review: F3 The Many Gates of the Gann

Yet another review, because I don't feel like writing up a session recap for yesterday's game right now.

This one is another Guy Fullerton module, F3 - The Many Gates of the Gann.  It's been out for a while, yeah you've probably all heard of it, but on the off chance you haven't, it's awesome.  And oh yeah, SPOILERS if you plan to play in it...

This one is straight up crazy-awesome. The dungeon itself is guarded by giant stone ape heads, that shoot disintegration beams.  The dungeon complex was built to protect some doohickeys ages ago, and is mostly automated at this point, run by what are effectively hypnotized, trained apes.  The complex was breached from below, though, and freaks have moved in.  So, you've got jerk monsters sneaking out to ravage the countryside, and a whole dungeon full of machinery designed around enslaving apes.

The mechanisms for enslaving apes provide most of the puzzles - if the players persist, they will eventually be able to figure out how to control the apes, and make more.  More likely they'll just run around causing mayhem though, because the place is full of other weirdos. The best of them are giant intelligent snakes that interact with the world by swallowing the lower halves of people and biting into their spines - the upper halves stick out of the mouths, cast spells for them, talk, etc.  Totally over-the-top, and if the party loses any characters, you get to turn them into sock puppets!

Anyhow, this module is absolutely fantastic, go buy, etc etc.

review: F1 The Fane of Poisoned Prophecies

Another review!  Got a game tomorrow, so instead of prepping like I should, I'm doing this! I present to you F1 - The Fane of Poisoned Prophecies by Guy Fullerton.  Note that this review has SPOILERS, which shouldn't be a shocker since it's a review of a module, but there you go.  Don't read if you ever intend to play it.

 

Yes, this came out quite a while ago, but I'm reviewing it anyways.  I just picked it up a few weeks ago, and this is pretty good.  It's got a somewhat fairy tale vibe, which I don't usually go for, with some guys building a stairway to the moon, and then hiding the entrance in the temple to the sun-god.

What made it work for me was the villains - a pack of lazy werewolves, sent by the werewolf boss of the moon, to go seek a way to control their shapeshifting (you know, on the moon, it's always a full moon).  I imagine those guys being played like a biker gang, kicking back with their biker ladies and raising hell in the temple.  I can work with that, and totally trash the fairy tale vibe in the process, because that's just how I am.

It's got quite a few puzzles - they are good, but they are also tough.  They are mostly of a nature where you manipulate something from a distance, so you don't see whether you've done anything or not immediately - which means that players will probably not persist in trying to figure certain aspects of the dungeon out.  Some NPC interaction would need to be added to provide incentive for PC's to work them out.

The conceit behind this is there's a moon staircase, that nobody knows about.  And there are werewolves, who've gone and chased off the prophetess and are pretending to be the mysterious oracle of the sun temple, and give out crap prophecies in exchange for gold.  Pretty sandboxy, players show up for whatever reason they like, and then interact with a bunch of thuggish werewolves and the mechanisms of the temple.

Anyhow, easy enough to drop in to any campaign I can think of, and I can see this working out very well in play.

review: Dwimmermount

I've been looking forward to Dwimmermount for a long time now, and it's released!  I wasn't actually part of the kickstarter (I almost never participate in those things), so haven't read the first draft, or been part of the drama, or any of that.  All I care about is having another big dungeon out there, because I love big dungeons.

So - conclusion first - I really like Dwimmermount.  It's really big, and it's full of pulp science-fantasy flavor.  It is NOT gonzo science-fantasy - nothing like my own ASE that way.  But you can see the shared roots, with floating space techno-gods, interstellar travel, metallized skeletons of unknown purpose, etc etc.  So, James and I apparently read all the same books and watched the same cartoons.

What Dwimmermount is, is classic D&D.  It uses tons of book monsters and book magic items.  There's custom creations in there, but the majority of it is straight out of the rulebooks.  It's also the product of play - my understanding is that James had a really brief set of notes and maps, and he made a lot of things up as he went along.  This book is the actualization of that experience.

The side effect of this, is that this book is the realization of James' and his players' play styles.  You can feel how his campaign worked and what his players were focused on as you read through it - it was an investigative, world-building campaign where the details emerged through play.  That is a strength and a weakness here - to really get the most out of the dungeon, the players have to invest themselves in figuring out the details of the world.  There are little margin notes that point out where history can be gleaned and sold off to sages - but it's a bit understated.  I think the DM will need to create & use some NPC's to showcase this in the early levels to make sure the players understand that this is worthwhile - the text as written doesn't really cover that, presumably since James' campaign went that direction all on its own.

After the first couple of levels, the factions get all up in the players' face and the historical bits should fall into place much easier.  This is very much a dungeon of factions rather than set-pieces and goofy traps - there's a lot of those, but the big deal here is interacting with the factions and playing them off each other.  The factions and their motivations are very well covered.

Other stuff:

Dungeon maps - very cool
Pulp background - very cool.  It's got astral travelers founding subterranean cities, giant robot-gods, lakes of magic gasoline, really it seems yanked from a 50's "B" sci-fi movie
Wilderness maps & overview - a bit bland, but it's not really the focus of the book, so not much of a knock on it either
New monsters - a lot of these are copies of Labyrinth Lord AEC, presumably stuck in because of concerns about being "Labyrinth Lord" compatible w/o needing the AEC.  Doesn't hurt anything, but could've been left out
New magic items - again, a lot of these are from AEC

I'm a terrible reviewer, others (Bryce Lynch, Gus L.) are much better at explaining why they like & dislike a product - but I've given it my best shot.  Overall, I like Dwimmermount quite a bit.

review: Mini-Manor

My unusually high charisma has once again caused a free gift to arrive:

The Mini-Manor showed up unexpectedly yesterday.  I want to review it in depth, but the big reveal is too cool, so there's only so much detail I'll give you.  Plus, you can just check it our yourself - Tim Shorts offered it up as freely downloadable PDF for Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day, and it's available at Gothridge Manor..

a. The magic items are all new, there's plenty of them, and they're very imaginative
b. Solo adventure for a 5th level shmoe.  He's probably going to die, because this adventure is tough. He wakes up in a cell, with a bunch of other shmoes, and there's some jerk cutting those other guys' faces off.  The point of the adventure:  beat that guy to death with a nearby severed arm, and then get out of the dungeon alive
c. A twist at the end!  Hahaha on you, player!  If the poor guy survives that long, of course...

I like it a lot, and it's a free gift, so bonus.

Note to Ferrari dealerships - I will also review cars, if one were to mysteriously arrive in my driveway.

review: Gygax #1

I was totally stoked when I heard about Gygax magazine, and then when I saw the pictures on the web site at the unveiling, hey - it was the old Dragon trade dress!  Nostalgia demanded I purchase this immediately.

It showed up today, and I read it, and here's what I think.

First off - when I opened the envelope, the magazine was so very thin. In another product I wouldn't have noticed, 60 pages is still a good count, but with the trade dress, it invites comparison to Dragon.  No 90+ pages here.  So, sort of a sad reminder of the decline of our hobby.

They are not targeting old school, or if they are, they didn't do it very well with this issue. They replicate the old-school Dragon trade dress, which is kind of annoying, because there wasn't a lot of old-school content in there.  So it's a nostalgia play, but I think the publisher wants to market to everyone with a big-tent magazine. Let me be clear: I hate big tents, because there's so little in those tents that interests me. I like focus.

The magazine has lots of authors with old-school cred - two Gygaxes, a Kask, a Ward, a Lakofka. Most of that was fluff though (except the Lakofka article which went into some crunch on AD&D bonuses) - a lot of talking about the good old days.  The other articles were also  fluff, or crunchy articles for newer games that I don't care about.  The exception is Gnatdamp, a swamp town by Michael Curtis, which was good.  It was statless and thus system-neutral, but clearly D&D.

Writing this, I'm feeling this post isn't much of a review - but that's because there was very little I could judge on its usefulness.  It was mostly fluff, and several articles on stuff I don't play.

I am tepid on the magazine right now.  I understand why there are fluff articles, everyone wants to reminisce, but there were so many... I think a better approach would have been to spread them out across more issues, and have a lot more focused content.  A higher page count would also have been nice too, as it stands it's like staring at terminally ill patient when sitting side-by-side with the early 80's Dragon magazines I've got on my shelf.

Overall impressions - love the trade dress, too much fluff, wish it was more focused on early edition D&D - something more like the soon-to-be-departed Fight On! magazine.  Presumably there's not enough of us in the OSR to support Gygax magazine as a business entity though, and they'll keep their big-tent approach.

review: Knowledge Illuminates

I'm already bored with marketing (which consisted of a blog post shared on G+ and posts to four forums). So on to other things.

Now that ASE2-3 is out the door I've got some time to read some of the gaming material I bought in the past few months - namely, Knowledge Illuminates and Barrowmaze.  Just finished KI, and just started BM - so I figure I'll toss out a review of KI, since there aren't many out there.

Completely coincidentally, Bryce at tenfootpole.org just reviewed KI as well...

Disclosure - I know the author, Tim Shorts, from a few sessions in Trey's Weird Adventures campaign earlier this year.

So, Knowledge Illuminates is a small lair-type dungeon, with 11 rooms. I like it quite a bit. The idea is that there's a box full o' demon, some of his minions got out in a wizard's lab, everyone dies, and eventually the party stumbles across the lair.  This is the only weak point - the hooks to find the wizard's lab aren't very strong. I'd toss them entirely and leave a treasure map somewhere instead.

The lair itself has a few monsters, and a LOT of magical loot for that room density. Treasure, btw, is using a silver standard - values are always referenced as "silver pieces".  It's a fairly old-school ratio of monsters to empty rooms - the dungeon is front-loaded with the monsters, so as you go deeper in it's all traps and learning the horrible history of the chest, and learning various bits of magical knowledge that can greatly increase your loot-haul, if the players pay enough attention.  The trap that slowly turns players into ghouls is particularly nice - I can see that causing a certain amount of heartache.

I would have liked to see the demon-locked-in-the-chest statted out and illustrated, in case the players go full stupid and let him out.

There's also a small wilderness area around the dungeon described. This stuff is mostly unrelated to the dungeon (except the hangman's tree, which has a nice payoff if you've read some books in the dungeon). As evidenced by the small amounts of treasure most encounters have, this is filler should the players go wandering afield - the real meat of this adventure is all underground.

Tim's got a chart at the back that shows how he doles out XP - it's more of rewards for certain accomplishments, instead of the straight xp-for-treasure. I'm too crusty and mean for that - you get your loot, and that's all the XP you'll be getting.

So it's a good 1st level dungeon, that can be run through in a single session.  If you're looking to get a copy, I believe there's a PDF up at rpgnow or you can order a hardcopy from Tim directly.

review: Death Love Doom, Monolith From Beyond Space And Time

It's review time!  I ordered Death Love Doom and Monolith From Beyond Space and Time from Noble Knight, read them, digested the contents for a week or so, and now I shall spew forth what I think.

I am a Raggi fan - I like the sense of nihilism in his modules. So naturally I like these. There is one thing I absolutely do not like about his products though - tiny little books with tiny little type. There's a concrete reason why - presbyopia.  Do you know who gets it? EVERYBODY OVER 40.  If it hasn't happened to you yet, it's going to. Dammitall, your audience is getting bad eyes, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM, and the tiny typeface in the tiny books really sucks, because you can't read up close, and you can't read it held farther away when the letters are so small.

So I hate the physical presentation.  On to the modules.  Spoilers abound, so skip if you're planning to play these.

So I ordered Death Love Doom despite Jim's warnings about the controversial content. It's really not all that grotesque, although why all the tormented people decided to rip their clothes off for the art I don't know. I'm not sure I can run this for my players, because a lot of the tension here involves being drawn in to care about what's happened to this innocent family. My players epitomize murder-hobodom, and I expect it would be endless looting and ignoring anything not immediately hostile, possibly followed by arson.  Which is a fun way to play, but treating this adventure that way just makes it a grotesque home invasion.

I have no concerns about their ability to follow the clues to the necklace that I've seen in other reviews - mutilated people are running around shouting about it, it seems kind of hard to miss.  If you just flee out of the house in horror, yeah, you'll never know what happened.

The only part of the module I'd change is the bit where they get to decide the value of the necklace if they go to destroy it, they'd go for millions.  Of course the chance that they actually try to destroy it instead of pawn it off on unsuspecting yokels is zero.

The set up for the module is a house where the family hasn't been heard from in days, and some thieves want to break in.  So it's pretty easy to dump wherever you want - no involved hooks or geographical issues to worry about integrating into an existing campaign.  I might try running it for my players if less than a full group shows up - that way the tension will rack up due to concern for their own physical safety, if not for the NPC's.

The other module I purchased was The Monolith From Beyond Space and Time.  The cover art looks interesting to me, but my family disagreed - there were many, many comments about "radioactive doodies".  Eventually I had to stick the book on a shelf where they wouldn't notice the cover, because the long involved stories about the how's and why's of radioactive doodies became overwhelming.

The adventure itself is pretty cool. I don't see the problem with railroady bits that other people have mentioned - my players would be completely stoked to have the ability to fall asleep near someone they don't like, and presto, you wake up and problem is solved. I have no respect for characters' integrity and back-stories though - I regularly inflict weird bodily changes upon PC's.  This is just upping the stakes a bit.

The only part I really didn't like was the owls. First, the shrubs were stopping players from leaving - the only way to leave was when the DM felt that enough dramatic tension had occurred.  What the?  Story-game balogna that makes no sense, and really is the opposite of old-school.  The other thing about the owls that stank was the slow degradation of spellcasters. Your magic-user saw some owl statues, and now you're screwed, and there is explicitly nothing you can ever do about it, nor was there any way to avoid it.  It's "weird", but it doesn't really sit right, it isn't a result of any player actions, it doesn't make playing the character more interesting, just gimps him...  This is apparently some fellow name Kenneth Hite's work, but James had editorial control here, so boo hiss to this part.

The rest seems like it'll work pretty well.  The monolith requires a "sacrifice" to leave, but presumably the "sacrifice" character will become one with space and time.  Or perhaps a henchman will want to become one with space and time.  Or the monolith can just be left open, which is how I expect my players would deal with it - because having light-surfers murder their well-guarded opponents would be very tempting. Or they exit onto another world and try to find their way back home the "back way". Players are creative, and there's a lot of them, I don't see a little thing like an extra-dimensional monolith keeping them from their murder-hobo ways.

This is pretty creative, James had mentioned it being his interpretation of a D&D "artifact" level magic item - which it performs wonderfully as.

review: D&DNext (summary: bleah)

I almost never post opinions, because everyone already has one and forums are better suited for discussion anyhow.  See here for my opinion post on avoiding opinion posts.

But I just read the D&DNext playtest rules.  Ahh well, I'll call this post a review.

Fighters do damage on misses?
Wizards cast no-miss magic missiles all day long?
You get umpteen saving throws against dying?

What kind of delicate flowers have modern D&D players become? The only challenge I can see with these rules is staying awake.  Never die, always hit, everybody gets a gold star and everyone's a winner all the time.

Whatever happened to succeeding through a combination of wits and luck?

Five billion thumbs down, not worth downloading, the design team is driving over a cliff (again), etc etc.

Review: Weird Adventures

I've just finished reading Weird Adventures by Trey Causey (of the wonderful From the Sorcerer's Skull blog).  It is awesome, go buy it now if you haven't.

Reviews should probably offer a bit more than a command to purchase.  The book describes, in broad strokes, an alternate Earth, where D&D magic and monsters exist alongside the 1930's of our world, and then in detail deals with one place in particular - the City, an alternate version of New York City.  The neighborhoods and boroughs are covered in detail, and full of adventure seeds.  It concludes with a short list of monsters specific to his setting.

The city is simply outstanding, and the adventure hooks are wonderful.  The underworld is run by the Hell Syndicate, who send their Hit Fiends to rub out the competition.  The homeless are urban druids, served by feral children who roam Central Park.  The sinister sorcerer Tsan Chan runs the Chinatown (well, Yiantown) gangs, and General Brant's Tomb contains the horrible thing that General Brant became.  The book is loaded with adventure hooks like that - it's impossible to run out of things to do in the City.

The art is amazing.  It's very very evocative of its pulp inspirations.  The cover is a crazy-good homage to the original Player's Handbook, with turbaned magician, gun moll, and tommy-gun wielding gangster acting as the archetypal adventuring party.  The art inside is just as cool, with hillbilly giants, hoochie-mamas, beholders stalking treasure-seekers, and a further homage to the DMG cover.

There are weaknesses.  One thing it's missing is a section on 1930's weapons and armor (well, trenchcoats and fedoras, I suppose).  Some guidance on these would be useful in running adventures in the City.  Trey's got a lot of "magic item" type material he's been putting up on his blog, perhaps it is slated for an item-focused sequel?  A short introductory adventure would also be useful for referees who want to leap into the City feet-first.

Overall, it's an awesome book, and great for a pulp/noir D&D game. The City is on the list of places my own players may end up, when they get to the various otherworldly portals in the dungeon.  I've been waiting for its publication for some time (along with Dwimmermount, Planet Algol, and Stonehell 2 - get a move on people!), and it was totally worth it.  BUY IT!  BUY IT NOW!

Review: Tome of Horrors Complete

I preordered the big hardcopy of the Tome of Horrors Complete for Swords & Wizardry a few months ago, and downloaded the PDF last night.

Have I read the whole thing?  Of course not, and I doubt I will.  It's several hundred pages of monsters, I'll flip through it when I need inspiration.  When I was young I certainly would have gone through everything, but I can't dedicate that kind of time to a monster manual nowadays.

As for providing inspiration, it does that in droves.  I've been staring the prospect of another several hundred dungeon rooms in the face, and it was imposing - but just a few minutes of flipping around and ideas started flowing - many only tangentially related to the monsters I was looking at.  It's got enough stuff that there's something to appeal for any given situation.

The collection has a few weaknesses.  The first is that a huge percentage of the monsters are from the Fiend Folio and Monster Manual II- and I've already got those.  At least I know if it's in this book, it's OGL and I can feel free to stick it in the published levels of the ASE.  There's still a bunch of new stuff - I'm particularly fond of the "Skull Spider."

The second is that I don't know that I'll get much use out of the "lairs" that appear with each monster.  When I first heard of the "lair" concept I was hoping for little keyed maps - actual lairs.  They are actually brief descriptions of an encounter with the creature, I haven't read any that couldn't easily have been made up on the fly.  There are several hundred of the things though, and I've only read a handful, so there could be some gems buried in there.

The third weakness is a particular monster I find grating - the "crucifixion spirit"?  Seems pretty douchebaggy to me.

The strength of the Tome of Horrors Complete is its size.  It's got tons of stuff, so it's great for paging through and looking at stuff when trying to come up with encounter ideas.  I don't have the hardcopy yet, but I'm hoping it's bound well enough to put up with my thumbing through it at random.

Using Fantasy Grounds and Skype

For our last session, we placed using Fantasy Grounds II and Skype.  It was a fairly short session, as Gutboy had a bunch of problems getting his microphone working and it took a while to resolve it all.  Then we had a "training period" where we figured out how to roll dice and fill in character sheets.

Overall, it went fairly smoothly.  I have a few quibbles with Fantasy Grounds, mostly with the "masking" feature for maps.  If you accidentally unmask something, you have to wipe out everything you've unmasked and start all over again.  I'd also appreciate being able to draw arbitrary polygons instead of just free-form and rectangles.  These probably aren't issues for "battle map" style games like 4th edition, but for a megadungeon with lots of odd-shaped rooms it's a big deal.

So the two players virtually attending were a bit nervous, as always, about tackling the dungeon with reduced numbers, so they monkeyed around in Denethix instead.  The old landlord has been jettisoned (and apparently won't be converted to Morlock food, how sad - I was hoping for acts of brigandry and cannibalism), and Mr. Roper has taken his place.  Is this the first campaign to draw inspiration from "Three's Company" ?  I'll toss Mrs. Roper into the mix at some point, and see if I can stir up some intrigue in the apartment building.

I introduced a bit of the seedier side of Denethix - hafnium addiction.  That's one of the less notable narcotics.  Wait til they run into the Variegated Eye-Leech addicts...

There was a lot of focus on Mongo's book, so I was just making things up to amuse myself.  I had no idea what its evil powers were - I was thinking more along the lines of evil stat increases, but then the players decided to have the elven sage cast "identify" on it, and he identified a power.  So I blurted out "it grants desires."  Had to roll with it from there - so now Mongo can trade evil acts for fantastic prizes.  To quote Mongo's player:  "There's no way this can turn out bad."

Review: Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom

Instead of actually working on level 2 (and thus, by definition, the sequel to ASE1) I've been playing Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom.  It's an Encounter Critical adventure implemented as Interactive Fiction - like the old Infocom games I used to play when I was a kid.

Man that was a sweet, sweet game.  There are only a few commands to deal with (assail, parley, regard, seize, use), and the puzzles are fairly simple.  The gonzo-factor is over the top though, since it is Encounter Critical.

Things I really liked:

a. Functions as a play example for Encounter Critical.  Not the mechanics, but how monsters & society operates.  The Encounter Critical rules are really lightweight, so this game really helps illustrate some of the default setting.

b. Bee Queen encounter.  Wonderfully silly.

c. The secret identify of the Slaver King.  It was jaw-droppingly over-the-top.

I've only played through the one time, and while I solved almost everything, I did goof a few things.

1. I assailed Adam, so he didn't become a buddy.  Whoops.
2. I can't figure out how to get to the fifth encounter with the Delicate Doxy.  Maybe if I was nicer to Adam?  Or maybe there's something that can be done with the gold statue?

If anybody knows the secret to the fifth encounter, I'd love to hear it.

Game play lasted maybe 6 hours?  It's a pretty easy game, but well worth the time.

Death Frost Doom

This isn't really a full-blown post, just a quick follow-up comment.  I read through Death Frost Doom yesterday, and I like this one.  It has the usual death traps, but I don't get the vibe that the players are being arbitrarily punished, for several reasons (some of which are SPOILERS so you might want to move along):

1. Many of the effects the players hit early on are non-lethal, and can be dealt with via remove curse and other typical remedies
2. Where the effects are lethal, there's often a repetition of the same trap, but with increasingly bad consequences (e.g. the inscriptions in Duvan'Ku)
3. Most of the nasty things going on actually appear nasty, and the players ought to know better, so they'll blame themselves if they goof it all up
4. A lot of the traps actually appear as traps or puzzles (e.g. coins on the children's crypt door).  So there are quality hints that the players need to be figuring things out.

I find I like this a lot better than Tower of the Stargazer or the pirate lair in Weird New World.  If players blame their own stupidity when bad things happen, then I'm happy.

I could drop this in my campaign and it would fit right in with the traps & tricks I put into my own encounters.  And if they get bored of the megadungeon, Death Frost Doom will definitely be on the menu.

Anyhow, this isn't a review blog, so it'll be all content all the time again with the next post.

Weird New World

When I wrote the session recap / review of LotFP: Weird Fantasy Roleplaying, I mentioned that I hadn't read Weird New World yet.  I did read it later that week, but never got around to writing up what I thought of it.  So here is my review.  There will be SPOILERS, of course, so skip this if you don't want to see that sort of thing.

I have the sense that Mr. Raggi & I were reading the same books recently.  Last year I read Dan Simmon's Terror, and Anthony Brandt's The Man Who Ate His Boots.  Weird New World is heavily influenced by the search for the Northwest Passage, and I saw a nod in there to the monster from Dan Simmons' book.  If you're planning on running this, I think you really do need to read one of the above books (or another about the search for the Northwest Passage), if you're going to get the flavor right.

The module is a sandbox, which is great, but it's mostly very very sparse on detail.  You'll have to put a lot of work into this to play with it.  It's more a campaign sub-setting than any kind of adventure.  Most of the encounters listed are bare-bones, a few lines of great ideas, but all the work is left to the DM.

In practice, I can't see players just wandering about this wilderness aimlessly.  The environment is deadly in the extreme, and they're going to need a reason to head out there, and probably some halfway-decent idea of where to go in particular, if you want to do more than watch the party flail around for a bit and die of exposure.  So just stumbling across the encounter areas is unlikely.  This is good and bad - good because you don't have to detail everything before the players set out, bad because they won't run into all the wonderful awfulness that's out there.

I really liked the map, it was really well done and very reminiscent of the arctic reaches of northern Canada.  The only fault I find with it is the numbered encounter areas.  The numbers are very tiny, and hard to pick out.  Putting text labels next to the encounter hexes, in addition to the numbers, would make it easier to use.

Mr. Raggi did describe two encounter areas in greater detail, the pirate lair, and a ship impaled on a coral spike.  The pirate lair suffers from the same issues that the the Tower of the Stargazer had - players are punished very very very badly for curiosity.  If you go through all the work of getting past the lava and/or rivers, you most likely just end up being screwed over for your ingenuity.

The coral spike didn't have that sort of punishment.  It is a bit lighter of an encounter though.  My only quibble here, which probably won't bug most people, is that it is patently impossible from a nautical perspective.  The sailors in my group would never suspend disbelief - boats that don't leak when pitchpoled onto giant spikes.  Probably not an issue if you're not dealing with sailors, but I could never get away with it.

All this said, I probably won't be using this anytime soon.  I'm in a Thundarr-inspired megadungeon right now, and wandering off into the Great White North isn't in the cards right now.  When they get down to the lower levels, with the teleporters, black ziggurats, and other low-level tomfoolery, I expect I'll drop in a gate to the frozen north.

I've also been turning over in my head my criticisms of both this and Tower of the Stargazer, in respect to the player-punishment.  I've read similar critiques of Death Frost Doom, which I also purchased, but have not yet read.  I have to compare what I've read, though, against my actual experience running the Tower.  The players mostly avoided the death traps, by being too scared to mess with anything, with the exception of the telescope.  I'm curious to know what lethality other people have experienced when running through these adventures. I've only read speculation so far, and one run-through of Death Frost Doom where the party didn't touch anything at all.

I also forgot to mention in the Tower of the Stargazer post, that the "game for your soul" section was very well received.  I only had 2 players, and both got involved with the game of checkers (chosen because it would be shorter than chess).  It was a big hit.

LotFP: Weird Fantasy RPG

Today, I had a couple of friends over and we tried out Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Weird Fantasy RPG. The fellows rolled up 2 PC's each, 2 dwarves, a fighter, and a cleric, and off they went to the Tower of the Stargazer.

I'll give the session report momentarily (and it WILL HAVE SPOILERS so if you don't want to know how the Tower of the Stargazer runs, stop reading before you hit the session report).  Before that, some comments about the LotFP:WFRPG.

1. Physically, the rulebooks are little booklets with paper covers.  I don't believe they would survive continuous play very well.  The print is very small as well, which makes it annoying to read.  There's no index either.  The physical presentation would be greatly enhanced by a single 8 1/2" by 11" hardcover book with larger print, and by the addition of an index.  It also has tiny dice and a tiny pencil.  My box set was missing the promised sheets of graph paper, but somehow I'll get by without that.

2. The cover artwork is astoundingly cool.  I like that the female fighter is in some sort of full-dress-coat leather armor, rather than a chainmail bikini.  Or even worse than the chainmail bikini, a set of dungeonpunk armor.  She's stylin' and practical.  The Type V demon is topless, but tastefully topless.  If a hideous snake monster can be tasteful, that is.  It's pretty uncontroversial, although I expect that for any serious attempt at retail penetration, the hair will have to be modified to drape over her chest (just my guess of course, I'm not in the game publishing biz so I could be completely wrong, and maybe the author isn't going for retail penetration anyhow).  Other art is OK, but it's clear where the big art budget went.

3. The tutorial is silly-long, for a product that is pretty much guaranteed to be picked up only by people who've already played D&D.

4. There was only a little bit of combat this afternoon, so we didn't explore the various new combat mechanics (parry, etc).  Nobody rolled a specialist (thief) either, but the skill system for them is really really well done, it fits right into the game seamlessly, and doesn't feel tacked-on like other skill systems.  It's ascending AC, too, if that's something you care about.  I like it better than descending AC, personally.

5. There's no bestiary.  The author has a section where he encourages everyone to make up their own unique monsters, and about substituting humans in for humanoids in published adventures.  I'm not a fan of that approach, as the monsters are part of what makes these games fun.  Every game has a bestiary for a reason, because they are fun.  Clipping out fun for ideological reasons doesn't seem like a good idea.  In the event a new DM picks up the game, he's also going to be left without any model monsters to emulate.

6. The character sheets available on the web site are formatted for A4, which I was afraid would prevent me from using them.  They printed fine on regular paper when I selected "fit to paper size" though, so all was well there.


STOP READING NOW IF YOU WANT TO AVOID MINOR SPOILERS

7. The intro adventure is very punishing for inquisitive players.  If you investigate anything in the tower too deeply, it turns around and bites you.  Literally in many cases.  I don't have a problem with the front door, it sets the tone, and you get a save, but many of the inquisitive actions you do in the tower can get you killed, with no warning beforehand.  It encourages players to never touch anything, which isn't really how I like to run things.  NOTE - I haven't read the Weird World intro adventure yet, that may have a different tone.  Everything else in the boxed set, I've gone through.  Also note, my players were decidedly un-inquisitive in this session, and missed a lot of the death traps.

8. The rulebooks are very nihilistic in tone, but the intro adventure seemed to be a more traditional D&D dungeon-crawl feel.  The sample gameplay session in the tutorial was also very D&D-esque.  So the nihilism isn't an inherent part of the gameplay, at least as far as the Tower of the Stargazer went. Probably a good thing, it's hard to be nihilistic when you're stuffing your face full of pizza.

Overall, it played just like a D&D session.  So what you get buying the boxed set, is a clone with some interesting features, that I'm sure are discussed elsewhere better than I'm discussing here.  You get ascending AC, a really nice skill system for thieves, some tweaks to combat (parries, etc), and fighters being the only class who improves in attacks as they level (which really makes you wonder what the point of a dwarf or halfling is, but it's a very humanocentric game, so I suspect they are intentionally being made less desirable).  You also get the nihilistic weird-fantasy style that the author advocates.  He is a very good writer, so the rules are entertaining to read.  So in a nutshell, it's a cleaned-up rule system, deviating in many points from a standard D&D clone, plus some attitude in the rules.  It'd be more of a win if the physical presentation was better, as it stands I expect regular play would destroy the rulebooks in short order.

And now, the session recap.  MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW.

(by the way, please excuse the writing style on these recaps, I'm basically just doing speed-typing here to dump the whole thing out before I forget what happened, I know I'm mixing tenses, being repetitive, etc)

Our intrepid party, consisting of dwarf Rollo, fighter George, cleric Shippy, and dwarf Groo, are brought to the base of a mysterious tower by the Adventure Railroad.  The tower is 80' tall, with a dome at the top, ringed by metal spikes, and completely windowless.  The area around the tower in a 50' radius is completely turned to ash.  At the edge of this circle of devastation stand four massive metal spikes, 40' tall.  Lightning continually hammers down on these metal spikes, and occasionally on to the ground around the tower.  The party considers heading back towards the Adventure Railroad to find a less scary wizard's tower to assault, but it appears the train has already left the station.  With nothing else left to do, George approaches the entrance.

The tower entrance is a massive pair of doors, each with a serpent-shaped handle and a door knocker.  George uses the knocker, and the doors silently swing inwards.  He beckons the rest of the rest of the party forwards, and they enter the tower.  They explore the tower's first floor, finding a trap door under a large pile of fake crates, and four bottles of wine.  Deciding that they want to stick to the tower, which they know is only 60' wide, and thus an easier mapping chore, they head upstairs to the second level and ignore the trap door.

On the second level, they see another set of stairs leading up to the third floor, trickling blood down the steps.  Before investigating the blood, they search the third floor, finding a diary of a servant who ran from his insane wizard master, and a key.  They then head upstairs, following the blood, and find that it comes from a massive iron door at the top of the stairs.  The blood is leaking from the keyhole.  The key they have doesn't fit, so they head back downstairs to the trap door.

Heading down, they find themselves in a store room full of crates with whimsical labels such as "The shoulder blade of a soldier who loved God."  Opening the crates, they find exactly what the labels indicated - various bones.

They headed into the next room, and found a laboratory with several small dead animals with sewn-up wounds, and a human cadaver sewn up with gold thread.  George yanked out the gold thread, and was shocked to find the corpse's intestines leap up to strangle him.  After a short fight, the party subdued the innards, and they continued exploring the room.  They found a microscope, a box of slides with blood samples, and several vials of a red substance.  They ignored those, and George investigated a hall full of mirrors.  The mirror at the end of the hall blazed with a brilliant light, and poor George was singed by the power of it.

Giving up on all that, the party headed south to a corridor full of cells.  Corpses immediately leaped up in the cells, floating a few inches above the floor, and somehow floated through the bars towards George.  George stood in the doorway and gave his all, sending many corpses back to their graves, but the last floating corpse tore his throat out.  The rest of the party slew the remaining corpse, and then lit the whole pile of them (and George) on fire.  After the fire died down, they explored the rest of the cells, finding a skeleton with 15 arms and 4 spines, and a corpse that when disturbed spat out a leech, that the party quickly smashed.

They then fooled with a strange shaft in the eastern side of the tower.  It had a dial that could be pointed at various numbers.  They pointed it to the number 1, and a disc floated down in front of them, to the bottom of the shaft below them.  Moving the dial to 2, the disc floated to floor level.  They stepped on to the disc (over two trips, as the disc was too small for all of them), and moved the dial to 1 and floated down to the bottom of the shaft.

In this area, they found a room with 4 levers, and many blue force-fields barring the way towards 10 treasure chests.  They found that objects touching the force fields would explode.  After fooling with the levers, they gave themselves some electric shocks, but were otherwise unable to cause any force fields to disappear.  They decided to rest for a few days in the relative safety of this room, and recover from their wounds.

Returning to the elevator, they set the dial to 3 and rode up into another level of the tower.  Opening the door to this level, they found themselves on the other side of the bleeding-iron-door.

A wizard trapped in a circle of salt asked for assistance, suggesting that he'd give the party 100gp if they erased the salt circle, so he could escape.  He explained it was a tragic accident that left him trapped.  The party asked him how long he'd been trapped there, and the wizard exploded in rage, threatening to kill them all if they didn't break the circle immediately.  The party taunted him for a while, then looted the room while the wizard watched impotently, taking a key from the door, a large crystal, as big as a man's head, and a book from the wizard's desk.

Heading up the elevator to the next level, they found a freezer room, with a cold metal box full of blood samples.  The party decided to just close the box and move on.  Next, they found a library, full of ancient books, that needed to be handled extremely carefully, with gloves, tongs, and special lighting.  Groo went through the library, tossing every single book to the floor, gleefully watching them disintegrate under his ungentle care.

As the wound their way through this level of the tower, they ended up in a room where a ghostly figure materialized, asking if anyone wanted to gamble their soul in a game of skill and chance, to remove a force field preventing the party from entering the next room.  The cleric Shippy agreed immediately, and a fierce game of checkers ensued.  Shippy prevailed, and kept his soul, and the force field disappeared.  This led to another library, where Groo started trashing all the books again, although these books were newer and didn't disintegrate on contact.

Taking the elevator to the next level, the party found themselves in a room with a retracted telescope, bins of charcoal and black powder, a control panel, a book on a pedestal, and a fish pool.  Rollo took the book and shoved it in his pack, and then tried feeding rations to the fish in the pool.  He was shocked to see the crumbled rations fizz and hiss as they hit the pool of water.  Shippy started fooling around with the control panel, and found a way to open the dome at the top of the tower.  He then closed, hit another lever, and the telescope started extending.  As it became clear it was going to hit the closed tower roof, he hit the lever to open the roof, but it was too late - the telescape smashed against the roof, and chunks of glass and metal fell to the ground, slicing clean through Shippy's skull.

They returned to the bottommost level of the tower to fool with the levers some more, but had no luck making the force fields disappear.  They decided to take the loot gathered so far, declare victory, and go home.

Customizable GM Screen, revisited

The D&D cartoon panel was too lame.  Zardoz + Conan = awesome.  The revised Savage Worlds customizable DM screen, for your viewing pleasure (click for larger version):

Customizable GM screen

The Savage Worlds Customizable GM Screen is just awesome. I spent a few hours transcribing tables into Microsoft Word, printed three sheets of paper out with everything I need to look up quickly during the game, and I've got a nice little Labyrinth Lord screen. Then I searched the web for Thundarr video captures, D&D cartoon video captures, and various scans of module & rulebook art, so I'd have something to show on the outside. It's very very very nerdy, I'm sure I'll get some grief from the players next Wednesday.

I might replace the D&D cartoon panel with more module & rulebook scans, it's nowhere near as evocative as a nice bit of Erol Otus art.

You can click on the pictures to see larger versions.