The Pillories Have Been Death Frost Doomed

Herein lies the tale of our abrupt and terrifying end to Death Frost Doom.  As if it could end any other way.

When we last met with The Pillories, their halfling, Remi Knotwise, had crawled through an air vent and landed in a hidden part of the dungeon, the tomb of an undead horror (the Exalted Inquisitor).  After realizing he was trapped in the tomb, and taking some horrendous internal and psychic damage from the Interrogator's questions-from-beyond-the-grave, he quaffed his potion of gaseous form and flew out of there (leaving all of his stuff in the room).

Over the course of a few game sessions, the players scrounged for clothing for Remi amongst the crypts.  Allister tried to use ESP on the jelly monster guarding the "well of souls" to find out its secrets, and went temporarily insane when he was assaulted by the anguished thoughts of all the souls trapped within the creature.  Instead of whacking the creature and continuing past it, they decided (once Allister recovered) they would follow Remi's path through the ceiling tunnel and go whack the Exalted Inquisitor instead.  The undead Inquisitor was whacked.  Remi collected his gear, the magic user "knocked" the door, and the players found themselves in a new part of the dungeon, the tombs of the "Greater Repugnances".  They made the fateful decision to go left.

Left brought them to the Tomb of the Blessed Afflictor, the undead commander of the legions buried within the mountain.  He appeared as a long-robed skeleton lord sitting on his throne, leering at them.  He showed off his freaky undead mind-powers by telekinetically slamming the door behind them so they were stuck in the room with them, horror-movie style.

Maximus, the name of the undead general, wanted them to swear an oath, first requesting him to raise his undead army, and then a promise from them to guide him to a large mortal city.  in return, he would swear not to harm any of them, directly or indirectly.  These oaths would break the powerful magic keeping him trapped within the mountain.

The priest, Father Blackburn, was first to speak - "We will never serve you, monster!"  His henchman, Geoff, drew his sword.  The undead lord hoisted Geoff into the air with a lift of his hand after Geoff failed a saving throw, and with a flick of the wrist, sent Geoff telekinetically smashing into the far wall with a sickening thud.  Geoff died instantly (he was only level 1, after all).

Initiative was formally rolled, and the monster went first - sucking Blackburn into his grasp via the telekinetic force pull, and telling the others it was not too late to stand down before he killed their priest.  The rest of the players froze!  Intimidated by the undead lord, they watched as Blackburn continued to squirm and resist, denying all the monster's overtures towards capitulation, until the thing grew tired of dialogue with the rebellious cleric and drained the life energy out of him!  It may not have been a glorious death but it was well-respected by the others, as Blackburn's player perished while staying strong for his ideals (knowing this was the campaign finale).  What a dramatic moment - this is why we play these games.  Remi, Yuri, and Allister each took a knee and agreed to help the undead lord escape the mountain.

Time seemed to distort as a nightmarish delirium descended on them... the monster escorted them to the Crypt of the Testifier, where supernatural oaths were spoken and sealed.  The jelly monster at the well of souls was ordered to dissolve, releasing the anguished souls of the dead.  Maximus's undead army was reformed.  The players reeled as if in a living nightmare when they beheld the legions vomiting out of the crypts.  The hungry dead from the frozen earth above them clawed their way out of the soil and rampaged down the mountain and into the high vales and valleys, overwhelming clan holds and besieging the village of Langholm.  These were the anguished victims of the cult, now turned into free-willed ghouls and hungry dead, desperate to eat the living.  There would be rumors for weeks to come, spread across Scotland and Northern England, of a strange plague across the northlands, causing its victims to waste away while infecting them with a horrible form of cannibalism.

Maximus ordered his army to fortify the mountain and close the passes, awaiting his return.  He needed to learn about this new world in the year 1630.  He collected the skin and clothing from Geoff back in the dungeon, consuming Geoff's likeness so he could pass as human once more.  The monster was pleased the characters would be taking him to York, a place he knew from Roman times when it was still called Eboracum.  He didn't mind that the characters claimed the campaign's "MacGuffin", a book of esoteric lore and knowledge that was on an altar by the Well of Souls.  Maximus had larger goals now.

The campaign ended when the group once again passed under the medieval gates of York.  The players felt the supernatural bonds of their oaths dissolve as they crossed the threshold to the city.  Maximus made to disappear amongst the busy streets, pausing briefly to look back at them over his shoulder and smiling from behind Geoff's stolen face and skin.  "Be seeing you."  He winked before flipping Geoff's hood over his head, and melted away into the crowd.

I'm not sure this is truly the end of The Pillories, but what a glorious and horrible way to part ways with our erstwhile heroes.  This group is going to undertake a gothic-themed Curse of Strahd campaign next (converted to Shadowdark), and that will keep us busy for some time.  Maybe I'll have The Great Virginia Disastrum read by then, and that could be our next LOTFP foray, a fun-filled trip to colonial Virginia.  But first, a nice vacation to Barovia.

 Be seeing you.

The Pillories in Death Frost Doom - The Crypt isn't Empty

Our cast of characters continues to explore Death Frost Doom (DFD), but the ending of last game session was perhaps one of my favorites.  First - about Death Frost Doom.  In the early OSR period (pre-2010), this stood out to me as an adventure that took D&D style gaming in a new direction.  Once I started running a game with my old high school friends, I knew this was an adventure that we'd work into the campaign, especially because they like the horror genre. In DFD, the players explore an ominous dungeon full of catacombs and the creepy trappings of a long defunct death cult.  The tension builds as they continue to loot crypts but aren't finding any monsters - but they know something bad is going to happen at some point, they just don't know how and when.  Last game ended with the first bad thing.

The players were in a kitchen in an area of the dungeon dedicated to priest quarters.  They found a hidden air duct in the ceiling that led to a 3' square crawl-space.  The party's halfling, Remi, asked for a boost - he felt some cold air coming down the shaft and wanted to see where it went.  He lit a candle and crawled through the duct, discovering a long vertical shaft that seemed to go up and out - cold air was coming down the shaft from the surface.  But the duct kept going forward, so he kept going.  The other characters called for him to come back, but Remi said he'd be fine.  In the dim light of his candle, he could see the duct opened into the ceiling of another chamber, and it looked like some kind of crypt was down below.

He yelled back at everyone to hang tight while he dropped down to check out the room.  (Mind you, he had no rope or similar gear - once he dropped himself down into the next room, he had no way to get back into the duct).  "It'll be fine", he said, "I'll find my way back one way or another".

The lid of the stone crypt was carved with a relief of a gruesome tyrant standing on the skulls of victims; he passed by the sarcophagus to see if there was a way out of the room before looking into it any further.  Yes!  There was a door out.  Unfortunately, it was barred from the outside.  Why would someone put a bar on the outside of a crypt, as if to keep something in?  That's when he heard the grinding of stone behind him, as something with a grip of iron slid aside the lid of the sarcophagus from the inside and sat upright.  That was the cliffhanger ending of the game night, with the mummified remains of the cult's "grand inquisitor" jerkily lurching towards the trapped halfling and his little candle.  The mummified inquisitor began to interrogate him with a sepulchral voice from beyond the grave, while the other players watched on in horror.

It turns out Remi has been carrying a potion of gaseous form with him since very early in the campaign, so he's confident he'll escape the crypt of the undead horror if he wins initiative, and that's why he was so nonchalant about the risks.  The tension at the table eased a little in anticipation of next game.  But the players are now boggled with the idea that the sprawling dungeon is not entirely quiescent, and there are dark horrors waiting for them, lurking in undiscovered tombs.

By way of reminder, here is our cast of characters, The Pillories:

• Reverend Blackburn - L4 cleric
• Remi Knotwise - L4 halfling
• Allister - L3 magic-user
• Yuri - L3 elf
• Henchmen - Wood (fighter), Toby (specialist), Geoff (fighter)

Other events since last game report included discovery of endless catacombs, filled with thousands of mummified cult members - warriors, priests, commoners, and even children.  There have been traps and curses, including the cleric, who fell victim to a spell that saw him inscribing a tattoo of the death cult on his own forearm while caught in a mindless frenzy; he learned to his horror that he can longer receive the benefits of his own healing magic.  They also discovered the source of the ominous susurrus sound that permeates the dungeon, but quickly retreated when an ooze-like monster crawled out of a well to defend the spikey plant growth that was producing the sound.  They know they'll need to defeat the ooze monster and hack through the spike growth to reach their goal, but decided to double back and finish exploring some other areas and confirm there wasn't another way around it first.  This is how Remi ended up crawling through an air duct to the tomb of the inquisitor.

I had great fun running it, and I'm looking forward to the next installment.

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.

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.

The Strigoi - Vampire Alternative for LOTFP

Zombies?  Nope - vampires!  The Strain.

To quote my teenage daughter, I've become "low-key obsessed" with Guillermo Del Toro's The Strain.  I binge watched the four season TV series on Hulu, and am working my way through the source novels (I'm on Book 2).  The novels were written with the help of Chuck Hogan, a spy novel author, and so they read like page turner thrillers with a horror twist.  The TV series presents a squirmy, gruesome re-envisioning of the vampire myth with plenty of visceral body horror.  It's a perfect take on vampires for your LOTFP game, and in time for Halloween if you're looking for some horror reading or viewing.

The books have been out since 2009 and the series came to TV in 2014, so I'm not spoiling any ground-breaking new show as I discus the general plot.  Be warned, some discussion of the plot will follow.  The series starts with the arrival of a dead airplane landing in JFK Airport, a 21st century re-imagination of The Demeter crashing into Whitby along the English coast.  In The Strain, the 200+ dead passengers on the airplane are infected with vampirism, going through a biological transformation while their bodies are sent to various morgues around the city.  They awaken at night and wander off to infect their loved ones and passersby, and suddenly a vampire plague begins to quickly spread across the Five Boroughs.

New York is honeycombed with subways and transit tunnels that give the vampires places to hide during the day, and the plot features wealthy opportunistic "human familiars" teaming up with the vampire lord, The Master, by spreading misinformation and slowing down the response of government agencies.  Instead of an apocalyptic zombie plague, New York faces a vampire plague, which spreads beyond the city, and the series eventually goes full-on apocalyptic, with nuclear winter providing safety from UV radiation for a dystopian future ruled by the vampires.  It's bonkers.

The Strain upends the glamor that has claimed hold of the vampire myth - there are no sparkling, handsome or beautiful sexy vampires here.  They are victims of a fast-acting, incurable, mutagenic virus, spread by worms, that rewrites their biology to turn them into giant leeches or ticks - they eventually lose their hair, sex organs, and even their nose and ears will wither away.  Instead of fangs, The Strain vampires (called the Strigoi in the series) have a six foot mouth stinger that lashes out and attaches itself to a victim, followed by a slow glug glug glug as it siphons out all of the victim's blood.  Anyone bit by the stinger is infected with the vampire worms, and anyone engaging in combat with the Strigoi risks getting infected if splashed by the vampire's white blood.  There are many moments of body horror in the series as wriggling worms burrow into open wounds or eyeballs to infect a new host.

From the cover of Book 1 The Strain.  It's gruesome.

Classic D&D vampires had that weird problem where they've got the blood-drinking fang equipment, but really what they want to do is touch you in melee and drain life energy levels.  The Strigoi represent a terrifying way to put blood draining vampires back into your game in an action-oriented style that plays well with classic fantasy and D&D style combat.

Strigoi (Munchers - the newly formed)

Unarmored, Move 120'. Hit Dice 1-4. Attack range 6' doing 1-4 damage + specials, Morale 8.  Chaotic.

Newly formed Strigoi start with 1 HD and gain a HD each week they're able to feed.  There are powerful free-willed strigoi (Lieutenants and Ancients) that are significantly more capable than "munchers" - we'll tackle them another time.  Munchers have animal instincts, with an innate desire to return home and feed on their loved ones.  However, they are connected through a hive-mind back to the Master, who can force groups of Munchers to apply tactics or carry out more complicated actions as the situation dictates.  Strigoi have 60' infravision and heightened senses, including hearing - sensitive enough to hear nearby heart-beats.

In melee, the Muncher uses it's 6' stinger attack.  A hit target must save vs paralysis or be helpless while the muncher drains constitution at the rate of 1d6 per round until the target dies.    The stinger is unarmored and can be severed in combat by an ally with an edged weapon attack doing 2 or more points of damage.  Anyone hit by a stinger in combat is infected with capillary worms (see below).

Glug-glug-glug.  This should terrify any D&D character.

Strigoi are vulnerable to silver weapons, and must make a morale check at -2 when confronted with silver weapons and each time they are hit by silver.  They will likewise shun silver mirrors, as such mirrors reveal their true nature (undead and riddled with parasitic worms).  They are destroyed in sunlight.  

Strigoi take half damage from normal weapons due to their mutated biology.  (Alternatively, I suppose you could say any damage roll in the lower half of the damage range is ignored, while a roll in the upper half represents a hit to a vulnerable area like the neck or head - whatever is less fiddly and more fun for your table.  I like the latter.)

Capillary Worms

Each time a Strigoi is killed in melee combat, roll a d6 - on a 1 result, the victor is splashed by Strigoi blood (including the parasitic capillary worms) which seek to burrow into the victim's flesh and cause infection.  Like rot grubs, the victim must immediately apply flame to the worms (1-6 hit points of damage) or a worm burrows into their flesh.  At that point, only a cure disease spell can end the transformation into a Strigoi.  (In the series, modern UV lights can also destroy capillary worms).  Anyone hit by a Strigoi stinger is automatically infected by worms.

The disease weakens the host over a 24 hour period as the capillary worms multiply and overwhelm the victim's system, colonizing the victim's organs and growing the vampiric hinged mouth and throat stringer.  Strigoi have heightened metabolisms and "burn hot" for purposes of infravision, a possible way of detecting them at a distance if your game uses infravision.  The newly formed Strigoi will arise the following evening and return home, seeking to infect their loved ones.

Note:

Although the TV series focuses on a biological, viral explanation for the Strigoi, there are mystical and alchemical elements in both the show and  novels that involve a Judeo-Christian mythological view of the vampires and their origin.  Their history is recounted in a book of esoteric lore called the Occido Lumen.  While the Strigoi disease appears to be a purely biological phenomenon, they are actually a supernatural plague and count as true undead, meaning they can be turned by clerics with a Turn Undead spell or ability.  Munchers are turned as Wights.

Potion of Longevity Ingredient

In the series, 3rd century alchemists created a formula to leverage the capillary worms as a component in a potion of longevity - more to come as I get deeper in the books.

I don't think I'm done with The Strain or the Strigoi yet, as I read further I'll likely provide some stats for the powerful free-willed "Lieutenants" and the terrifying "Master".  It's the Halloween season, after all.

Note:  All the images are from The Strain TV series, subject to copyright, and used here only under fair use as part of a review and discussion of the work.

Game Report: Grinding Gear Part 1

At the end of the Tower of the Stargazer, we didn't discuss a next game; I assumed it was a one-shot until we connected offline, and the player's said, "This OSR vintage is fine stuff indeed, let's have another!".  I needed to get a campaign world skeleton (Building York 1630) together for the following weekend, and quickly prep an adventure.  We chatted offline about what they wanted to do - something sinister that appeals to the horror enthusiasts, or a more traditional dungeon challenge that could arm them with coin and gear for the challenges ahead?  It was a close discussion, because the group is here for the horror, but ultimately they decided they'd prefer to work off their gaming rust in something more recognizable.  I put aside The God that Crawls (for now) and dusted off The Grinding Gear.

The players had over 6,000sp after their first caper, and spent the week thinking about what to do with their money.  They decided they wanted to rent a house in York as a headquarters, build out a library, and use downtime in between adventures to research spells and make some scrolls.  (These are all activities contemplated and encouraged in the LOTFP rules).  By the time we started play the following week, the elf had researched Sleep, the magic user had researched Charm Person, and the cleric had crafted a scroll with Turn Undead and two copies of Cure Light Wounds.  They were more prepared for the next adventure.  They also chose a name for their character group, The Pillories.

The one-legged veteran Mason, a survivor of the wars in Europe, knocked on the door of the Pillories' HQ early one morning.  Mason was a henchman of William Brewer, the local mob boss.  "The big guy wants to see you - says he received some correspondence meant for you.  He's arranged a lunch for today".

Over the course of a lunch meeting with their patron, the players did in fact receive several pieces of correspondence - a letter to meet with The Doctor(1) later in October (it was currently early September).  The doctor was the collector who wanted the king and medusa statue recovered from the tower last game session, and Brewer earned a fine commission as a broker.  The doctor now suggested there was another salvage opportunity, but he wanted to discuss it in person on his way back through the area from Cambridge.  He had a home in nearby Harrogate and a mansion in the Pennines; he invited the players to make arrangements with his staff in Harrogate for a visit next month.  He claimed to be an apothecary and alchemist, and to induce further goodwill he included a gift he called an "Elixir of Wound Recovery", implying there was even more beneficial solutions available for their ongoing partnership.

The second correspondence was more immediate, and I'll relay the text of it here:

The 15th Day of September, 1631

To Those Worthies Who Found the Star Jewel,

On behalf of my Principal, I'd like to extend my deepest congratulations on this lofty accomplishment.  There are channels where news of such deeds have circulated, and patrons like my Trustor have taken note.  Be thou hale in the tribulations to come.

My benefactor is extending a formal invitation for you to stay and visit his establishment, a relatively obscure tavern and inn called "The Grinding Gear" that caters to daring men of fortune like yourselves.  You'll find his establishment in the North Riding.  Follow the road out of Harrogate to the small minster of Ripon, and travel west into Nidderdale.  You'll find us west of Aldfield.

We look forward to meeting you and offering the opportunity for your next grand adventure.

Safe travels,

Signed, the estate of Garvin Richrom (deceased)

While the player's contemplated this peculiar note from Garvin Richrom's estate, Mister Brewer raised the topic of the excellent "Ambersham Mead"(2) they were sampling over lunch.  "This is truly the finest mead on the market in England, isn't it?" quipped Brewer.  "Maybe when the dust settles from this 'Grinding Gear' jaunt, I'll ask you to head off to Devon and see if you can make some kind of special business arrangement with the brewers."

The players wanted some leads on some "muscle" they could hire as retainers and Brewer knew just the right people.  "There are these two guys who came here looking for work, but they're no good for my organization… I won't employ mere highwaymen or crude bandits who prowl the crossroads robbing travelers…"  In this way the players met Toby Martin (specialist) and Wood (fighter), two former brigands who claimed to have fled a group of outlaws called "the Locksmiths" who were holed up in an old ruin near Selby.  "Life with the Locksmiths started to go bad.  Half the gang moved into the dungeon and started organizing themselves into some kind of gross cult and we wanted no part of it…"(3)  One of the players, Blackburn, quipped, "Cults are our specialty - maybe we'll have to check it out some time, too."

The players bought horses and stuff they'd need for the overland trip to the Grinding Gear; they rode west from York to Harrogate, stayed at a nice inn overnight in Harrogate (the Granby), and went north to the minster of Ripon the next day.  In the Auldfield west of Ripon, they spoke to a farmer named Ambrose and learned "Yes, there used to be a place called the Grinding Gear in the nearby forest, but the man lost his daughter several years back and closed up shop…"

"Come to think of it", the farmer called out as they made to continue, "You're not the only folks to come through here looking for it… there were a few fellers like you come through here just a few days back…"

The Grinding Gear was published back in 2009, if you're a referee reading the blog you're probably familiar with it.  The players found the scene, the abandoned outbuildings, the lonely and empty inn, and the courtyard statue of Garvin Richrom on a monument block surrounded by all those dead bodies - stripped of clothes, and riddled with puncture marks.  We played up the "Hills Have Eyes" angle with the eerie silences and the unshakeable feeling of being watched.  The halfling scouted the area and noticed the uncanny lack of critters with his Bushcraft skill - no rabbits, squirrels, or songbirds anywhere nearby.

The players ignored the statue after taking a cursory look at the bodies, instead choosing to enter the inn and methodically search floor by floor until they reached the ladder into the attic.  At the urging of Allister, Mr. Wood hefted a lit lantern up the attic steps, flipped the trap door open, and saw a breadcrumb of coins leading to a larger pile of treasure in the middle of the attic. He called back down, and Blackburn started up the ladder behind him.  Once Wood made it out of the trapdoor, he stretched to full height and started looking around with the lantern beam.  As the light flashed across the ceiling it began to ripple and undulate… it was covered in pale roosting bats.  One of them unfurled its wings and looked back at Wood, and where its mouth was supposed to be hung a floppy, mosquito-like proboscis.  "Get down, get down, get down" yelled Wood.

Our group's artist depicted the fight against the mosquito bats.

By the time Blackburn got off the ladder, and Wood was able to close the trap door behind himself, 10 of the monsters had followed them through the hatch and into the hallway below; several were clinging to Mr Wood and already slurping his blood.  Our night ended with a desperate fight between the Pillories and the mosquito bats on the 3rd floor of the inn.  The players eventually prevailed, although everyone was down in the 2-3 hit point range by the end of the combat and Yuri the Elf would have died without a well-timed Cure Light Wounds.  An uncomfortable thought passed through the group - only a fraction of the mosquito bats made it down the trap door behind them.  There was a huge gaping hole in the side of the attic providing egress into the courtyard.  Did anyone remember to close the front door behind them?

Our cast of Characters
Minister Blackburn:  Cleric
Yuri: Romanian Elf
Remy Knotwise:  Halfling
Followers:  Mister Wood (Fighter), Toby (Specialist)

Allister:  Magic-User

Deceased:  Edmund, Zach - lost in Tower of the Stargazer

Footnotes

As I work through the LOTFP back-catalog, I'm going to put a lot of rumors and pointers out there for future adventures - here are seeds planted this game:

(1) The Doctor's plot hooks will lead to The God That Crawls, Death Frost Doom, and eventually Strict Time Records Must Be Kept - this feels like a good "spine" to the campaign.

(2) The Ambersham Mead of Devon is of course a nod to Bee-Ware!

(3) The Loquesmyths are the gang of thieves in Magic Eater.

Building the York 1630 Campaign

Events moved quickly after the new Lamentations of the Flame Princess game last week.  The players had their successful one-shot delve into the Tower of the Stargazer, declared, "By Jove, this OSR style of gaming is quite a rare flavor", and continued "Bartender, I'll have another.  No, bring the whole bottle, let's make it a full campaign!"

Spoilers may follow.  I don't believe any of my players follow my blog, but in case any do - you might want to stop reading if you don't want to know how the sausage gets made… or how the whiskey is distilled?  I should get my metaphors straight.

In daily life I'm a busy corporate minion, so I knew I'd be stitching together a handful of adventure modules into a loose setting rather than relying on home brew.  For a Lamentations campaign that hits on the classic notes, the centerpiece would be Death Frost Doom and its aftermath.  There are many potential outcomes from it that can send your campaign into a different direction, like a zombie apocalypse or a plague of vampires, and I recently re-watched The Strain and Fear the Walking Dead, so I am here for any and all of it.  

Earlier in the summer I read a book called The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England (Jonathon Healey) so I had a sense of the politics, tensions, and domestic concerns in England between 1620 and 1630 and the transition from King James to Charles.  I picked York because it seems like an interesting northern city with old medieval walls and streets, perched on the edge of several large wilderness areas - including the Yorkshire moors, which seem like they could serve well for hosting haunted places and the odd lair.

In no particular order then, here are the kinds of things I did to get ready for campaigning.  I found a handful of maps online of early modern York that would work as a city map, at least until I convert one in a mapping tool.  I created a random name generator so I could quickly name NPCs and characters on the fly, and also a campaign events generator to populate the calendar with upcoming events that happen in the wider world - wars, and rumors of war.  I made a calendar, too - strict time records and all that.

I created a list of some 40-50 random names of interesting sounding businesses, so I could improvise as required when the players went shopping - I use the name list to pluck a name, pluck a shop name off the shop list, and use another random generator with personality quirks for a suggestion of an NPC's personality.  I built these tools in Excel years ago with random numbers and vlookups, and just update them from campaign to campaign to simplify prep.

I don't have a map of England yet - I've used Google maps to familiarize with the area, but eventually I want to make something with hexes that can be shown to the players for overland travel.  Someone pointed me at a Cambridge collection of period-appropriate John Speed maps; they are amazing, but possibly too detailed and busy for game purposes - we'll see where I land.

In the first game, the players' patron was a local gangster named William Brewer.  He's going to stick around  as an important supporting character as we shift to a campaign mode.  His tavern, the Brabbage, will be a hub for rumors and future plot hooks, and I came up with a handful of things to introduce in the game session so the players have options.  Thinking back to the game session, I introduced plot hooks related to The God That Crawls, The Grinding Gear, Bee-Ware!, Magic Eater, and Strict Time Records Must Be Kept.  Not bad for a single session.  A game based in England will feature many of the Kelvin Green LOTFP titles, as they involve unusual locales and villages that work well in a sandbox.

Here's something obvious to me, though - LOTFP needs an adventure database!  After the current slew of books, the publisher is approaching 100 titles (the last printed title is numbered LOTFP00105, but there are a few skips and reprints in those numbers).  Some are targeted at a fantasy setting, while others are more tightly bound to Earth history and real world locations.  There are adventures set in England, in Scandinavia, in Europe - such as France, Italy, and Germany-based adventures.  Don't get me started on the time periods - many assume a 1630's era, but I've seen one-offs that are set in earlier or later time periods.  Most of them target low levels, although there are a few outliers.  Then there's the taste factor, which ones are "all ages" vs "extreme content".  It's fine to have such an eclectic catalog but a searchable database with attributes would make a referee's life much easier to find useful adventures.  Since I doubt someone will see this humble plea and produce a searchable LOTFP database, maybe it's something I'll put together as I continue the "quixotic quest to review every LOTFP adventure out there…"  I digress.

Besides needing a map of England, I also want to identify several secret societies to round out the campaign prep.  Characters with extraordinary powers, like clerics and magic users, in an otherwise mundane world, would exist on the fringes or keep their status hidden.  There might be cabals of magic users vying for power in the shadows, or a small collection of monster hunters that still fight the good fight in the name of the divine.  Call of Cthulhu is full of these kinds of groups, like the Theron Marks Society, the Brotherhood of the Beast, or the Silver Twilight.  Lastly, I'm also thinking about making some period-appropriate encounter tables for the countryside - who doesn't love a giant random encounter table?  If some kind soul already knows of a Thirty Years' War random table, I would be grateful for a pointer.

Hope you enjoyed reading about the process, and maybe even got some ideas you can use in your own games.  I'll get last game session written up next.

Current Mood

I joined meme culture.  The opportunity to run a game for my high school buddies has put me behind the screen again with the Lamentations of the Flame Princess (LOTFP) rules in hand, and it's been a blast.  I love the LOTFP rules and aesthetic.  The rules compliment the scenarios very well - LOTFP is lower-powered and focused on exploration, and the scenarios are equally light on combat and concerned with engendering a growing sense of mystery and dread.

Meanwhile, Adventurer Conqueror King powers up the combat side of classic D&D, which is a natural fit for Gygaxian adventures (heroic fantasy) that feature a lot of tactical combats as in The Temple of Elemental Evil.  My vision for the Greyhawk campaign is to make it a tour de Gygax, including Tsojcanth, the Giants, and Descent into the Depths of the Earth.  We've missed a few weeks of scheduling, but I'm hoping to get it back on track soon.  We're going to relax the scheduling to bi-monthly to make it easier on a couple of the regulars to accommodate, and this is going to create a natural opening for me to keep the LOFTP running as a bi-weekly game too (win-win).

I spent a chunk of time last week laying out the foundations for the LOTFP campaign, York 1630.  I'll post the process this week, a play report on the LOTFP game, and another adventure review.  Happy Monday.

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?

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.

Lamentation Sales-O-Mania

Earlier this month our favorite Finnish iconoclast and free-thinker put on a massive Lamentations of the Flame Princess sale.  I haven't kept up with all of JR-4's latest releases so this was a perfect opportunity to add new books - I picked up a dozen or so recent PDFs.  Some are going to become LOTFP classics - I've had fun reading.  Kelvin the Green Machine is a workhorse over there.

I heard about the sale on Facebook, and saw that it was a response to bad actors in the RPG space targeting Lamentations of the Flame Princess.  A JR-4 video popped onto my YouTube feed - I watched several of his videos from the past year. 

The YouTube videos offer a troubling lens into the personal toll the industry persecution has put on our favorite prophet of the weird.  Video is a powerful medium, it offers rare intimacy, letting you experience the creator behind the byline.  James has had to deal with an overwhelming amount of crap for championing an artistic vision - gatekeeping, bans, and now freelancers getting dumped due to mere association.  I don't like to swear on the blog, it's lowbrow, but fuck all the book banners and their ilk.  It's a topical concern for Americans; you may have noticed we're having a moment over here.  It's maddening.

I may be currently running a classic Gygaxian Greyhawk game, but am very much aligned to the LOTFP project of mixing horror and weirdness into fantasy gaming.  I appreciate works that subvert worn tropes and push the boundaries of what our games can do and be.  Not everything they do over at the House of the Flame Princess is to my taste.  TSR had plenty of stinkers in their day, too.  But I support the creative freedom to try new things and see what works.  Our hobby is more interesting for it.

So what can I do to highlight what's going well over in Lamentations-land?  To that end I'm going to review the entire LOTFP catalog, at least one per week.  Granted, this is a half-dead blog, so it's not exactly the most life-changing way to get attention for a publisher doing good, interesting work, but hey, that's what I got here.  I think I own 75% of the LOTFP stuff anyway so it won't be a great stretch to acquire the stragglers.  I've been a fan ever since Death Frost Doom turned a section of Greyhawk into a zombie wasteland, and my group still talks about surviving those early Lamentations adventures to this day.  Let's find out what other treasures are hiding out in the LOTFP catalog.

LOTFP Review: Fermentum Nigrum Dei Sepulti

 

A strange stone, tumbling through the void of endless space and into the secret history of the world… the cursed legacy of a doomed witch’s family… a terrified abbot whose desperate plea has gone ignored by Rome… a vile conspiracy of whispers, visions, and delusions among drunken, stumbling brothers… and a black secret, black as the bubbling foam that gushes forth from the ale-barrels and the corpses of the fallen alike…

That's the evocative blurb from the dust jacket on LOTFP's recent book, Fermentum Nigrum Dei Sepulti (Black Yeast of the Buried God).  The adventure is site-based, and kicks off when the adventurers are staying at the inn near the monastery; an overnight massacre happens within the monastery walls as the monks devolve into armed conflict with each other, and fires break out in several buildings.  As the adventurers respond to the chaos, they get drawn into an unfolding horror, which ultimately leads them into exploring the catacombs beneath the monastery.  I should warn you, like any review there's the risk of spoilers if you are a player.

Fermentum is written by Gord Sellars, supported by some recognizable names on Team Raggi (Alex Mayo, Jacob Hurst, and Gonzalo Aeneas as the artist).  Like every LOTFP book I own, it's A5 sized, and the production values of Fermentum as an artifact are impressive.  It has a textured, foil cover (although it does look like on my purchased copy, the foiling didn't reach the bottom cover text.  Jim!).  The pages are heavy weight and feel good to touch, the spine is stitched, the layouts and text are all well done.  I look with dismay at my shelf of falling apart 5E books, broken spines and pages falling out, and wonder why a small publisher in Finland can figure this out but Hasbro's quality is trash?  These LOTFP books are meant to last.  Naturally, they are a little pricier than disposable mass published books.

Here's a view with the layout, art, and feel of the text.

I'd never heard of Gord Sellars; the wise Google indicates he is a professional writer and teacher, not a professional RPG author.  As such, he makes different choices than what you'd see in a traditional dungeon crawl.  (There have been a few cases where Jim Raggi went with non-traditional RPG writers for his books, they don't always work out, but Gord has done a great job with Fermentum).  There's a cinematic quality to the adventuring party exploring the devastated monastery, walking in the wake of the carnage, as the knowledge they gain ratchets the tension like a horror movie plot.  Furthermore, as the adventurers reveal the secrets of the monastery, they become embroiled in the mystery themselves - they become infected.  The central twist is the monastery is the site of an alien infection, and as the players piece together the horror that befell the monks, they risk falling victim themselves.  It's a spectacular premise for a horror story, and works equally well here in a site-based exploration adventure.  Incidentally, the monastery locale covers about 50-60 keyed areas (the above ground monastery and underground catacombs), some new monsters (the Garünger), a rival adventuring party, a couple of unique magic items, including a cursed grimoire, and new rules for managing the rising infection afflicting the characters.

I was intrigued by Fermentum because it revolves around a Medieval monastery, with brewing monks and a nearby tavern - the kind of locale you should be able to drop unobtrusively into almost any fantasy campaign (and certainly the early Medieval home brew, pun intended, I've been building out for myself).  LOTFP's adventures frequently take place in a pseudo-historical early 17th century milieu, but you could easily change place names and religious institutions to reskin this for a standard fantasy realm.  Furthermore, the monastery and nearby inn make an excellent locale to put into your sandbox early in a campaign, so it's a well-known and safe stopping point for your players.  This would create even more contrast with the terror during the night the monastery falls.

The book is written for the LOTFP rules.  It's been a while since we talked about them much here, since I've been running the 5E for my gang, but LOTFP is basically a customization of the old BX 1980's rules with stylistic updates.  You could run Fermentum with BX or similar old school rules sets.  In LOTFP, the spell lists are curated so magic is less flashy than core D&D (no fireballs or lightning bolts or raise dead).  It has a solid d6 skill system, an improved thief (the specialist), and strong niches for the core classes and demi-humans.  Stylistically, the LOTFP rules assume a setting like early modern earth, with a silver coin standard, and equipment you'd find in the 16th or 17th centuries, including simple one-shot firearms.  There's definitely a market niche for class-based adventuring rules (D&D style) but using adventures that deliver into horror and weirdness, borrowing from the Call of Cthulhu color palette.  LOTFP fits that niche well and this is an adventure that hits the right notes of D&D style exploration, lots of opportunities for roleplaying and combat, and mounting dread.

If you can't tell, I enjoyed the book a lot and look forward to running it.  This is a great little horror-themed exploration and dungeon crawl, with escalating tension as the players hope to discover a resolution while facing rising infection and loss.  The beer and brewing theme is fantastic, and I can imagine unnerving the players with Guinesses or stouts all around as we sit down to play this one (except maybe sodas for the kids).  Cheers!  Salut!  (It's available here at the LOTFP web store).

Rally for the Flame Princess

Apparently my LOTFP book collection was not small

James and the Lamentations of the Flame Princess line (LOTFP) are in business trouble.  He recently announced some new products but at the bottom of the post (here) walked through the company's financial woes.  LOTFP has been a lightning rod for gamer controversy the past few years, but I'd hate to see them go under, particularly with COVID and convention cancellations being the last straw.  Some of my group's best campaigns have been with LOTFP rules.

My first campaign here was called "Gothic Greyhawk" and some of the earliest blog posts from 2010 kick off that setting.  It took place in Greyhawk's Sterich, re-envisioned like Eastern Europe with the valley of Barovia (Ravenloft) nestled in the mountains nearby.  While the campaign eventually lead to Strahd, the early going was a greatest hits collection of LOTFP's early stuff - Tower of the Stargazer, The Grinding Gear, Death Frost Doom, and Hammers of the God.  I can't recommend that particular quartet of adventures enough; they take standard fantasy adventure tropes and subvert them with a heavy dose of weird or horror or both.  They are adventure gold.

We would go on to run my Black City megadungeon campaign with LOTFP rules as well; the Black City put the players into the role of Viking explorers, plundering a frozen alien ruin on an island near the Arctic circle.  Life happened, and we never finished the lower levels of the Black City (so I never finished that particular campaign) but people greatly enjoyed the write ups.

After those campaigns I parted ways with running LOTFP for a bit.  We ran Dwimmermount using the ACKS rules, while LOTFP pivoted towards producing materials heavily rooted in 17th century Europe.  James should have stuck with subverting traditional fantasy tropes with the Weird, it cast a much wider net for an audience.  Anyone running a fantasy campaign could drop the four adventures I called out above into their campaign and it would become instantly better, or something like Broodmother Sky Fortress by Jeff Rients.  If Goodman Games can profitably make mediocre 5E updates of classic adventures (I'm looking at you, "Original Adventures Reincarnated") there's definitely space for someone like LOTFP to take classic tropes and infuse them with dread and horror.

It's sad to hear about the recent struggles with the company.  I've never had print copies of a few of the classics, so I'm going to pick up his Adventure Anthology: Blood to round out my print collection.  That's ultimately what motivated to make a post about the publisher; if this really is the swan song for LOTFP, there are some good books to snag before the bow of the ship sinks beneath the waves forever (and if enough people also get that book they wanted before the going-out-of-business sale, maybe there's no going-out-of-business sale at all, yes).  Unfortunately, to get print copies of the adventures identified above, you'd need Adventure Anthologies Blood and Fire and the standalone Death Frost Doom.  LOTFP is not cheap but the hard covers are extremely well done, with stitched bindings and quality print production.  By contrast take a look at this picture of my crappy 5E Monster Manual with the pages falling out (my player's handbooks are right behind it in terms of binding "quality" and several adventures have followed suit).  It's a wonder any of the WOTC books have held up to even light use.

pages falling out of the Monster Manual

(Just an aside, my collection of 1E AD&D hard covers have held up extremely well for 40+ years, just showing that at one point, TSR/WOTC did know how to publish quality books, built to last.  5E book quality is a disaster - I've wondered if they make them poorly so you have to replace them every few years.)

Writing this post, I realized I have a ton of LOTFP stuff on the game shelf.  In recent years I've limited myself to getting a few PDFs here or there because my group hasn't been drawn to the whole 17th century campaign thing (and if we did, it would have to be pirates, definitely pirates).  Good luck LOTFP, hope you make it through.  We've had a lot of fun with your books through the years.

Matters of System

I've got a few games running right now, using published settings, but the real thing I'm looking forward to doing this year is campaign development - picking an idea and getting back into the world of homebrew campaigns, either starting something new, or picking up an older idea again.  However, I like a bunch of different rules sets and frequently switch between campaigns.  How many of you guys have run the same rules for multiple years, versus switching rules when you start the next campaign?

Rules sets can be adjusted to favor the style of play you prefer, but I still get inspired by the differences inherent in the rules; mechanics help underline the focus of the game and what's important.  Just like picking the right tool for a job around the house, the right set of rules makes the referee's job easier, too.  Here are the rule sets I'm considering when pondering the upcoming campaign.

ACKS (Adventurer Conqueror King System)

ACKS is a retro clone built on the OGL as a spiritual successor to BECMI (the basic, expert, companion, master, and immortal rules published for Basic D&D in the 80's and early 90's).  BECMI envisioned a rich campaign world beyond the dungeon, and included rules for dominions, wars, and rulership, as well as expanding basic D&D to include advanced facets of play like planar travel and artifacts.  ACKS assumes that exploring dungeons and lairs will always be a part of play, but provides procedures for creating lair-filled hex crawls, populating a campaign world, and very detailed guidelines for players on crafting items and creating spells, build domains, establish guilds, and raise armies.  ACKS expands the game from just controlling a character in a dungeon, to include a character shaping the course of the world.

Of course, the referee needs to have a specific campaign vision in mind to put in the overhead to build a campaign setting that will eventually support intrigue and conquest; it has to be something the players want to do as well.  ACKS is almost a throw-back to the Chainmail days and the earliest campaigns, as it anticipated characters will recover tons of wealth from their dungeoneering, and invest piles of gold into building castles and armies.

LOTFP (Lamentations of the Flame Princess)

Anyone paying attention to the OSR is familiar with Jim LOTFP's penchant for pushing the envelope with his Heavy Metal magazine style of art and promotion.  Because why not, right?  The inmates rule the OSR asylum, and it's fantastic.  But beneath LOFTP's occasional boob and dismembered corpse is a streamlined and trim interpretation of the old BX rules chassis for Moldvay's 1980's D&D and redbox.  LOTFP has laser-focused niche protection for the main character classes (fighter, cleric, magic user, and specialist), a form of 'bounded accuracy' since no one beyond the fighter improves at fighting ability.  It also has my favorite d6-based skill system for D&D.  (Jeff Rients recently covered a comparison of Moldvay and LOTFP in articles called LOTFP vs BX; sadly they're not labeled for easy linking).  The implied setting of LOTFP is the early modern period in a milieu based on historical Europe, featuring elements of weird fiction and horror.

A 'feature' of LOTFP is that it doesn't include a bestiary; monsters are expected to be unique and terrifying, for the most part.  Jim has threatened to release an updated Ref Book for the past few years that includes more guidelines on weird monsters and running campaigns.

5E (Good Old Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition style)

Wizards of the Coast made an effort to reached out to old school players during their playtest of 5e, and delivered a version of the game that featured smaller stat blocks, 'theater of the mind' old school combat, and a play experience built on combat, exploration, and dungeoneering.  5E continues to sell very well, and appears to be growing the table top hobby in new ways with live streaming of games and celebrity games.  5E is also the game new players encounter in hobby and book stores; the brand appears strong and going well.

As an old school player, there are some issues that leave me cold.  Characters are really powerful, even from level 1, and the game implies a high fantasy, high powered world where magic is ubiquitous - at least among player characters.  5E really only emulates one type of setting well - a high powered D&D setting!  It's built on 40 years of self-referential lore and development, and has pretty much become it's own genre of fantasy.  No wonder the Forgotten Realms is the default.

However, players seem to love the system.  Going from 'zero to hero' in the old school style is an acquired taste for players, especially kids, and 5E's high powered laser clerics and zappy wizards are more in line with modern video games.  Not every player likes having disposable first level characters that can be killed by a house cat and some good dice rolls.  5E character development includes the creation of personality facets like ideals, bonds, and flaws; old school characters get developed through play, and not conceived all at the beginning.  I've noticed that younger players enjoy imagining that stuff right out of the gate, and it's improved their ability to roleplay their characters at the table.  I need to get some Curse of Strahd game reports going - 5E has a lot going for it from the player's perspective.

Unfortunately, I really don't like the Forgotten Realms - a little too bog standard fantasy.  A personal challenge is whether I could I structure a satisfying campaign setting using 5E when I'm done running Curse of Strahd.  Maybe an older idea like Taenarum, my megadungeon featuring the Greek Underworld, would work as a high magic, high powered setting?  Either way, the setting needs to be purpose built for zap zap pew pew style D&D.

Regardless of which system I land on, I'm sure it will involve a healthy amount of hex crawling and wandering the wilds; both LOTFP or 5E would need to borrow from other systems to accomplish that, as neither mechanically supports it today (either through lack of bestiary or lack of procedures).  I'm still loving the Skyrim experience of free-range discovery of ruins, caves, and enemy holds, and want to see that expressed in a table top game!  The campaign will feature a large-ish megadungeon as well.  I'll reflect in the near future and decide if I should revive an older idea (Taenarum, the Black City, or Harrow Home) or start something fresh and new.

Is this common - do you switch rules per campaign, go for a best fit for mechanics, or use the same core for each game and just make it work?