ACKS Game Report: The Beatings Shall Continue Until Play Improves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LOTFP Review: Just a Stupid Dungeon

Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission James Raggi Dungeon, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission James Raggi Dungeon, and when it was over, I never wanted another.

There shall be spoilers.

I'm working backwards through the Lamentations of the Flame Princess catalog, and Just a Stupid Dungeon is the most recent adventure from James Raggi IV, the OG founder of the Flame Princess.  I have a great affection for those early Lamentations adventures like Death Frost Doom, Tower of the Stargazer, and Hammers of the God.  They rewarded intelligent play, confronted the players with mortal danger and real stakes, and blended rational designs with absolute weirdness.  Most of all, they treated your campaign world with reckless disregard.  Those OG Lamentations adventures hit me like a diamond bullet right through the forehead.  The genius of them - the perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure.  (With apologies to the excellent movie Apocalypse Now…)

This adventure isn't one of those diamond bullets to the skull.

The hook for this one is… well, there's a door in the side of a hill and no one knows what's behind it.  Go.  There are some stats provided for the neighborhood children and hapless villagers who may follow to look at the door… just in case murder hobos gotta murder?

Beyond the door in the hillside is a simplistic 10 room dungeon.  The encounter key stretches things to a 24 count by having distinct entries for the doors and corridors.  Each room is one kind of nonsensical character trap or another.  The sea room that drops you into the middle of an ocean, drowning, unless you drop your heavy gear and swim for the exit.  The fire room that burns up all your stuff.  The blinding light room.  And so on - you get the idea.  There are also infinite rats.  The hillside has been perfectly tunneled and prepared to supply the dungeon with infinite rats.  Infinite.  Rats.  I had plenty of friends who made dungeons like this when we were in middle school, but none of them approached the task of player disablement with as much seriousness and grim purpose while still offering limited paths to victory.

Lest I leave you with the perspective this is all hateful, there are some fun elements.  There's an illusionary demi-lich character that pops up in one of the rooms like a call-back to S1 Tomb of Horrors.  Aha, we're in a mad funhouse dungeon!  There's a room where a wish can be granted… but the wish involves time travel and 450 years of world-changing labor to grant the wish.  That is a brilliant re-interpretation of how to grant a wish to a player.  The chord of a half-remembered tune blossoms back into a full song -  you feel like you're seeing the real JR 4 band get back together.

The piece de resistance is the world-sleeping trap in the final room, the gas that puts the entire world unconscious for a random period of time.  Depending on your point of view, this is either the greatest gift to you as a dungeon master to screw with your own world and send your campaign careening into an unpredictable new direction, or you'll throw the book across the room.  On the other side of a keyboard, James is laughing and smugly saying, "You're welcome".  The classics treated your campaign world with reckless disregard.  He's remembering how the song goes.

How do you even rate this kind of thing?  It's a bit incoherent and awful like a kid's attempt at a fun-house dungeon, but carried out with the malign skill of a seasoned designer, whose jaw is set with grim resolve.  Pieces of it are brilliant.  There's some truth in advertising here, it's Just a Stupid Dungeon like it says on the cover.  It's downright punishing towards adventurers.  At one point the text defends the ensuing calamity thus:  "All because some busybodies couldn’t help themselves and just had to explore some stupid dungeon for no actual reason".  See that you players, you had it coming all along.

I'd love to hear if anyone has played Just a Stupid Dungeon with real players.  Are they still friends with you?  Did anyone throw their Doritos or flip the table or curse JR 4's name through clenched teeth, shaking their fists?

Well.  I might like to see that some day.  I think I just talked myself into putting this one into a sandbox campaign.  No one's going to make them go through that door in the hill, after all.  They'll have it coming to them.

You too can own Just a Stupid Dungeon:  Just A Stupid Dungeon at DriveThruRPG.

ACKS Greyhawk 14: School in Session

I'm a few weeks behind on game reports.  My daughter graduated high school this spring, and I've been consumed the past few weeks with preparing for her epic graduation party, the gradpalooza. But gradpalooza is over, the relatives have all gone home, the house is back to normal and I can return to the trivial pursuits of life, like writing about roleplaying game sessions.

My players have had a rough couple of weeks.

For several weeks now they've been grinding their way through the Earth Temple flunkies on level 1 of the Temple of Elemental Evil.  They've had to deal with typical "Gygaxian defenses" - layers of foot soldiers with swordsmen backed up by polearms backed up by archers, with a few guys willing to throw flaming oil here and there.  You know deal, we've all seen Gary's style.  Gary was a war gamer at heart and his designs don't make it easy for folks whose only strategy is hack and slash.  (Me personally, I love the care he put into helping game masters with tactics).  However, a few well-placed Sleep spells can sure help tilt the playing field towards the players.

The player's fought their way through a literal gauntlet of human mooks, eventually penetrating a chamber with a few higher level lieutenants.  "Protect the clerics", one of them said, "Hold the line here".  The players knew they were on the verge of getting through to the bosses.

When the captain and lieutenant fell, the players warily eyed the barred door, beyond which presumably waited "the clerics".  Would they be high priests or skittish under clerics, unable to mount a serious defense?  A fierce table top discussion ensued.  The loudest voice was the one that said, "Let's retreat and rest, get all of our spells back, heal, and pick back up here when we're ready - on our time table".

Yeah, this is not a video game or a 5E dungeon.  The opponents are intelligent and are going to respond to incursions (or in this case their small army of mooks being slaughtered by invaders).  When the players returned after resting and healing outside of the dungeon, the cleric quarters were stripped clean - all their treasures and magic items taken away with the fleeing priests.  All that XP from gold escaped as well, making the mook battles even more pointless.

There was a gnashing of teeth and wailing.  Some recriminations amongst the players may have been spoken, and they had the taste of ashes in their mouths.  Large yawning chests mocked them with their emptiness, other than a few stray coins left behind in the hasty retreat.  A hard lesson was learned.

On a succeeding night, they cleared a large swath of the eastern portion of dungeon level 1.  The most interesting "encounter" involved a tomb door warded by glyphs.  Their NPC magic user was willing to knock the door (from a safe distance) but had no answer for the glyphs.  Shakti, the war priestess, convinced one of her NPC mooks to open the door, and he was blasted by cold magic and knocked unconscious.  They were able to stabilize him but his face and jaw were messed up.  (Since we're using ACKS for this one, there is a table of 'mortal wounds' to consider any time a character is rendered below zero hit points).

The tomb was full of niches with moldering, infected looking corpses.  Their paladin mused, "Hmmm - would a spore infection be a disease or a poison?  I haven't gotten to use my immunity to disease ability, so I'm going in…"  The corpses ended up being inanimate, not monsters lying in wait, although they were all diseased and would infect characters with a virulent respiratory illness.  The paladin was quite satisfied he was able to search the niches safely (protected by St Cuthbert's grace) while everyone else stayed safely away.

Game reports are caught up, at least until this weekend's game session, and next up we'll be taking a look at James Raggi's "Just a Stupid Dungeon" as I continue reviewing the LOTFP catalog.

LOTFP Review: Bee-Ware!

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

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

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

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

These two monster hunters are ready to wreck your plans!

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

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

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

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

ACKS Greyhawk: A Gnarley Interlude

A principal role of the dungeon master is to be an information dispenser - to feed the players stuff they can use to make decisions and exercise agency in the setting.  Most of the time that's going to come from narrative descriptions during exploration.  From time to time I'll put very brief "cut scenes" into my game when I want the players to know something their characters don't know - like foreshadowing.  I suppose it's not a very old school technique but I use it when there are interesting opposition characters that won't get a lot of screen time (before they die) and it makes their deaths more memorable.  Face it, module writers spend lots of time regaling the reader with their villain's backstories and plans, the players show up and are "I waste him with my crossbow."  The cut scenes let you get a little more value from those villains.  We're going to cover one of those situations tonight.

Several game sessions ago, the players left Hommlet with horses and carriages, camping and fishing gear, and canoes, and made a big show (in Hommlet) of making it seem they were going fishing - they said they'd be heading to the Nulb area to camp near the Imeryds Run, the river that flows out of the Gnarley Woods and through Nulb.

One of the first cut scenes - a 30 second blurb at the end of one of the game sessions a while ago - involved a mysterious hook nosed stranger, tall and cloaked, riding into Nulb and sauntering through the bat wing doors of the Waterside Hostel.  Mr Hook-nose sidled up to the bar and slipped some coins to the bartender, Dick Rentsch, for a whiskey and a question.  "Howdy, Dick, it's been a minute.  My duties have been keeping me away.  By chance have you seen a group of 'fishermen' come through town with wagons and canoes?"

A future cut scene involved Hook Nose hiring a group of disreputable Nulbian brigands, led by a hard luck mercenary captain (Captain Stephen), and another involved the captain and his motley crew of cutthroats setting out along the local roadways looking for Hook Nose's missing fishermen - their searches were fruitless.

Not sure if anyone else does stuff like that, I admit it's idiosyncratic.  But it give the players an ominous sense there are villains and NPC's out there moving against them without it being directly actionable.  Once in a while they'll kill a guy and be like, "oh man, you know who that actually was, it was the stupid priest plotting against us all this time.  I wasted him with my crossbow.  Bwah hah hah…"

Last game session saw the pay off related to one of these little side plots.  The players figured out which characters and NPCs were going on the adventure and set out again for the dungeon.  They canoed across the Imeryds Run and made their way out of the Gnarley Woods north towards the temple.  The two rangers in the group noticed a thin line of smoke across the river, looking west - on the same side of the river as the player's encampment.  Trouble.

The elven ranger, Glyndal, is in possession of an elven cloak and is very hard to detect in the wilds.  He crept through the rushes at the river's edge to spy on the other side.  A dozen or so grubby brigands were setting up a small camp on the far side.  A few officers on horseback sauntered around the camp… the commander nudged his horse down the waterline for a drink.  "I do like to be out in the field on maneuvers - reminds me of my time in the army", he said with a drawl.

The players decided to bail on the dungeon excursion, went back to the forest to their canoes, and prepared the camp for a possible attack.  They didn't set up any traps or ambushes on the approach between the brigands and where the player encampment was down river a few miles… a pair of brigand scouts went into the woods mid-afternoon, and almost got away with the location of the player camp.  After killing the scouts, no one in the player group made the connection that forward scouts would be missed at some point, and the brigand commander would move his force into the woods looking for them.  So glorious battle was had after all!  Huzzah!

No, that's not quite right.  The camp's magic user had a full bevvy of sleep spells and the brigands were eliminated with very little bloodshed (or glory).  Captain Stephen was surrounded, surrendered, and proved to have little loyalty to the man who hired him, "a dislikable fellow that went by the name of Gremag - though he seemed well known to the folks that ran the Waterside Hostel up in Nulb…" 

Although we haven't been back to Hommlet for many game sessions, at least one of the players remembered a Gremag as a proprietor of the trading post - they've sold a lot of dungeon gear back to the traders.  Next week will likely see a trip back to Hommlet.

I have to check my Greyhawk calendar - in the T1 module, there's a mention that a high level assassin will travel to the area looking for those who killed the New Master below the moathouse some 5-20 days later, and I know I rolled it and put it out there - it has to be coming up soon.  You have to plan all that stuff out on a calendar to be a fair dealer.  For instance - I already knew when the brigands of Captain Stephen would come to the player's area and start searching the woods, it was already on the calendar.  Had the players chosen to do something different that day (like go back to Hommlet early) maybe the brigands would have come upon a camp filled with a half dozen zero level guards; they'd kill everyone, steal the players loot.  The players would get back and cry foul - but no, it was on the calendar that way all along, you just picked a bad day to leave your camp.  Sorry.  Keeping a good calendar avoids conflicts of interest and illusionism.  So with any luck, a certain foul-tempered assassin will be showing up in Hommlet about the same time the players want to settle their unfinished business with Gremag.

Post script - our cast of characters

I have 8 or 9 players on the distribution list, but we typically get 3-4 available for any given game session.  This week we had the following folks:

Barfred - L3 paladin of St Cuthbert

Shakti - L3 priestess of a war goddess, wants to build an army to cleanse the world.

Sana - L1 henchman of Shakti, a religious fanatic (fighter)

Glyndal - L3 elven ranger (archer) from the Gnarley Woods.

Kayden - thief - Glyndal's L2 henchman

NPCs

Elmo - Hommlet's rock star ranger.

Spugnoir - an NPC from Hommlet, he who puts bad guys to sleep.

Jack - a zero-level guy rescued from the dungeon, kitted out like a champion with recovered equipment.

A player typically controls Spugnoir (and we've had guests run him) but ideally the players will out-level him and he can become a henchman.  Elmo is getting ready to have other missions that take his attention elsewhere, he's too much of a Mary Sue to let the players keep him around as a crutch - the module advises he may accompany the first several times into the temple dungeons and then recede.

Okay - until next time!

Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu Actual Play Series

 A few months ago, Chaosium published their own "actual play" series for Call of Cthulhu.  It's only four episodes, but they went all out for them - especially for a a small game publisher.  They use period costumes, props, a great looking studio, talented actors, and guests who drift in to play the roles of NPCs.  The game master (keeper) does a great job.  I was impressed by the production.

The episodes introduce the viewer to Call of Cthulhu game play, with sidebars that introduce the rules.  The keeper also explains how things work.  I can see why a game company would leverage well-produced actual play episodes to show how their game is fun and easy to pick up.

I seem to remember that several publishers experienced an OGL-bounce when WOTC imploded during their self-inflicted OGL debacle.  Pathfinder was selling like hotcakes, and Chaosium sold through their stock of Call of Cthulhu boxed sets (the starter sets).  The video series probably seemed like an even better splurge once WOTC had their meltdown and new people were looking to try the game.

The scenario presented in the video, "Bookshops of Arkham", appears to be written especially for the production.  It has some neat bits - there's a sequence in an insane asylum that's fairly creepy (I think it was episode 2).  Without further ado here they are:

Bookshops of Arkham, Episode 1:

Episode 2:

Episode 3:

Episode 4:

Magic Eater: LOTFP Review

There will be spoilers…

Let's begin the reviews of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess catalog.  I'm going to start from the most recent releases and work backwards.  I'm also focusing on the PDF format and items available on RPGNow… er, DriveThruRPG.  There's a range of usability of the Flame Princess stuff, so I prefer to grab the PDFs first and hold off on hardcovers for the things I really like.  Since LOTFP evolved from the golden age, almost all of the modern LOTFP adventures now assume a low-magic pseudo-historical 17th century setting.  Magic Eater is a neat little adventure that can easily be ported out of 17th century England to terrorize the players in your preferred campaign setting.  This one is less about horror and more about "the weird".

Magic Eater is written by Kelvin Green, and weighs in at 35 pages; 30 pages for the main adventures, with 5 pages added for a strange little bonus adventure, A Rough Night at the Dog & Bastard.  The premise of the main adventure is simple… a gang of thieves robs the player characters - not their persons, but the loot left behind in their hideout, rooms, or home base.  The players acquire clues that ultimately lead them to the thieves' lair; the players either assault or infiltrate the fortress; there's a climactic set-piece confrontation with the eponymous Magic Eater.  The gang of thieves, the Loquesmyths, prioritize stealing magic items, and that's what ultimately gets the players motivated (enraged).  There is a long tradition of meta-monsters that attack player's stuff, like rust monsters and disenchanters, and this adventure leans into that motif.

When I use this one, I'll try to work the elements into the campaign background, wherever the players have an investment property or home base where they keep their stuff.  Examples include underworld actors such as the cat burglar Grimalkin or the Loquesmyth's gang.  Many LOTFP seem to be targeted at the levels 1-3 crowd, but this one could be used for the next tier of levels, especially if the players are prone to aggressive negotiations - more reason to make it part of an ongoing campaign.  For that matter, the Loquesmyth hideout could become player character property at the end of the adventure, too.

The assault on the Loquesmyth's ruined castle offers the players several options - they can do a frontal assault, use stealth and infiltration, or use roleplaying to take advantage of schisms in the gang.  There is a cult within the Loquesmyths who treat the Magic Eater as a god, and their revolting practices have begun to mutate them into something more and less than human.  The cultists live in the dungeon, while the other half of the gang stays above ground, offering a chance to drive them off or co-opt them.

The Magic Eater himself is a 5HD bulk with a range of random abilities, earned by devouring magic items, and the climactic combat will engender a blend of disgust, horror, and comedy. When I run this one , I will probably portray the Magic Eater like the Mike Meyers grotesque "Fat Bastard" character from Austin Powers.  He'll have the uncanny ability to sense any magic items the players still possess and declare they need to "get in his belly".

That's a nice sword you got there.  It'd be a shame if something happened to it.

Let's pivot and discuss the writing.  Adventure writing is ultimately a type of technical writing - there's information that must be effectively communicated for the game master to run the scenario.  Once this basic requirement has been met, there's a lot of space for an author to develop a voice.  This is a strength of Kelvin's style - he'll mix in puns, self-deprecating jabs at himself, jabs at players or at LOTFP tropes, and directly address the game master via sidebars.  His books are fun to read.  There are recurring quirks of the Kelvin-verse - the ever-present Dog & Bastard, or poor Geoff (typically requiring rescue).  Perhaps the Kelvin-philes can shed some insight from the Kelvin-files (ho ho) how these things became fixtures?  I imagine the Dog & Bastard is an eldritch franchise that attracts these otherworldly forces to it's vicinity…

Speaking of that ubiquitous tavern, the book ends with a short side adventure called "Rough Night at the Dog & Bastard".  You could place it at any of the franchise locations - they're all over 1630's England and Europe.  Some kind of storm or similar external event keeps the guests and player characters stuck at the inn for a night.  It just happens to be the same night a few sex cultists happen to be there with their magic idol, along with an intertwined cast of desperados and… nuns.  For my version I'd go full Quentin Tarantino and run this like "The Hateful Eight" - I'm sure homicidal player characters will oblige - fiasco is usually the default play mode for murder hobos.  It's a peculiar vignette that could happen while traveling between adventure sites and is worth at least one night of hilarity and hijinks.

Before wrapping up the review, I will warn there are elements that push the boundaries - your threshold for gross or adult material may be less than mine.  (Everyone with the slightest taste difference from me is either a prude or a jaded and depraved maniac).  The Magic Eater cult from the first adventure does awful things with the Magic Eater's excrement (gag, barf), and the second adventure involves the hijinks of a pair of sex cultists with their blasphemous idol.  It's still tame by LOTFP standards.  But there you go.

For me, Magic Eater is a keeper - fun to read, looks fun to run.  You can get it at DriveThruRPG for $5.99 here:  Magic Eater.  Next review also takes place in the Kelvin-verse, "Bee-Ware".  Until next time - be seeing you.