Tower of the Stargazer Game Report - York 1630

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes

I had a core group of friends in high school who all played games together - we played D&D, Chill, MERP and Rolemaster, Traveler, all sorts of stuff that was around back in the late 1980's.  I haven't seen a few of them in a long time - 20 years!  We reconnected earlier this summer and were musing "Wouldn't it be fun to fire up a game again?"  I knew one of the guys, Dave, shares my love of horror and the weird - they agreed to do a LOTFP one-shot.  It took a month or so to get the schedules to line up, but we finally ran our reunion game last weekend.  I was having trouble getting our Greyhawk ACKS game fired up anyway due to summer vacations and travel, so this was a great weekend for a pick-up game.

The group made characters during the week after a "session zero" discussion - they brought Blackburn, a Solomon Kane-like cleric; Allister a magic-user from London; Edmund, the burglar; Remy Knotwise, the halfling of Essex.  I'm putting the game in 1630 York in England.  Yorkshire and the northern coast has been on my travel bucket list forever, and it seems like the desolate north of England would be fine for placing a LOTFP adventure.

Billy Brewer, aka Willy the Fox, or Billy B, the local crime boss, who is always referred to as "Mr. William Brewer" in his presence, often arranges things for wealthy patrons, and one of his benefactors, The Doctor, had seen an art piece a long time ago in his youth in the parlor of a tower out on the moors.  It was the former home of an acquaintance who had disappeared many years ago, and the Doctor wanted to know if the art piece could be salvaged and brought to him - he was a collector of rare things.  The tower was out on the moors, away from well-traveled routes.  Mr Brewer would send a few of his thugs along as muscle and furniture movers, along with a horse and cart, but there were enough rumors about the "old wizard" that used to own the place, he wanted to hire several specialists in the occult to accompany his superstitious goons.  Thus, the players came to meet each other and have a job.

By this time, the published adventure Tower of the Stargazer has been out in the wilds for 13 years and is well-known as a fine introductory adventure.  I'm sure you know all about it, so I'll elide many of the details and just focus on the interesting bits that happened.  (And if you're a referee and don't own it already, why don't you have it?  It's great).

Our first casualty was right on the doorstep.  The players performed a search around the door, verified there didn't appear to be any traps, and the thief/specialist (Edmund) boldly grabbed the door handle to shove it open.  The magically trapped handle became a serpent, reared around to bite him, and he died when he failed his saving throw.  Remy, the halfling, said "Perhaps we should knock…" grabbed a spear, lifted one of the door knockers with the spear tip, and watched with a sense of accomplishment as a loud gong reverberated through the valley and the doors magically swung open.

I had everyone make several characters as a contingency, so Edmund's player used the gong sound echoing across the highlands as a contrivance for his replacement character to come investigate the area, and thus Yuri the Elf would soon join the adventure.

The statue the players sought was in the second room, so Brewer's thugs got to work with ropes, block, and tackle, to maneuver it out of the tower and safely stow it on the wagon.  The players began exploring the abandoned tower.  The terms of their employment specified they could salvage anything out of the tower to keep for themselves after securing the statue.  However, if any of Brewer's goons went with them and died, they'd owe a death-benefit to the crime lord out of their share.  They found several trap doors in the floor not far from where the statue was found, and began exploring the basement.

One of the rooms down there is a workshop with operating tables, dissected critters, and a human corpse with a bulbous abdomen, stitched back together with golden threads.  One of the players even said, "This is all wrong - it's going to be John Carpenter's The Thing and turn into a giant maw and start chomping us".  But then the player noticed the corpse was stitched with gold, real golden thread, and caution was thrown to the wind in the interest of loot.

Everyone freaked out with horror mixed with laughter when the animated guts of the corpse started choking Allister, their magic user.  Dave is an artist and posted this sketch shortly after the session, capturing the corpse mayhem:

No one died by asphyxiation, although Allister did almost get choked out.  In the meantime, a couple of Brewer's goons were poking around the lab, too.  The goons were named Barty White, Lucky J, and Zach.  Barty had stayed topside with the horse and cart, but Zach and Lucky J came in to explore with the players.  Zach went to investigate a hallway of mirrors, got promptly sucked into some kind of mirror of life trapping (he looked like General Zod in the phantom zone) and Lucky J tried smashing the mirror to get his buddy out.  Unfortunately that didn't bring Zach back.  That led Dave to make the quote of the night, "Lamentations of the Flame Princess - play stupid games and win stupid prizes."

The players figured out how to work the tower's elevator and made it to the lowest level, where the actual treasure chests were protected by various force fields across a large room.  After a lot of trial and error and frustration dealing with the levers and the different on/off modes, they still hadn't figured out an effective way to negotiate these barriers, and gave up in disgust.  By this point Allister, their magic user, had shocked himself into unconsciousness, and the others decided discretion was the better part of valor, and they would just have to give up on the treasure room and head back to town.

On the way up the elevator, the halfling became curious if the elevator went to a secret spot on the first floor.  He found himself on the third floor instead, face to face with the wizard of the tower, trapped in a thaumaturgic circle of some kind and frozen in time.  There was a hilarious conversation between the halfling and the wizard, as the halfling figured out the wizard was trapped and kept saying, "keep talking, keep talking, I'm listening…" while he rooted around in the wizard's stuff, shoving anything that looked remotely valuable into a large sack (including a 5,000sp "star gem").  That particular scene ended with the wizard howling in helpless rage at the thievery, while the halfling scooted off into the elevator yelling "YOLO, sucker !!!" and escaping with a large bag of loot.

So they missed out on the treasure vault, but salvaged their night with their halfling's daring exploits.  Back in town they'd have to forfeit some of their pay to offset losing Brewer's man Zach, but overall it was a successful first adventure. 

The game rules were very well received (and why not, LOTFP rules are great), the players liked the different vibe of early modern, and the focus on exploration and puzzles interspersed with moments of dread that characterize good LOTFP adventures.  Great fun was had all around.

We had had a "session zero" during the prior week where we talked about character generation.  The question of keeping demi-humans in the game came up.  We ultimately decided to keep them in the setting and play up the idea that they were rare but possible; halflings were a well-known English phenomenon in the south of England, near Kent.  Dwarves were uncommon, but rumored to live in the mountains of Scandinavia.  Elves had left the British Isles centuries ago for some unknown faerie land, but the dark forests of Eastern Europe still had rumored settlements of Earth-bound elves with slavic names and heavy accents.  Thus the player's elf character became "Yuri", a wanderer from a distant land.  (He still has some work to do to explain Yuri's presence in the Yorkshire Moors…)

Sufficient fun was had that they implored me to make this a semi-frequent game, so I'll be running a York-based LOTFP campaign 1-2 times a month, in or around when we don't get together for Greyhawk.  So this won't be the last time you hear about these particular characters or their exploits.  Incidentally, anyone know of a good hex map of Ye Olde Merry Englande?

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.

The Licorice Eaters

August 9th marks the end of "the days between", an 8-day period where Deadheads (fans of the Grateful Dead) reminisce or celebrate the impact of the band.  Jerry Garcia was born on August 1st (1942) and died on August 9th (1995) and the period is named for a melancholic and nostalgic piece called Days Between.  There's a groovy boho town nearby called New Hope, where a gallery featured a free exhibit with a bunch of Jerry artwork, visiting that was my nod this year to marking the "days between".

I don't expect people outside of America to know the Grateful Dead - shoot, most Americans have forgotten about this particular subculture.  But the Dead did something back in the 70's that energized a following that shows no signs of diminishing.  They gave their sound away.

With a few exceptions, the Dead studio albums are not particularly good.  Their magic comes from live performances.  Every show has a unique set list.  Songs are played differently from night to night - solos are different, arrangements are different, they experimented on stage.  The Dead's formula fused psychedelic improvisation and jazz to traditional roots music like blues, folk, country, and bluegrass to create a distinct and new thing.  People started sneaking recording equipment into the shows to catch that lightning in a bottle and relive or share what was otherwise a transient experience.  As befitting a band built on libertarian ideals of freedom and expression, they weren't interested in policing this taping activity.  "The shows are never the same, ever. . . . and when we’re done with it, they can have it."  In fact, by the 1980's, there was a formal section behind the sound booth on the floor that was reserved at Dead shows for the tapers to set up their audio recording equipment.

An entire non-commercial sub-community sprung up within the Dead sub-culture around copying and sharing tapes, fan to fan.  The Internet Archive and Relisten both have some 17,000 recordings* of the Dead shows from the 1960's until 1995 that have been digitized by tapers and posted online for anyone to listen.  All free.

To be fair, there is also commercial activity that's keeping the scene alive - the Dead's record label still releases re-mastered and cleaned up versions of concerts a couple of times a year, from higher quality recordings patched directly from the sound boards, and that's what you can hear on streaming platforms like Apple, Spotify, or Nugs.net as Grateful Dead Road Trips, Download Series, or Dick's Picks, named after one of their archivists (Dick Latvala).  You're paying for quality.  (As an aside, I recommend Nugs for anyone that loves modern live music and jam bands, but if that's your kicks you probably already know about it).

Something else has happened because the music is about performances and not studio work.  The songs evolve.  It's an open invitation to do your own thing.  Everyone who played with the band or a side project has put their touch on the music - you can hear Dead songs played by touring acts like Dark Star Orchestra and Joe Russo's Almost Dead; in my area there are like 15 Dead cover bands that do the bar circuit in and around Philadelphia.  Dead & Company, with John Mayer and several Dead members, just finished a sold-out ballpark tour in the states that was extremely good.  Several days a week you can go have a beer and a burger or ribs and catch a Dead tribute band in your area - like I said, there are over a dozen around Philadelphia, and every state has them.  Some of the Philly ones are quite good.

Jerry had a quote: "If I work as hard as I can in my life, I may be able to end up building this thing that nobody can tear down after I'm dead."  This train is still chugging along.

Maybe it's unnatural or a forced comparison to compare the Dead scene to roleplaying games and early D&D?  They were both fronted by 70's icons with beards?  The OGL, and through it the OSR, opened the door to allow community sharing that captured similar egalitarian and communal spirits as the tapers and the cover bands.  There was a heady sense of freedom and creativity in the early OSR, and a great sharing of ideas.  Think of the interesting projects this scene has produced, whether it's one page dungeons, Hydra co-op, D23, or Prince's funny "no artpunk" collections.  There is commercial activity, too - many retro clones offer free rules, but you'll pay for quality if you want nice printed editions with art.

I don't keep up with all the permutations of new retro clone rules, but people are still cranking them out.  Does anyone follow all the new adventures that are published?  It feels like an ocean.  I try to keep tabs on what Bryce is looking at, and I get the sense it's a fraction of what's actually out there - just waves lapping on the shore.  I'm generally a positive, glass half full kind of person to start with, but this feels like a healthy scene with a lot going on, even if it is a bit decentralized and chaotic, with different centers of gravity.  Tenkar still has his crowd, there's the Dragonsfoot people, Pundit's place, the old school conventioners, some Discorders and Substackers sprouting up here and there.  Not a booming scene, but a scene that has weathered controversies and kerfuffles and has settled into a mostly even keel.

I have tasted of newer iterations of the game, and they've left me wanting - they're not licorice.  I'm glad an OSR scene was still here to come back and experience.

Later tonight when I'm pouring a bourbon or scotch to reflect on another "days between", I'll also tip one for the OSR and the folks out there still doing good, creative work and keeping this scene alive.  Cheers all.

*Footnote:  the Dead performed some 2300 concerts over their 30 year run, but since any given concert could have been recorded by several tapers, that's why there can be 17,000 recordings in the internet archive.

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.

The Lamentations Hype Machine - New Dungeons Incoming

JR 4 put a video together discussing new releases for Lamentations of the Flame Princess.  I like the format - the two Jims manifesting the internal dialogue between good business sense versus creative freedom.  That seems to be the whole ballgame for LOTFP:

There should be a lot of new books to review as this material hits DriveThruRPG or I get my hands on some physical copies.  Somewhere along the way I heard this wave includes lots of dungeons that hearken back to the early days of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and that is welcome news.  It's a really good rules set, but LOTFP is strongest when it builds on standard tropes and gives them a two-handed shove through the doorway into The Weird.

I saw some social media posts from James where he said the last convention - Ropecon - had the highest sales ever since he's been attending it.  That's really interesting,  Gencon is this weekend - I have a buddy going who may try to pick up a few books for me.  I could be delusional about the underlying cause, but it seems like WOTC's OGL kerfuffle energized people to check out alternate games (including OSR publishers).  Alexander Macris, the ACKS creator, has been plugging away at an updated version of ACKS.  We should see that this summer.

Stay tuned - I'm looking forward to seeing a return by LOTFP to weird dungeons.  I'm working on a review of Curse of the Daughterbrides but should be able to see some new stuff next week and gauge for myself.  Anyone out there in the EU had a chance to see any of the new books in person?

Post Script:  

I was visiting some in-laws near Kentucky and saw that my entire blog was blocked by their ISP.  I could see it when I connect to cellular.  I don't even think there's anything controversial here, maybe an instance of foul language?  This is exactly why we need to fight censorship and battle against the suppression of ideas - and support our small publishers.  I'm with the banned.

ACKS Game Report: The Beatings Shall Continue Until Play Improves

Fantasy life has been rough for the Temple of Elemental Evil crew.  They lost several henchmen in these sessions.  The beatings shall continue until play improves!

Their first loss was difficult to avoid.  They've been camped near the river in the Gnarley Forest, emerging from the woods to explore the Temple of Elemental Evil.  They use canoes to cross a small river on their way to the Temple.  River encounters are always in play.  This particular river encounter involved a Naiad, surfacing in the early morning when Cormac and Dunne went down to the river to fetch water for the camp.

A beautiful half-garbed waif broke the surface of the river, water dripping from her silky tresses.  Cormac's jaw dropped open in amazement as he fell victim to her charms.  Dunne was further back, and rushed to the bank to help, but he succumbed to her whammy as well.  Cormac was bestowed water breathing as the Naiad lured him away into the watery depths (to serve her for a year).  The players pointed out there are worse ways to lose a henchman.  Not equipped or interested in pursuing a rescue, Dunne wrote a message for Cormac, sealed it in an empty bottle, and left it  stuck in some tree roots nearby, against the day Cormac returned from his year of "service" - whatever Naiads do with their handsome servants - washing the dishes and folding the towels and similar house chores, I'm sure.

Once the matter with Cormac's abduction was settled, the group decided they wanted to go back to town.  They had learned in a previous adventure someone named "Gremag" had hired brigands to seek out their camp, and the only Gremag they knew was an employee or partner at the trading post in Hommlet.  Time to go back to town and ask some questions.

By this time, they have accumulated plenty of horses and a few wagons in the camp, so they left with a wagon, draft horses, and a bunch of riding horses, making it to Hommlet later in the same day.  The players took care of  "town stuff" and also checked in with the lord of Hommlet, the magic user Burne.  (Lord Burne has granted them permission to rebuild the moathouse as a future base).  Burne reminded them Hommlet was a village of laws, and there would be no vigilante action - they could bring Gremag into custody and have him imprisoned, but they need to confirm they have the right man first.  Luckily, they had spared "Captain Stephen" the leader of the brigands, and he was working with the players - he could identify Gremag.  The players hatched a plot!

Dunne, who lives in Hommlet as a distiller of spirits, sold whiskey to the traders, was a known business contact of them, and was not known to be an associate of the adventurers.  They decided Dunne would be the one to pay a normal visit to the trading post, while an "invisible" Captain Stephen (under an invisibility spell) would identify Gremag from outside the window.  The other players, mounted, would be in the vicinity of the trading post as required.  Afterwards, everyone would regroup at Dunne's house.

The exchange between Dunne and the two traders, Rannos Davl and Gremag, eventually grew strained.  Dunne kept trying to pump them for information, and they were suspicious about why he's been out of the village so long.  He did learn there was a peddler in town (Bob the Peddler) and they were irritated because Bob was undercutting them - Bob was staying at the inn.  Eventually Dunne left and confirmed with Captain Stephen that Gremag the Trader is the same man who hired Stephen and the brigands in Nulb, and off they went to Dunne's house to rendezvous.  The other players quickly rode to Dunne's house behind him, and everyone dismounted and went inside.  There was no subtlety.

There was an awkward moment when the players realized Dunne's house was just down the street from the trader's.  The groomsman and guard in the yard had a clear line of  sight the whole time, as a large gang of heavily armored dudes descended on Dunne's place (undermining some elements of the story Dunne just told the traders).  Oops.

The players decided they needed to go the traders as soon as they had a credible attack plan and arrest Gremag - so they started scheming.  Spugnoir would throw a Sleep spell in through an open window and the players would go with the frontal assault.  When the players actually busted their way in, the minions were asleep (the groom and mercenary) but Rannos was behind the counter, looking irritated.  No sign of Gremag.  (I'm not even sure the players made the connection that Rannos wasn't asleep because he was too  high level…)

"Gremag left in a hurry, it was the darndest thing… almost like he was fleeing!  Has he been caught up in some nasty business?", Rannos asked innocently.  Anyway, the players just missed Gremag, and Rannos was a smooth operator.  As the players were leaving, the paladin asked if he could detect evil on Rannos… in ACKS, detect evil works on humans if they have a chaotic alignment and evil intentions towards the caster.  Rannos's aura flashed evil to the paladin!  A bad guy got one over on them.  The paladin deemed he had no basis to attack Rannos, but he'd be on guard going forward.

It was too late to go back to camp so the players got rooms in the inn (in most cases a player character split a room with his or her henchperson).  Shakti's room had a bed for her and Sana and a cot for Captain Stephen.  When they awoke the next day, Captain Stephen was dead!  He'd been murdered in his sleep - his throat cut.  They players started an investigation but didn't get very far.  They eventually bought a lot of stuff from the garrulous and easy going "Bob the Peddler" who was also staying at the inn; they buried Captain Stephen outside of town and left Hommlet for their camp, eager to return to the dungeon before the end of the game session.

It's possible some of my players scan the blog from time to time, so I won't say how Captain Stephen was murdered.  DM's secret.

Later that game session, tragedy struck in the dungeon.  They entered a room where a portcullis trap fell at the entrance, splitting the party - the first two ranks of characters (the fighters) were in the vaulted chamber, while the support guys stuck on the far side of the portcullis.  Two of the player characters sprinted towards a door in the south of the vaulted chamber, to quickly see if there was a winch or lever in the room - whoops, it was full of ghouls.  The next round, the harpies up near the ceiling started singing.

So here's the situation - two fighters are standing in the doorway of a room containing 6 ghouls; the ghouls are alert because of the sound of the crashing portcullis.  Two more characters are still by the portcullis.  The other four characters are stuck on the far side of the portcullis.  Everyone had to make saves against the harpy songs, and half the group failed.  Both fighters in the doorway with the ghouls completely forgot about the undead once the harpies started yodeling… they turned their backs and started looking for the sound of those heavenly voices, somewhere lost in the columns high above.  Those two fighters fell quickly to a ghoul assault.  Ghoul paralysis is rough.

Some quick thinking by the players on the other side of the portcullis kept this from becoming a partial TPK.  Spugnoir, lost in the harpy-infused delirium, had two scrolls of protection vs undead (ward vs undead in ACKS terms) and a cooler headed character retrieved one and stuck it through the bars to Kayden, the thief on the other side.  Kayden was able to create a magic barrier against undead and push the monsters off the downed bodies of the fighters by moving into a defensive position near them.  He was joined by Killian, another henchman.

The ghouls were penned in their room by the ward vs undead, which now blocked the doorway, but the harpies fluttered down and attacked Killian and Kayden from the air.  Some of the characters back at the portcullis tried to shoot through the bars.  Kayden went down, the magic circle disappeared, and the ghouls were back in action, but the harpies were driven off or killed in the meantime, and the charm effects evaporated.  The trapped characters worked on lifting the portcullis.

Eventually, the second protection from undead scroll needed to be used to conjure a second barrier.  The henchman Killian had unwisely chosen to "rage" with the ACKS Berskergang feat, and he pursued the fleeing ghouls into the darkness against the player's better judgment.  He would eventually be slaughtered by the ghouls, outside of the safety of the magic circle.

Kayden was stabilized by the cleric, and the survivors decided to beat a retreat and regroup.  Mistakes were made this evening.

This was a tough one for the gang - 3 followers or henchmen gone.  Let's see how they bounce back next time!

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.