Retrospective and Review - Strict Time Records Must Be Kept

The premise of Strict Time Records Must Be Kept is that the player characters have been dosed with a slow-acting, fatal poison while isolated in a trap-filled mansion, where they search for doses of antidote.  The set up involves a wealthy patron betraying the group, ostensibly to create entertainment value for haughty, wealthy guests.  When I conceived the concept of the York LOTFP campaign, a year ago, I sketched a spine for the campaign that included a wealthy patron that could play the role of "the Doctor" and invite them to his mountain home for the fatal meal.  Starting with Tower of the Stargazer back at level 1, the Doctor has been in the background, arranging jobs, sending them letters of encouragement and small gifts, and ultimately hiring them to raid the church vaults detailed in The God That Crawls.  Now they were invited to the Doctor's remote mountain home for a fabulous meal, a well-earned reward, and a chance to hear where the Doctor's glorious plans were leading.  They were completely blind-sided when he announced to them over dinner that they'd all been poisoned.

Here's the scene:  the players traveled several days to the Doctor's mansion, where they were put up in one of the many small cabins surrounding the estate, and they arrived in time for the big dinner, dressed in formal attire (meaning limited armor, limited weapons).  They mingled with the Doctor's rich friends as "guests of honor" while the first courses were served in the dining room.  Uniformed servants with bone-white masks painted with red dots on their cheeks moved amongst the room re-filling glasses and placing the main courses.  The Doctor began to talk about his "great project", for which the player characters were being paid in gold for the part they played... Two of the masked servants brought a coffer to the end of the table to show off the player's reward, payment for retrieving a Roman text from The God That Crawls.

The Doctor's creepy servants

"There's just one thing", the Doctor said, after tinking a glass to get everyone's attention.  "I'm not going to get into the details of the project until later, after tonight's entertainment.  Let me tell you about the entertainment... my honored guests, the Pillories, have all been poisoned.  Their entrees were laced with a tasteless concoction of my own devising, which will kill them all painfully in 12 hours.  However, in the interest of fair play and sport, there are antidotes in small vials that look like this..." and the Doctor held up an empty vial, "hidden around the mansion or locked away in nefarious puzzles.  And we get to watch them stumble around looking for the vials while their symptoms get worse."

"Except for you, Ignazio - I poisoned you as well, because we needed a demonstration."  At that point, one of the rich guests started violently convulsing and went through a wave of gross symptoms, previewing for the players what would befall them over the next 12 hours.  "His dose was far more virulent than the rest of you, you still have 12 more hours.  Chop chop."

So that's more or less how you kick this one off.  One of the rich guests got sick and fled the room (Sergio Ortega).  Dame Thatcher started laughing uncontrollably at the character's predicament with tears streaming out of her eyes, and the Dread Pirate Roberts put some money down betting that the adventurers would all make it out alive.  The players said "Screw all you guys, we cast SLEEP."

In our version, the rich guests never got the chance to spectate as the characters stumbled around the mansion because their unconscious bodies were all trussed and bound in the dining chamber.  Captain Roberts wasn't affected by SLEEP (too high level) so he wished the characters well; he was going to retrieve his things from the upstairs and potentially help them if they met up again.  His NPC arc didn't work out as he hoped; his room was trapped with a blunderbuss, he took a chest-full of shot, and he also ended up with a heightened dose of poison.  He crossed paths with the players a few times as they explored the mansion, but once it was clear to him he was caught in the Doctor's poisoned web and experiencing spiraling symptoms, he returned to the dining hall and slew the bound socialites before melting from the poison - not just mostly dead, but dead-dead.

As if all this doesn't sound fun enough, the servants and hunting hounds out in the yard were all dosed with rage-inducing drugs and would jump-scare the players from around corners or behind doors as they crept through the mansion looking for antidote.

Strict time keeping is a recurring feature in these LOTFP adventures, whether it was managing light and food in The Grinding Gear or plotting the course of the slime monster turn-by-turn in The God That Crawls.  Here, the countdown takes on ominous life as the players begin to dread the tolling of the hours which signal the next wave of saving throws against ever-more debilitating poison symptoms.  Pressure builds as the players try to cover more ground in the house, even as their characters lose function.  Every time they succeeded in finding an antidote dose, there would be a tense moment around the table as they tried to justify who should take it, based on a combination of saving throws, symptoms, who had the most valuable skills, and so on.  (They ended up saving their Specialist first).

The Pillories eventually found the Doctor's secret lab in the basement, where they were able to synthesize the final antidote that was needed using the Doctor's notes.  They rescued someone named Geoff from the Doctor's prison, and Pastor Blackburn recruited him to be a henchman, setting up an interesting future problem when they rescue the next Geoff down the line and I need to decide if all the Geoff prisoners are clones.  By morning, the players had survived the poison, the rage-servants had died of heart attacks after the rage drugs wore off, and the wealthy patrons were either killed by the vengeful Captain Roberts or taken out by other traps within the house.  We had a post-mortem game session where the players took the next 6 months or so of game time leveraging the deed of the house and several adventure's worth of loot to fix it up, hire all sorts of staff, and claim the mountain retreat as their new headquarters.  They transported their library from York to the house in the Pennines and the spell casters used the time for magic research... including researching a "Comprehend Languages" spell so they could decipher a certain cryptic set of writings on a cave face deep beneath the Doctor's house, where a skeleton made of stone was half emerged from the rock face.  If you own this adventure, you know the room I'm talking about, and the players laughed for several minutes about how close they came to letting the halfling smear blood all over the thing the first time they found the room, before they knew what the inscription meant.  Their halfling, Remi, has leveraged his robust saving throws to become the party's instigator.  Every campaign needs someone willing to pull levers and stir the pot.

We had a lot of fun with this one, as far as a review rating that's the best thing to say about an adventure - it was well worth our time.  It was a little challenging managing all of the NPCs early on in the first evening, but that got sorted out fairly early.  I knew this would be a central fixture in the campaign and introduced the Doctor, and his manservants, early in the York campaign.  During the lead up, they knew the Doctor was eccentric and weird, and didn't trust him, but didn't distrust him enough to refuse a dinner invitation and chance to collect their money.  But I think Strict Time Records Must Be Kept could work even better with a convention game, where the referee could be stingy on the number of antidotes and see who survives at the end.

Like many of Kelvin's adventures, there are gratuitous puns and pop culture references which break up the horror and give momentary relief to the tension.  An example was the room of chains and hooks with the metal puzzle box, with its razor sharp edges, holding an antidote... my players are all products of 1980's horror movies and started quoting the original Hellraiser, "We have such sights to show you" and "Your suffering will be legendary, even in Hell" and that kind of stuff while someone wrestled with the puzzle.

Speaking of movie references, one of their favorite moments (captured in the sketch below) is when they discovered the Doctor's henchmen had captured one of their friends from York, a homeless chap that lived in their alley they called "Sandwich Sam", and the Doctor sewed something into Same's abdomen (a box with an antidote).  They were fond of Sam and had to weigh attempting a surgery vs keeping Sam alive... they ended up doing the surgery but using magic to keep Sam alive.  (Unfortunately Sam was murdered later in one of the game sessions by a homicidal butler).

This one was a great adventure, with an interesting premise, that made great use of time pressure, and I had enough forethought to incorporate it naturally into the campaign backstory.  Physically the book is a high quality LOTFP hardcover, 80 pages, with art, maps, and writing by Kelvin Green.  I find Kelvin's puns and culture references entertaining to read and fun to work into the game, so his adventures work for me, and this might be the best of the bunch.  It was certainly the adventure I was most excited to put through campaign play first.  The other one that's definitely in our future is Bee-Ware, since Ambersham Mead has been a recurring game reference since the early days of this campaign.  The players even re-opened a tavern near the new mansion property and want to stock it with Ambersham, necessitating a visit in the near future.

As for the campaign York 1630, in the long months they were rebuilding the mansion and making it their own, the players deciphered the Doctor's notes and fully read the book they bought for him, the Words of the Dead.  Between the account of the Roman legate, and the medieval notes the Doctor had gathered, they determined the holdfast of the ancient death cult was at a place called Cold Mountain somewhere north of Carlisle, in Scotland.  It's there they will pierce the ancient cult's secrets of immortality and finish the Doctor's "great project".  Next game report, we'll recount how they set off to begin Death Frost Doom (now in the year 1631).

The God That Crawls Retrospective and Review

It's been a minute since I've posted here at the Dream House.  My corporate alter ego has been busy - my company is merging with a French business, and acquisitions are busy times anyone in IT.  It's been good though, I've enjoyed visiting Reims and trying to pick up French.  My gaming group has been diligent about maintaining the LOTFP campaign, and the players have a few new adventures under their belts.  Let's get caught up with "The Pillories".

By way of refresher, this campaign is centered around the city of York in 1630.  There's a healthy number of LOTFP early-modern adventures either directly placed in England or easy enough to put there, such that there's no lack of interesting things for adventurers to do.  The player character patrons have included a local crime lord, Billy Brewer, a mysterious figure named Garvin Richrom, and a collector of rare things called "The Doctor".  The Doctor was introduced in person last game report, and he's since hired the characters to retrieve a valuable codex from a secret vault of the Catholic church (the locale of The God That Crawls).

Our characters include Pastor Blackburn, a Solomon Kane-like puritan monster hunter; Remi and Yuri, a halfling burglar and elf wanderer; Toby and Wood, the two henchmen; the group's leader is Allister, an Oxford scholar and dabbler in the mystic arts (a magic user).  They call themselves The Pillories.  The campaign is basically a "best of" for old LOTFP including Tower of the Stargazer, the Grinding Gear, and now The God That Crawls.  (On the near horizon sits Strict Time Records Must Be Kept and then Death Frost Doom).

The group traveled to Dover, stayed at an inn and got their bearings, before going to Shepperdswell, a small hamlet that was home to the parish church beneath which were the lost Catholic vaults filled with terrible secrets and dangerous items.  The Pillories met the pastor of the church, Father Bacon, and be-friended a local farmer who let them stay in his barn for a night.  It was Halloween night, and they ended up infiltrating the vaults through a hill-side entrance and quickly got lost in the tunnels.  There was lots of screaming and running through a maze while they were tracked by an immortal shoggoth-like monster, the "god that crawls".

A few of our artist's renditions of 'the god' chasing the characters

After a lot of trial and error with mapping and figuring out how to navigate the maze, they found a circular shaft leading up into the church.  Unfortunately, right after two of the characters climbed up and out, the monster came along and chased the rest of the group away from the exit.  So they got split up - two characters (Toby and Yuri) were up in the church, while everyone else plunged back into the dark maze, trying to outpace the monster.  It was great fun.  It eventually devolved into a full fiasco when dawn broke and the party still hadn't reconnected, but now the thief and elf needed to deal with people waking up in the church and finding intruders.  The next day was All-Saints Day and there would be a mid-day service in a couple of hours with all the villagers coming to church as well.

All's well that ends well.  The other players finally got out of the maze, the Father and his acolytes were put to Sleep, the Father was Charmed, and the players concocted a story about being agents of the church sent to verify the secrets were safe, and what a great job Father Bacon was doing keeping it all secret and safe.  They had their book they were sent to recover, the Father was calmed down before mid-day services, and they were able to head out without anyone summoning the nearby nobility and law enforcement.  They did collect a bunch of other "weird items" to mess with in the future, but never did find the secret vault with the overpowered artifacts.  However, they left with a map and have resolved to come back at a later time to see where it leads.

I never ran this one years ago when it first came out, and wasn't sure how the whole "chased by a monster in a maze" would play out at the table.  It worked remarkably well in actual play and wasn't hard to manage as the referee.  I don't think I gave it enough credit back in the day, and we truly had a grand time.  Most classic D&D or fantasy game adventures fall short when it comes to mazes and getting lost, but James Raggi did a fine job with maze construction on The God That Crawls and designing an interesting setting around it.

My players are scattered about these days, so we're playing online using a virtual table top, which makes manipulating maps and revealing / hiding sections of a map easy with online tools.  I have both physical books and PDFs for most adventures, so while I'm referencing a print copy for myself and flipping pages, I use the PDF in advance to create images of the maps and load them into the virtual table top for the online gaming and mapping.  The referee does need to do some prep work on the maps hiding secret things and whatnot, which is my biggest accommodation switching from books designed for in-person gaming to online gaming.  I wonder, post-COVID, how many groups actually went back to 100% in-person play?

To wrap up, this one is about being chased by a shoggoth-like monster through a multi-level dungeon maze while trying to find some horribly unfair cursed items.  If that sounds like an enjoyable proposition, this adventure delivers the goods.  There's enough weird history and tie-in to the real world of the setting that it was reminiscent to me of a Call of Cthulhu adventure, but playable with familiar d20 mechanics and classic fantasy classes and rules.  The God that Crawls - an old one but good one.

Next time we'll turn our attention to a much newer adventure, Kelvin Green's Strict Time Records Must Be Kept.  Stay tuned.

LOTFP Review: The Curious Conundrum of the Conflagrated Condottiero

This capsule review will have spoilers.

Here's some boring facts about the book up front to avoid diving right into the spoilers.  The Curious Conundrum of the Conflagrated Condottiero (henceforth referred to as "4C" for the rest of this review) is 26 pages, with Kelvin Green doing the writing, art, and cartography, as he is known to do.  It's 26 pages and you can get the PDF here: 4C on DriveThruRPG - where apparently it's a gold seller.  Okay, have we given the spoiler-averse enough time to bail on this review?  Good, let's get into it.

4C is a revenge piece about an implacable undead hunting its murderers.  From the back cover:  Five men went to war.  Four men returned.  Now something is burning them to death.  We learn that the five men found a treasure cache during the war; after a disagreement over the treasure, the four murdered their compatriot and buried him in a shallow grave, then returned home with the loot.  There are several ideas on getting the players involved shortly after the time the first murder happens, and most of the adventure takes place in the environs of the small German village of Schwartzfuß where the players will get to put on their best Scooby Doo impersonations and unravel the mystery.  The village is briefly described, with a focus on a few key NPCs and some red herring side plots.  Like many books in the LOTFP canon this is meant to take place in the 1630's in and around the 30 Years' War.

As I was reading this, I kept thinking about 1980's horror movies like John Carpenter's The Fog with its theme of vengeful dead (in the case of The Fog, they are drowned lepers betrayed by the villagers).  In the afterword Kelvin relates The Fog was indeed a primary influence for 4C.  In the movie The Fog, the undead are terrorizing the town of Antonio Bay on the 100th anniversary of its founding and the event that drowned the mariners.  The original The Fog is a low-budget movie but I think it's held up well, highlighting the uncomfortable fact that many of our settlements or historical founders (hello, America) committed horrific things we've either suppressed or forgotten.  At the same time, watching an implacable foe exact revenge on "innocent" generations removed from the original crimes is also unsettling.

From that perspective the targets in 4C are less sympathetic (they're the actual murderers, not some distant descendants).  I don't believe it's mentioned, but there could be an opportunity to place the first murder or appearance of the revenant on the anniversary of the crime or murder pact, tying it to some kind of auspicious date where old crimes resurface to plague the living.

I suppose I've said enough about this one. There's no dungeon to be found here, so let's take a moment to acknowledge the wags who'll gripe about a Call of Cthulhu style horror investigation published for a class and level D&D style rules system. I'll conclude by saying I liked the premise and the set up of this one and will consider using it, perhaps in a future LOTFP campaign placed in the Holy Roman Empire.  By now I believe there's a critical mass of official and unofficial LOTFP adventures set in Germany.  Nor would it be hard to transplant it to ye olde England with the aid of a name generator, so we may not have to wait for a future campaign after all.

Thanks for reading.  As I work backwards through the LOTFP catalog our next visit will be to The Obsidian Anti-Pharos.

LOTFP Review: Winnie the Shit

Get yourself a blender, pour in a parody of Winnie the Pooh, a heap of The Island of Dr Moreau, a pinch of seasoning from Animal Farm, and some references to the Kelvin-Verse, and you've got the adventure locale for Winnie the Shit, Kelvin Green's latest offering for the LOTFP line.  This one is a 48 page hardcover with Kelvin doing the writing, cover, and interior art.  This is a solid addition to the Kelvin-verse; I don't rate it up there with the big three - Strict Time Records, Forgive Us, or Green Messiah - but it definitely has play and should go in your "Kelvin-verse" sandbox.  You can get the hardcopy at the LOTFP webstore (here) or DriveThruRPG (here)

The book describes a mini sandbox area in a place called Lancaster Great Park (modern day Ashdown Forest) in early 17th-century England.  A misanthropic sorcerer, AA Moreau, had fled to the forest to work on his master spell, The Ascendant Synthesis of the New Man, which creates sorcerous human-animal hybrids.  He had hopes of replacing humanity with a newer, better race.  At the start of the adventure, Moreau's creations, the New Men, have imprisoned him and depopulated the nearby village of Hartfield of its people who were used as raw materials for more New Men.  Their sadistic leader, Edward Bear, tortures AA Moreau and forces him to cast the spell each day to create another hybrid (assuming the New Men have a ready human victim and animal to synthesize).  There are several loose plot hooks that can get players investigating the area, but the moment the characters run into a few violent hybrids, the game is afoot, as they say.  There's something extremely satisfying as a referee to imagine wailing on the player characters with a hatchet-wielding Piglet or a savage Winnie the Pooh.  The sandbox gameable content includes lairs of the various main characters (all allusions to the main characters from the 100 Acre Wood, after being re-envisioned as misanthropic human-animal hybrids), and some places to explore like AA Moreau's house, Rabbit's underground warren, or the creepy Woozle's spinney.

There is something solid and accessible about the adventures set in the Kelvin-verse.  When you open a non-Kelvin LOTFP book, there's a risk of being confronted with a tortuous premise such as... "This adventure takes place in July of 1647 in a Swiss chateau overlooking the Bodensee on the exact day before that year's solar eclipse..." and you're wondering, "neat idea but how am I ever going to fit this thing into an actual campaign?"  Many of the Kelvin-verse adventures are set in England and feature an uncanny locale where something nefarious is happening - that looseness makes them extremely referee-friendly to place and establish.  The premises allude to pop culture in a fun way; there will be puns and humor (checking off the box "entertaining for the referee to read"); you'll still get a dose of horror and weirdness before you're through.  Over time they've started to reference their own Kelvin-verse mythology that connects to other locales in the Kelvin-verse... John Dee's 'Men in Black' from Green Messiah make an appearance in the 100 Acre Wood, for instance.  I suppose the highest praise I'd offer is that I'm actively working several books from the Kelvin-verse into my 1630's York game - we'll feature Bee-Ware, Magic Eater, Strict Time Records, Green Messiah, Fish F*ckers, and this fella, Winnie the Shit, just off the top of my head, along with some of the LOTFP classics.

With this review done, I've finally finished looking at the summer's batch of LOTFP books.  I still think The Yellow Book of Brechewold is my pick for favorite new book from the past summer.  Both the ACKS Greyhawk game and LOTFP York 1630 are going strong, so I don't know that we'll get to visit Brechewold any time soon (unless I make time travel a thing for the York crowd...) but Brechewold is high on the list to get the campaign treatment in the future.  Apologies for the glacial pace of my blog of late; the end of year has been quite busy in the real world (the pay the bills world) but have some time off with the USA's upcoming Thanksgiving holiday.  I'll be getting back to older LOTFP reviews next, starting either with something called The Obsidian Anti-Pharos or The Curious Conundrum of the Conflagrated Condottiero.  Should be fun.  Oh, and I'll get some game reports posted - the players are chugging along in Greyhawk and York. See you soon.

LOTFP Review: Galileo 2: Judgment Day

Let's establish something right from the start - this is mostly set up as a one-shot adventure designed to evoke a vibe that blends slasher horror and a little dark humor.  The player characters are ostensibly deep in debt to the Inquisition, destitute and working off their debt by carrying out surveillance against a man under house arrest - the famous scientist Galileo Galilee.  They watch his villa day and night, until one evening they see him fleeing into the night, disguised poorly as a nun.  They're faced with a crucial decision… do they recapture Galileo, or use his escape attempt as a chance to ditch their post and loot his wealthy villa?

Unbeknownst to the players, Galileo's villa has hosted a prison warden for the past several years, a merciless automaton created by the Church and equipped to use the voice of Galileo's oppressor, Pope Urban VIII.  When you are a fictionalized version of the Church, of course you can invest untold sums into manufacturing a weird science robot to torture enemies of the state.  The scenario kicks off when Galileo has zapped the mechanical terror with a kit-bashed device to give him time to escape.  If the players explore the villa looking for loot, they'll need to deal with the automaton as it reawakens; if they head off into the night in pursuit of Galileo, the automation emerges from the villa to track them through the woods and into the nearby city.

The meat of the scenario involves chase rules and the tactics and capabilities of a powerful opponent with a series of pro-wrestling style finishing moves and a sadistic streak.  Depending on whether the players loot the house or hit the road with Galileo, there are opportunities to introduce bystanders and similar 3rd parties to get in the way of the automaton and allow it to demonstrate its killing potential.  As a 9 HD terror, it's probably a death sentence if the players assume they can beat it without wearing it down, luring it into water, getting it to fall from a high place, or some other clever environmental tactic.  (Galileo used an electrical device in his basement to zap it, so players looting the villa may also chance upon that device).

That's about it for this one.  If you believe your referee style could create a suspenseful adventure portraying a ruthless automaton with the voice of Pope Urban VIII relentlessly pursuing the characters, while executing deadly wrestling finishing moves with panache and showmanship, this could be a fun one shot scenario.  Even in the realm of dedicated horror games, there aren't too many scenarios that capture the "relentless killer" vibe, putting this in a rarified spot.

So what do I think about it?  Well, I don't typically run convention games or one-shots, so I'm probably not the ideal target audience.  I do think a creative referee could integrate this into a campaign without too much trouble… its 1637, Galileo is a brilliant scientist under house arrest, and he may be in possession of books or knowledge a typical group of early modern LOTFP adventurers (or their patron) could require, necessitating a side trip to Florence and a mission to evade the spies of the Inquisition and secure a surreptitious audience with Galileo.  It could be like a heist or infiltration adventure that transposes into a slasher horror.  It's a short scenario and would probably get done in a 2-3 hour sitting.  There are a few thousand XP available for looting the villa, and a similar amount in payment for helping Galileo escape.

Galileo 2:  Judgment Day is available in hardcover (40 pages) at the LOTFP web store or PDF over a DriveThruRPG.  It's written by Bradley Anahua (a LOTFP rookie) with art by Charlie Gillespie.

The Automaton

LOTFP Review: Black Chamber

A new challenger has rattled its spurs and stepped through the batwing doors onto the dusty streets of Review Town to take on the LOTFP-verse.  This one is called Black Chamber, and features a theme of arena combat with unwitting victims popping out of the floor in an alien danger-room setting.  Maybe that's why the phrase "a new challenger approaches" is on my brain.  We'll look at the good, the bad, and the ugly of this one as we break down the walls of the Black Chamber.

As usual, reviews are meant for referees, there will be spoilers.

The Good

I enjoy dystopian science fiction and horror movies like Cube, or The Platform, that unsettle the viewers with a dangerous, unknown environment, and force the characters to survive long enough to figure out what's going on and escape.  Black Chamber leans heavily into that theme, temporarily trapping the players in a pitch-dark arena where bizarre and random opponents will be thrust upon them.  Adversaries can range from zombie conquistadors, robots that grind opponents into sausage, to ordinary people who have been trapped in the dark and just want to escape.

There is a back-story to this one that involves an infectious alien intelligence that co-opts living creatures, making them part of a collective while it changes their blood and organs to black oil and coal - a kind of alien zombie.  There's a constant threat of infection to the players while fighting in the arena itself, including guidelines on handling "alien rabies".

Beyond the chamber (and it's expected the players will figure out a way to escape) there's a small dungeon, where the players can learn the ancient history of the place, find potential allies, and deal with a few powerful foes.  One of the foes is a potent magic user, controlled by the alien collective, who can cast a quirky spell called Seven Gates, which opens up seven portals throughout the dungeon.  The portals can last up to several hours once created.  You can imagine some madcap chase sequences like a Looney Tunes cartoon or a Scooby Doo chase scene, as different groups use the portals to pop around the dungeon.  Oh, and the destination each time someone enters a portal is random.  Zoinks.  Cue the Benny Hill music.

Finally, if you like the flavor of Gamma World, or Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, there are hi-tech devices the players can loot, and a fair amount of treasure.  This adventure creates a balanced tone of horror, sorcery, and super science that checks off a bunch of interesting boxes.  I'd love to hear how the playtests went for this one.

The Bad

If you're in the market for a Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventure for your 1657 Portuguese campaign during the Portuguese Restoration War, you are in luck my friend.  This one is not quite "tell me you're a one-shot without saying you're a one-shot" territory, because it wouldn't be too hard to scrub the historical context and place this in a decade or setting that actually matches your LOTFP campaign.  There are certainly cases where LOTFP authors pursue their vagaries and make obscure adventures difficult to integrate into an existing campaign.  This one isn't too bad.

The Ugly

My eyes.  I love dark mode on my computer screens and iPad, but it was a bit jarring for a game book.  I'll put a picture of one of the pages below.  The aesthetic certainly drives home the oppressive theme of black, seeping infection and gives it a metal vibe.

The Judgment

I loved this one - it's why we come to the Lamentations of the Flame Princess.  It's a challenging adventure, it's got horror, weird science fiction stuff, and puts interesting pressures on the characters to escape before they all succumb to infection.  I'm not sure a first level party would even make it out of the chamber, so this is probably something for a party with a little experience.  Access to cure disease would improve their long term odds.

It's a 40-page softcover, but this should have been one of the hardcovers and gotten the deluxe treatment - it's a keeper.  I think the softcovers were community submissions.  The author here is Becami Cusack.  The best of the summer LOTFP releases have been Yellow Book of Brechewold, Temple of the Wurm, and this one.   Let's see where it lands as I finish the last two new books.

You can get a PDF of Black Chamber over at DriveThruRP (DriveThru), and it looks like physical copies are available at the LOTFP web stores (LOTFP Web Store).

LOTFP Review: A Gift for All Norway

Is it?  Is it really a gift for all Norway?

Disclaimer:  Reviews are for referees.  I'm a spoiler.  Stay out, players.

I'll come right out with the judgment… I have some issues with this adventure for campaign play because of how much work is left to the referee, but it'd work fine as a one-shot at a convention.

A Gift for All Norway is a short book - 16 page pamphlet with a soft cover.  The dungeon involves the adventurers entering a cave seeking a stolen artifact, the Heart of Hrungnir, named after a figure from Norse legend, a Jotun.  Within a few rooms of the cave structure, it should be apparent the characters are traversing a gigantic digestive tract like the miniature scientists and doctors from the movie Fantastic Voyage.  Challenges include environmental factors (like lakes of acid) and oozes and slimes (crawling and slithering anti-bodies).  There aren't really NPC roleplaying opportunities in the dungeon, and little or no treasure (unless the players keep the artifact).

All gut-tract dungeons need more Raquel Welch.

If the player's find the artifact, there's a location where it fits in the dungeon, and funny things can happen.  I won't spoil all the fun!  It's definitely a gift for somebody.  I can imagine a party making it to the ultimate location, and deciding what to do next should be an interesting dilemma.

My knock on this one for campaign play is it requires a bit of hand-waving or a lot of referee work.  The players supposedly start in England, travel to Norway, and have to deal with an evil Nordic cult waiting for them at the village of Vihavn not far from where the adventure begins.  All that stuff is left for you (the referee) to figure out.  The evil cult is actually just called "the Nordic cult".  I asked ChatGPT to help me name it and the AI cranked out a handful of evocative names:

• Frostfang Covenant
• Rimeborn Disciples
• Hrungnir's Cursebound
• Jotun's Whisper
• Jotunheim's Doomcallers
• Frostforged Creed
• Nidhogg's Vanguard
• … you get the idea.

So you’re buying (and playing ) this one for an 8 room romp through a digestive track dungeon (no Raquel Welch in sight) and a LOTFP worthy decision.  For a one-shot, you could start the players already in Norway - right at the cave mouth - and probably get through the dungeon in a 2 hour convention slot.  I can see it being a satisfying short dungeon in those circumstances.

It's kind of weird this batch of LOTFP adventures had two "crawl around the inside of a giant ancient being" adventures - don't forget we had Meanderings of the Mine Mind earlier, and now A Gift For All Norway.  They are very different - we're talking about Night at the Museum vs Fantastic Voyage.  The Mine Mind is all about interacting with anachronistic people, while this one is Man vs Nature (and by Nature, I mean gigantic digestive and respiratory tracts).

You can get this one at the usual places, the LOTFP store and DriveThruRPG:  A Gift for All Norway.

LOTFP Review: Faecal Lands

I group Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventures in two broad categories, Type A and Type B.  I sift through the catalog looking for the Type A adventures - they are grounded and gritty, focused on themes of exploration, discovery, and building horror, with real consequences and that LOTFP weird twist - like running a Call of Cthulhu adventure but using the familiar BX rules set.

Type B adventures push the limit of what you can do with a table top adventure - all the "shock for shock's sake" art pieces - the classic James Raggi 'damn the torpedoes' mindset that gets things banned on DriveThruRPG.  As an observer of the Type B phenomenon, I used to think James enjoyed triggering people, but nowadays I see him more like an eclectic publisher that puts a lot of mixed stuff out there and hopes it finds the audience that appreciates it.  I'll shrug my shoulders and say, "well clearly this thing wasn't made for me", and move on with my life.  When you throw a lot of stuff against the wall as a publisher, not everything has to stick.  But I'm always on the lookout for more of that Type A stuff, because when they're good, they're really good.

Faecal Lands is not a Type A adventure.  But it might find an audience, so let's get into it.

I imagine a hypothetical idea pitch would have gone like this - "You know, James, Lamentations needs its own planar adventure.  Lots of modules in the history of fantasy gaming feature jaunts into the elemental planes, where the players are grappling with a hostile environment and battling planar entities until they can escape back home."  Oh yeah, that sounds interesting, but what's the weird twist?  "Oh that's the best part.  Since the elemental planes of air, earth, fire, and water are so banal and overdone, I was thinking it could be the plane of poop.  It'll have poop demons, and lakes of pee, and poop dragons, and a final poop boss guarding the poop fortress".

If that sounds like the kind of thing you've been waiting for your whole life, I have great news for you my friend - this is your day, and this is your book.

The cover is so gross I almost didn't want to review it (so I'm not putting the cover here, there's a link below if you like).  But the setting is done earnestly and with an eye towards challenging game play.  I've read plenty of more serious adventures that wish they had the amount of gameplay, usability, and design this crappy book holds, even if it's built around a bad joke.  It includes a hex crawl, points of interest and mini-dungeons to explore, large wandering encounter tables, environmental hazards and diseases, a rudimentary ecology and bestiary, and interesting items and fetch quests.  For a gag book it is shockingly well done.  That makes it perplexing - it'd be much easier to write off if the game content was bad - it's not.

Edit:  I thought it'd be helpful to show a snippet of a page - most of the encounter areas are like this, with functional maps that combine room key descriptions and maps in one neat layout (referencing a bestiary in the back).

At this point, I don't no plan to use this one.  But I won't say never, because there could be that game situation where things go pear-shaped and the party is landing in a metaphorical world of sh*t, and the referee just wants to say, "F*ck it, you twits are landing in a literal world of sh*t too.  Good luck escaping the Faecal Lands, dolts(1)."  This is what Type B LOTFP brings me to - profanity.

The book is 32 pages and written by Glynn Seal, author of The Midderlands.  (There are even several references to Great Lunden).  Glynn also did the art, layout and cartography, and it's all good.  However, much like some criticism I leveled at Meandering of the Mine Mind the editor here missed a few things.  It's as if this batch of LOTFP releases was rushed, or the editors were only looking at spell check and not the big picture.  Small things, like a missed table reference here, or the wrong type of skill check in the text (LOTFP uses d6 skill checks, not % skills).

While the idea of a poop dimension full of poop demons has a distinctly adolescent quality to it, this is executed seriously and would be a challenging adventure locale.  My sense is it would work best for a competent group of players with characters in the level 4-6 range.  (I think the LOTFP crowd has given up suggesting level ranges).

You too can be grossed out by visiting the LOTFP webstore or DriveThruRPG:  Faecal Lands

(1)  Here's an example of how one could tie this easily into a recent adventure: In Magic Eater, there is a gross cult that also involves a poop theme.  The Magic Eater is an unstable monster that should explode when he dies, blasting everyone in the room (cultists and player characters alike) over to the Faecal Lands to be grossed out even further.  You're welcome.

LOTFP Review: Do Not Accept This Quest

This one is called Do Not Accept This Quest.  "They should have never entered that house…"  I didn't love the adventure... but how about that creepy cover?

Per the usual disclaimer - this is an adventure review, beyond here lie spoilers.

This is about a ruined house with a small dungeon beneath it.  From the backstory, we learn the previous owner was a diabolist who murdered children.  We should be in for something chilling!  However, the execution didn't live up to the premise.  In a published adventure, I want ideas that I couldn't have sketched out for myself with a few hours of prep before game night.  

The rooms of the house are atmospheric, but the dungeon beneath is linear - a straight path with rooms attached.  There are locked rooms in the cellar of the abandoned house with wolves living in them.  I could probably stop the review right there...  Later we learn there are imps breeding in the dungeon.  Maybe the imps are carrying keys, and keep the wolves as pets, and take them out for walks?  The imps don't have supernatural abilities, immunities, or tactics, so they come across as goblins with wings.  In several of the rooms the imps are hanging out with the dead zombie children like it's a monster mixer - a party.

Physically, this book is a soft-cover pamphlet, 12 pages, with nice production values in terms of art, layout, and cartography.  The author is JE Evans.  I'm used to books in the LOTFP line embracing "The Weird" - either a novel premise, a strange twist, or something that subverts expectations - the weird is the LOTFP trademark.  This one has some evocative descriptions, but there wasn't a twist (unless you'd call imps with babies and their zombie play-dates is the twist).  How would you give this one a "weird twist" and make it less conventional?  Drop your ideas in the comments.

This one is $4.99 over at DriveThruRPG:  Do Not Accept This Quest.

That's all for this one.  Next up is something called (groan) Faecal Lands.  I don't have high hopes for a book themed around a poop dimension and poop demons, despite the author's impressive resume.  Wish me luck, I'll be holding my nose.  The good news is, once we get past the poop kingdom, the remaining new LOTFP books look like absolute fire.

Review: Temple of the Wurm

When I saw the cover of this book, with player characters drooping and flopping like melting Salvador Dali clocks. I groaned.  There's no way I'm going to like this adventure.  Then I read it, and I was surprised. It's odd and cool and felt like a Cthulhu Mythos excursion without a deep one or squid face in sight.

Remember people, adventure reviews are for referees.  Don't spoil yourself, players.

You could say this adventure is "high concept".  The players explore an alien temple where many spells, traps, and alien attacks can make them two dimensional, collapsing to the floor like silhouettes and able to slither up walls and ceilings.  There are also effects that can reverse the dimensionality in the other direction, making the players 3-dimensional, or adding additional dimensions, moving the player character through time or into the higher dimensions.  It has the potential to be very weird.  Note:  there are no Dali clocks in the adventure, although time can become twisted; if anything, some of the locales in the alien dungeon have a circuit-board quality with flashing lights that brought to mind a 2-D character entering the movie Tron.

The situation is fairly simple - people are disappearing near a lake.  A likely hook is the missing son of a fisherman and a request to poke around under water - he was taken.  There is a cave in the lake, leading to an air filled dome and the entrance to the temple proper with the warring two-dimensional aliens.  If the players are resourceful and can learn how to communicate with the aliens, there are opportunities for roleplaying and alliances - there are even factions, and a terrifying predator ("the wurm").

It's hard to rate how this adventure would handle during gameplay without a playtest because of the strangeness, and there could be a wide range of outcomes depending on whether players learn how to communicate with the alien factions.  My guess is it would be a hoot (a technical term).  It should make for an interesting challenge having combats where some characters are 2-dimensional, others are 3-dimensional, and monsters are similarly shifting in and out of different phases.  There are also areas that can only be reached having a 2-dimensional scout opening up exploration avenues leveraging dimensionality and letting players exploit their new states.

As an avid reader of Lovecraft and all things Cthulhu Mythos, I couldn't help but notice how this adventure taps into vibes similar to From Beyond, or The Mountains of Madness, and the idea there are older, stranger races just beneath our feet or just beyond our ordinary senses.  I think it's quite likely players returning from Temple of the Wurm will forever mistake moving shadows or flickers just outside of their peripheral vision as the 2-dimensional explorers invading the realm of the 3-dimensionals.  I would certainly take advantage of that ambiguity to create fear and uncertainty.  "Have they found us again?"

The author of this one is Alucard Finch.  It’s digest sized, 48 pages, with great layout and art.  It's not tied to any specific LOTFP time period or setting, so could be placed in any type of campaign.  That's been a theme with these new releases so far, they've featured dungeons that could work both in a LOTFP setting and in a heroic fantasy setting where the referee is willing to play into 'the Weird'.  It's available at the LOTFP EU webstore or here at DriveThruRPG:  Temple of the Wurm

Review: Meanderings of the Mine Mind

Spoiler warning - this is a review of an adventure, players stay out!

The set up of this one is fairly simple - some miners are on strike, some heavies from the local guild are trying to get them back to work, and the adventurers show up.  There's a random table that provides several ideas on why the players have come to the mine - the Church hired them to destroy some cave art!  A child went missing in town and is supposed to be hiding out in the mine!  That kind of stuff.

Meanderings of the Mine Mind is an introductory adventure written by Mark Sable; it comes in at 32 pages, and it presents a short mind-bending dungeon.  The overwhelming vibes it kept giving me was somewhere between 1960's Star Trek and the movie "Night at the Museum" - imagine a Star Trek away team ending up at the OK Corral, or Nazi World, or Teddy Roosevelt running into Sir Lancelot and the pharaoh.

This is basically a fun-house style dungeon with some quirky historical encounters, like Roman centurions or World War 2 German Wehrmacht soldiers with grenades and rifles.  The idea behind it is this:  beneath the mountainside is the ancient corpse of a gargantuan alien creature - I picture a Marvel "Celestial" - and the miners have dug tunnels through the thing's fossilized brain.  The silver they're mining once functioned as the creature's neurons and synapses.  The tone of this is more weird and gonzo than horror - it's lighter fare than your typical LOTFP excursion.  While it could work fine in LOTFP's default early modern setting, it could also be used in a traditional fantasy setting.  If it had a detachable cover and those pale blue maps from 1980's TSR , this could have fit right in with the charming "B Series" modules that took place somewhere on Mystara.

However - I have some nitpicks!  Let's start with the maps.  Every room in the dungeon has 3-4 subsections, lettered such as area A, area B, area C… and directions like "A:  A makeshift bunker here houses German soldiers from World War II".  The text is written to make you expect to see where area A, B, C, and so on are placed on the map… I spent too much time looking for them.  Maybe there was a mix up between the maps, the text, and the directions given to the cartographer.  If you're going to run this one, it'd make sense to put annotations on the map so your descriptions don't get crossed up during game play.

The other peculiar thing in the dungeon involved a "diamond encrusted mining pick".  Every room has a silver vein, and it's implied the players can bust out their Skyrim or Minecraft moves and do a little ore mining along the way.  However, I couldn't find anywhere in the text where it describes how much silver can be gleaned from a silver vein.  This seems like a question the players will ask.

When players do some mining, there's a large random table of weird effects that can happen.  The effects are flavorful - they could experience alien memories, have their brains zapped or altered, gain superpowers, all the way up to waking up the big fella who goes and destroys the countryside.  But I was mentioning the "diamond encrusted pickaxe".  Yes, a diamond pickaxe is a treasure in one of the areas.  Besides being a fine treasure on its own, it lets the players mine silver without triggering the random effects.  It made me wonder, if a miner had enough money to bling out their mining pick with diamonds, why are they in a mine?  My "Stan Lee No-Prize" explanation is that the diamond crusted pickaxe was manifested by the alien's mind - it can be used later in the adventure for something special.  But that's the kind of detail you'd expect the author to share or an editor to catch.  Maybe I'm overthinking things - we're talking about a dungeon with cavemen and a Renaissance painter in the same room - but these are the important questions that keep me up.  Watching the fan spin on the ceiling in the middle of the night, and turning the question over and over again in my brain… why, why is there that diamond encrusted pickaxe lying on the floor?  I have to know.

Like most Lamentations of the Flame Princess physical books, the production quality is very high - hard cover, heavy weight paper, fantastic art, layout, a beautiful map.  If this were a PDF on DriveThruRPG, perhaps an author's first adventure, and it had a few loose ends in the text or some misses on the map, you'd say "this is a really great first effort, and there's the bones of a fun adventure in here".  After all, it's easy enough to update a PDF and send it back out into the world.  But LOTFP is an experienced publisher putting a lot of effort into their physical books.  It's fair to expect the maps and text to be a little tighter.

This was LFP0096 out of the new releases.  Going in order, the next one up is LFP0097 - Temple of the Wurm.  It looks quite strange - looking forward to discussing that one!

Review: The Yellow Book of Brechewold

And now for something completely different…

The Yellow Book of Brechewold answers the question, "What if Jack Vance wrote Harry Potter as a sequel to T.H. White's The Once and Future King?"  It's quite different from anything else in the LOTFP catalog.  It might also be one of the best LOTFP books in recent memory.

The Yellow Book of Brechewold (TYBOB) is both a setting and a framework for running a campaign therein.  In the years after Merlyn and Arthur have left the stage of mythic England, an eccentric castle sits atop a large dungeon.  It acts as a school of magic for promising students, replete with a headmaster and tutors, providing a place for magic users, clerics, and elves to pursue strange subjects and go on fantastic quests.

A Brechewold campaign is organized around the academic year.  There are 13 different tutors with varying courses of study for the players to select each term.  You're not actually roleplaying out the school year unless that floats your boat - the tutors are patrons who can provide rumors and quest goals, and the players will have a good set of ideas to plan interesting adventures for themselves in the sandbox.  There are 70-80 rumors available, running the gamut from recovering lost magic items and treasures, discovering hidden chambers in the dungeons, and even some skullduggery and mischief.  A Brechewold campaign anticipates the players will embark on one main adventure per term; two grand adventures per academic year, and 8 adventures over the course of their 4 years at the school.  The adventures could take the players through a 6 level dungeon beneath the castle (some 100 rooms) or into the hexes of the surround wilds where there are another 25 locations.

Stylistically the setting blends wonder and whimsy with a splash of the weird and picaresque.   The tutors are eccentric schemers and manipulators like characters from the Dying Earth series; the wilderness is straight out of British folklore and T.H. White, with knight-errants, geas-bestowing Faerie knights, and legendary figures of Arthurian myth.   Examples of the style:  there's a portal to Mars where two skeletal dwarves have been forced to forge a legendary Merlyn-killing sword for 100 years, enslaved by a sentient star.  There are humorous encounter locales, like the Shrine of St Pancras the patron saint of inferiority complexes, or tongue-in-cheek magic items like the Debate Club - if you knock someone out with it, you win the argument.

As with many OSR works, there are random tables to generate plenty of variable content - generators for demons, knight-errants, faerie knights, other students, and dungeon and wilderness encounters.  The descriptions are OSR-sparse and on the minimalist side.  Here is a sample encounter, the tomb of a ghost professor in the dungeons who now takes the form of a six-legged elf-bug hybrid, The Entomologist:

TYBOB comes across as a labor of love where the creator (Matt Strom) wrote it, did the artwork, and even made the maps by hand. That's perhaps my only complaint - those dang maps!  There's no grid nor map scale to any of them, an affront to my war-gaming nature.  There's a definite taste palate in the OSR that treasures artistic hand-drawn maps with clever annotations right on the maps themselves, but it's not my preferred style.  (The rest of this setting is good enough I will get over myself).  To give you an idea, here's a snippet of a map:

I'm a big fan of this book, and I will absolutely look for an opportunity to bust it out for an upcoming game - that may not be long with the way my Greyhawk campaign is going!  Full disclosure about my gushing enthusiasm for this one - I am predisposed to loving this kind of setting.  Back during the Mystara period of classic D&D, The Principalities of Glantri were always my favorite gazetteer.  T.H. White's The Once and Future King was one of those formative books I read during high school, and I've read it several times with fondness.  With 3 children, I can't count how many times my wife or myself read the Harry Potter series to the kids out loud when they were younger, or were forced to endure the movies (again and again).  Then there's Jack Vance and the picaresque characters of The Dying Earth.  I come by a fondness for Brechenwold's material naturally, and if you like these influences as I do, you probably will like Brechewold as well.

If you're a long time LOTFP fan, this one doesn't court controversy with edgy themes or norm-busting artwork.  No demon cocks or butt-faces, you maniacs!  It captures a tone of whimsy and chivalry with splashes of the weird, and perhaps that why it's norm-busting for LOTFP - it's the LOTFP book that deserves to have a broader appeal in the wider OSR-o-Sphere.

I was able to get my hands on a preview copy, and like all the hardbacks made from the Lamentations of the Flame Princess imprint, the physical book is high quality with a cloth bookmark (looks smyth-sewn to me with stitched pages, but I'm sure a bibliophile can confirm).  This book comes in at 160 pages and is one of the heftier LOTFP books outside of Carcosa or the adventure anthologies.  I'm expecting it to be available today (August 11th) on the EU webstore, shortly followed by a PDF release on DrivethruRPG.  I'll update this post with links to both places (and prices) as they become available.  

Edit:  Here is the link to the LOTFP EU webstore (€ 38.50 for print and pdf):  The Yellow Book of Brechewold.  Hopefully gets added to DriveThru and US store soon...

There you go - reading Brechewold ends my week on a high point.  I highly recommend checking it out.  Like King Pellinore himself, I'm continuing my quixotic quest to review every LOTFP book on the planet, with another new one in the queue for next week - the Meanderings of the Mine Mind.

LOTFP Review: Curse of the Daughterbrides

I could stop the review right there.

Take an unhealthy dollop of Craster (the incest guy with all the daughter-wives from Game of Thrones), add in the involuntary suicide theme from M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, and a couple of birds flipped from the FU Guy, and you get the gist of Curse of the Daughterbrides.  If that's not your jam, you can pass on this one.

However, I subjected myself to reading it, so I'll soldier on and share an actual review.

I've read and played a fair number of Call of Cthulhu scenarios, as well as derivatives like Trail of Cthulhu and Delta Green, and there exists a slice of horror scenarios that force the players to make terrible moral choices to forestall a greater horror.  There are yet other scenarios that strip the players of agency at points - maybe they become unreliable narrators or monsters themselves.  Curse of the Daughterbrides establishes such a situation, in media res, that combines both motifs - terrible choices and a looming loss of agency.  It is a genre removed from the tropes of agency-based D&D and the expectations of fantasy gaming and sits firmly in the horror genre.

The situation is a fiasco… a bothersome wizard (Neythan Liddicoat) discovered the creepy incest guy (Daveth Nancarrow) and his entourage of off-putting "daughterbrides" in a village.  Nancarrow carries a curse and prophecy that drives him to breed with his offspring, and the curse has made his weird daughter-wives resistant to magic.  When the meddlesome wizard manufactures a spell to kill all the Nancarrows, it backfires on the villagers instead , who go on a horrific spree of killing themselves in gruesome detail.  Enter the players, visiting the pastoral and remote village of Dammell Green on festival day, and discovering the collateral damage that recently unfolded.  The player characters will get infected by the curse if they explore the village, and then become aware that coming into proximity with another sentient being will trigger the player character's own deaths by suicide.  Revelers and festival goers from the surrounding countryside continue to meander towards the village, creating existential threats for the players.  The only way to survive is to kill or drive off anyone that tries to approach, before they get too close.  It is a grim situation.

By default, there is no way to break the curse.  The scenario is meant to be a one-shot that kills all the characters (a TPK) after the players witness scene after scene of vivid self-inflicted death, until they eventually succumb to their own bleak fate.  The author (James Raggi IV, publisher of Lamentations of the Flame Princess) describes it like this - "Just a shit situation to get stuck in the middle of, and not much hope of getting out of.  Suffer."  In case some callous referee wanted to add this to an ongoing campaign (??), he does provide some optional ideas on how to break the suicide curse.

If you're in the market for a no-win scenario with a gruesome subject matter and themes of incest, well then this might be an adventure for you.  I'm sure there are fans of the horror genre that would find this one a rollicking good time.  There are bleak movies that embrace moral horror and hopelessness, and there's a precedent in other game systems of bringing that experience to the tabletop medium.  There's a certain liberation during Call of Cthulhu scenarios when the players know everyone is doomed, and they try to do the best job possible anyway, in the face of certain death.  Ultimately I'd characterize this scenario as a genre-bending art piece unlikely to have utility in most traditional agency-based campaigns, but might find an audience amongst such horror devotees.  Any Delta Green/LOTFP cross-over players out there?  That would be a strange Venn diagram.

This is not a hefty book - it's 24 pages, describes a small village where all the citizens have killed themselves, and provides background information on the Wizard Liddicoat and the Nancarrow Clan.  Despite the short length I found it a tough read - the death scenes of the villagers are numbing, and the incestuous daughter-wives are off-putting.  The author, James Raggi, writes an introduction where he shares how traumatic elements of his personal life found expression in the scenario.  I hope he's in a better place in his life now.  To the extent a written piece can convey the artist's emotional message and act as self-therapy, this book seems successful in that regard.

Would I ever run this one?  It seems unlikely.  I'm not planning any bleak horror games, nor have cleared the subject matter (trigger warnings) with any players.  If I were to run it, I'd make the suicide curse run out by sunrise the next day - I like the idea of the "dawn of a new day" wiping out lingering malign enchantments.  Could the players survive the long night?  Both Liddicoat and the Nancarrows would be targets for the surviving players to clean up the mess.

Hopefully this review gives you some advance warning on the type of game where this could work.  It's available for $4.99 here at DriveThruRPG: Curse of the Daughterbrides.

LOTFP Review: Just a Stupid Dungeon

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.

LOTFP Review: Bee-Ware!

Let's get back to looking at the Lamentations of the Flame Princess (LOTFP) catalog - the next book is called Bee-Ware!  Note:  there shall be spoilers.  It's been a few weeks since I reviewed Magic Eater.  I took a few weeks out to see a lot of Grateful Dead music at live venues (Dead & Company) with 30,000 of my good friends.  It was great fun.  But now it's time to take off the tie-dye shirts and birkenstocks, put away those good vibrations, and dress up like black-clad edgelords and dredge up some angsty LOTFP feelings.  Let's see what Bee-Ware is all about.

Bee-Ware is about honey, and mead, and a bunch of people that just want to be left alone in their insular village of Ambersham to brew and sell their really good mead.  They're hippy libertarians, live and let live - the type of people who'd have Be Kind bumper stickers (Bee Kind) on their VW vans.  Maybe the Grateful Dead universe and the LOTFP universe aren't so far apart.  I'm not feeling the edgelord from this one.

However, the bee-kind folk of Ambersham do have a dangerous secret… they are all shape-changing bee-people.  Beecanthropes, if you will.  They can transform from dour zero level bee keepers and farmers into 4HD player killers wielding terrifying save-or-die poison stingers.  There's a lot of villagers, and they're all very deadly - except if they use their stingers, they die as well, just like real bees.  Murder isn't their preferred option.

That's the essence of the adventure - Bee-Ware is a setting about a remote village full of deadly monsters that don't want to do any monstering.  The players can make an alliance with the leader of the bee people, they can go into business together, they can try to burn it all to the ground, or they can explore a ruined house near the village and discover from whence the bee people's power emanates.  There is a trapped, extra-dimensional swarm entity in the ruined house, which empowers the village leader and through her, the bee people.  The players can assemble spell-fragments recovered from within the ruined house to make a spell that can banish the swarm entity and de-power everyone.  The inside of the ruined house has a fun 1970's Dr. Strange vibe - a blend of Kirby dots, Ditko astral spaces, and weird geography.

These two monster hunters are ready to wreck your plans!

There are a few wrinkles to the adventure.  There are two bona fide monster hunters camped out near the village, certain that there is skullduggery afoot in Ambersham.  They can easily be played as psychopathic murder hobos (ie, holding a mirror up to the typical player party) and can be excellent triggers to disrupt whatever sensible course of action the players choose.  There are also a few anti-social villagers who can act as spoilers too.  Lest I forget, there is a local franchise of the Dog & Bastard tavern, and Geoff has managed to be imprisoned in Ambersham as well (if anyone out there is collecting all the Geoffs - and why wouldn't you be? - you'll need to plan a trip to Ambersham).

Bee-Ware is 50 pages.  The art and writing is by Kelvin Green - which means there are plenty of jokes and puns.  For instance, one of the monster hunters is Rimsky Korsakov… also the name of the composer of Flight of the Bumblebee.  I'd like to say Kelvin's use of puns is improving, but as we all know puns aren't mature until they're full groan.

I do like this adventure quite a bit.  It presents a curious locale and situation, with open-ended options, and is easy to put into a sandbox setting to ferment into something sweet.  My overall sense of Kelvin's style is to present scenarios that strike a balance between horror, comedy, and fiasco, which is a great aspiration for our D&D style games, so I'm predisposed to liking adventures such as this.  As usual for latter day LOTFP, it assumes a 1630 pseudo-historical setting (17th century England in this one) but there's very little in the adventure module that would need to change to transpose it to any bog-standard fantasy setting.  Like "Magic Eater" from last review, this one is an unqualified keeper - I'm recommending it.  You can grab the PDF over here at DriveThru:  Bee-Ware!

Next up, we'll take a look at "Just a Stupid Dungeon" by the legend himself.  I'm using a LOTFP checklist to go from the most recent publications backwards, so there is another book on the list with the high-falutin title "Beware the Mindfuck!" that wasn't available on DriveThruRPG.  (Shocking they wouldn't carry that one).  So we'll have to forego being "mindfucked" for now.  Use your imagination about what you could be missing.  We'll settle for plumbing the recesses of a "stupid dungeon" instead.  Bee seeing you.