The Monolith From Beyond Space and Time

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The Monolith Beyond Space and Time
Module published by Self published
Rule System	Lamentations of the Flame Princess
Authors	James Edward Raggi IV / Kenneth Hite
First Publication	2012

"(The characters will eventually)...realize they cannot win. They are doomed, and were doomed from the moment they got involved."

– James Edward Raggi IV, showing even more disregard for being fair to your players than usual

The Monolith Beyond Space and Time is a module for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, written by James Edward Raggi IV. It is designated as being for characters from level 0 through infinity, which should make you immediately suspicious.

Raggi considers this a homage to H.P. Lovecraft, which for reasons that will quickly become apparent is an insult to the other RPGs based on Lovecraft's work.

The Adventure

This article contains spoilers! You have been warned.

Somewhere in the world, a freakish alien monolith of unexplained origin appears in an equally freakish valley. The PCs, being the PCs, are encouraged to investigate. And in typical Raggi fashion, even the trip to the monolith is a clusterfuck.

The Valley

First off is the distance to the monolith itself- it's randomly determined every time you enter the valley, and can be as long as several astronomical units (for reference, one AU is equal to the distance from the center to the Earth to the center of the sun, which means the party won't even make it a fraction of the way before dying of old age).

Then there are the other random effects that the valley, some are at least somewhat interesting (everyone in the party must obey the commands of one random player, cast spells become self-aware) to the WTF (if the characters leave the valley they end up in an entirely different setting chosen at random from the DM's shelf, nothing is able to travel anywhere during the daytime so the party ends up running in place like in Through the Looking-Glass).

And then there are the random encounters, which include these gems (keep in mind that the party hasn't even reached the monolith yet):

• A cliff that inflicts falling damage on you if you try to climb down it carefully, but leaves you unscathed if you just jump off.
• Kenneth Hite's contribution (which is all the more baffling given his reputation for writing much less awful material): A clearing full of owl statues surrounding a guy who has clearly killed himself, which is surrounded by unkillable thorny vines and can't be escaped from "until the players are suitably creeped out". After that, every spellcaster who was there starts having horrible nightmares about the owls- which also begin to start infesting their spell slots, making them practically unusable. When enough spell slots are filled with owls, the caster will be forced to commit suicide. There is no way to make it stop, which the game smugly points out for the GM.
• A colony of nudist pacifistic lotus-eaters who subsist off of a berry that makes them so fertile that they give birth within half a day and the cooked meat of their own offspring, because it just wouldn't be Raggi without the gratuitous cannibalism.
• A giant anglerfish monster that emerges out of a two-inch deep brook because fuck logic. It is extremely strong and due to space-time horseshit any time the PCs encounter the brook again it'll reappear completely healed. On the off chance that they kill it again (despite the colossal amount of DM asshattery suggested to make this impossible), the campaign immediately ends and the DM is forbidden from running anything ever again. Which would probably be for the best, in this case.

Outside The Monolith

The party's real troubles will begin when they get close enough to see the monolith.

This is because tiny superintelligent alien spaceships will invade the characters' bodies, which will then possess them whenever they fall asleep. When they're in control, the aliens make their victim virtually invincible but also force the victim to kill any living thing within 100 feet that hasn't been invaded itself. The only way to stop the possessions is to close the Monolith, which means that the party must either follow the DM's railroading or be rendered incapable of functioning outside of completely deserted areas.

Then you have The Guardian. It's a thing that is able to attack from another reality, which means it can deal enormous amounts of damage while remaining utterly indestructible itself. Naturally, Raggi advises that the DM hides the fact that it's invincible from the players until they figure it out on their own.