign world with reckless disregard. He's remembering how the song goes.
How do you even rate this kind of thing? It's a bit incoherent and awful like a kid's attempt at a fun-house dungeon, but carried out with the malign skill of a seasoned designer, whose jaw is set with grim resolve. Pieces of it are brilliant. There's some truth in advertising here, it's Just a Stupid Dungeon like it says on the cover. It's downright punishing towards adventurers. At one point the text defends the ensuing calamity thus: "All because some busybodies couldn’t help themselves and just had to explore some stupid dungeon for no actual reason". See that you players, you had it coming all along.
I'd love to hear if anyone has played Just a Stupid Dungeon with real players. Are they still friends with you? Did anyone throw their Doritos or flip the table or curse JR 4's name through clenched teeth, shaking their fists?
Well. I might like to see that some day. I think I just talked myself into putting this one into a sandbox campaign. No one's going to make them go through that door in the hill, after all. They'll have it coming to them.
You too can own Just a Stupid Dungeon: Just A Stupid Dungeon at DriveThruRPG.
Great to see your blog up and running again - I have been reading it since all the way back in the day when you were writing about your Black City campaign.
ReplyDeleteLike you, I am a big fan of the early LOTFP adventures. It is also a great rule set - which does not get said enough. The specialist, the encumbrance rules, turn undead is a spell, only fighters get better at fighting - I like all those rule tweaks. But, but, for a number of years, a lot of what LOTFP has published has been terrible (I make a partial exception for the Kelvin Green stuff). Some of the best LOTFP stuff has been published by third party publishers - have you heard of the Saint of Brueckstadt? Look forward to your further reviews!
I like Gazer Press - I've been getting their stuff when I see it - I have Baphomet's Son in my reading queue. The Saint of Bruckstadt was a solid dungeon.
DeleteOur Ref ran this for us. It was... okay, I guess? It's what it says on the tin, an annoying funhouse dungeon. A mixed bag, some of the rooms are fun, some are less fun. We like bumbling around and pushing buttons, so it was okay for us for the two sessions or so.
ReplyDeleteThe most annoying thing about it is Raggi publishing this instead of taking a bit more time and doing a more refined dungeon. We know he is a capable writer. Even a funhouse can be better.