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.

Catching Up with the Pillories (York 1630 Campaign)

 I've been away a while - 6 weeks!  I have several alter egos, in one of them I lead a global IT department and spent the last month of the year focused on "landing the plane" - making sure we delivered annual commitments and finished the critical projects.  Then the kids came home from college (I have two in college right now!  A senior and a freshman) and then it was off to Mexico to spend time with the hippies on the beach at a music festival (another persona).  But table top gaming continued apace, it was only the blogging that fell by the wayside.  Now the year has started afresh, the rum and tequila have worn off, the tie dyes are put away, let's look at what's been going on with our Lamentations of the Flame Princess York campaign.

Since it's been a while, here is the cast of characters: they've named themselves The Pillories, and include Allister (an Oxford scholar who used the library's forbidden books section during his tenure there to learn charms and enchantments); Father Blackburn, a Solomon Kane-like puritan monster hunter; Remi Knotwise - a halfling burglar; Yuri - an elf wanderer from Central Europe; Toby and Wood, two war veterans and former bandits, now henchmen (a thief and fighter, respectively).  I've kept demi-humans in my alternate 1630's setting.  Halflings are creatures of comfort that live in southeastern England, although some are employed keeping the gardens at Cambridge.  Elves are ill-trusted creatures of sorcery, banished to the dark woods of Eastern Europe and unwelcome in Christian society.  Yuri spends most of his time disguising himself.  We haven't met any dwarves yet in-game.

The character along the bottom - left to right:  Wood, Allister, Remi the halfling, Yuri the elf, Toby, and finally Father Blackburn

These players were all new to Lamentations of the Flame Princess, so the campaign has been set-up as a bit of a "greatest hits sandbox".  The first adventure they did was Tower of the Stargazer, out on the Yorkshire Moors.  They learned of a mysterious patron, "The Doctor", who collects oddities and curiosities.  They were lured north and west to a challenging puzzle dungeon called The Grinding Gear.  The last game report was about halfway through The Grinding Gear (all the previous ones are here:  York 1630 game).

The Grinding Gear Wrap-Up

There's a point half-way through The Grinding Gear where the party can become trapped in the dungeon, and it's critical the group has been keeping records of food, water, and light resources.  This isn't a game like 5E with infinite light or "we're all mutants with darkvision"; darkness is an actual obstacle and the players need light to solve puzzles and escape the dungeon.  When the Pillories got trapped they had 2 days of water, rations, and 16 hours of oil for their lantern, and a small number of torches.

If the players have been reasonably astute along the way, navigating The Grinding Gear's remaining puzzles isn't terribly difficult.  Early on in the campaign, they adopted the practice of avid note-taking, using a shared Google sheet to track marching orders, supplies, XP totals, handouts, in-game notes, etc, and it's really helped with game recaps and memory.

However, my players couldn't resist playing the organ, they were sure something good would happen - see the picture below.  It could've been worse; several characters were rendered deaf for a few hours, but the effects weren't permanent.

Play that organ!

Beyond the puzzles, there's a trick sarcophagus that hides something important, captured here in another sketch by one of the players.  All-in-all, the Pillories were able to escape the Grinding Gear with 8 hours of cushion on their light sources, having found the principal rewards left behind by the dungeon creator, Garvin Richrom.  (Garvin Richrom will be a recurring character in the campaign, there's a lot that can be done with him).

Yuri and the sarcophagus

The LOTFP rules enable magic-users and clerics to write scrolls in their downtime, and The Pillories have discovered the benefits of investing profits into their library, which enables scroll writing, so downtime between adventures is not idle time.

The Downtime Interlude

There were several items founds in The Grinding Gear that the players didn't know how to use right away; the magic users needed to research and develop an Identify spell, and then there was trial and error to figure out the command words.  For instance, they had recovered a wand that belonged to the Medieval alchemist Sylvanus Fulgur; with Identify, they learned the wand could paralyze or immobilize a target.  Fulgur's manuscripts were in Latin and Greek, so Allister spent weeks working through all the different ways a Medieval alchemist might say "freeze" to find the triggering combination to activate the wand.  At one point he was luring in destitute people off the streets of York to practice on them.  "Would you like a sandwich, you look hungry?  Just step into my parlor while I point this innocuous looking shaft of rowan at you."

Allister trying to figure out the command word

Father Blackburn learned the workings of a gnarled staff of almond, like that carried by an Old Testament prophet.  In fact it was a staff of healing, and each time he uses it, his hair and beard grow long and flowy like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments.  So he carries it but hasn't used it much.

Also during the interlude, they met The Doctor.  I've introduced The Doctor as an actual physician, apothecary, and lecturer at Cambridge, in addition to a collector of rare curiosities.  He hosted the player characters at his estate near Harrogate, where he studies the healing property of the nearby baths.  His time in the library at Cambridge brought a reference to a pre-Roman cult that had discovered the secret of immortality, that which eluded his Medieval predecessors, and was looking for a book that contained a reference to the location of the cult.  Correspondence between two 16th century bishops alluded to a place of safe-keeping beneath an English church, from before the Dissolution of the Monasteries.  He wanted the player characters to be his agents in finding the church, discovering if there actually was a secret store of hidden books beneath it, and finding the book in question.

The Doctor:  apothecary, madman, flautist

He showed them an arcane symbol they could expect to find on the cover:

The players spent some time calculating costs for the expedition - per diem for the overland trip to Dover and back, and reasonable wages.  The Doctor is only interested in the death book; if they find other treasures beneath the old church, they can claim salvage rights.  Of course he'll disavow them if they get caught breaking any laws.  Furthermore, he expects the death book (Loqui Mortuis) to point towards the mountaintop stronghold where the Romans overthrew the death cult that was terrorizing the surrounding highlands.  There could be further opportunities for the players on such an expedition to western Scotland if they handle this part of the operation well.  A deal was struck, and our characters set out for Dover.

If you know the LOTFP canon well, you'll recognize the pre-Roman death cult as an arrow pointing towards the adventure Death Frost Doom; the items sequestered beneath a church in the English countryside lead to the adventure The God that Crawls; the Doctor himself is the mastermind behind Kelvin Greene's Strict Time Records Must Be Kept, although perhaps that adventure is still some way in the future.

This is a good-sized recap for today, we'll resume with how the players have been faring in The God That Crawls.  Spoiler:  It's been great fun.  We'll be back soon.