Lamentations of the Flame Princess

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Revision as of 21:35, 8 January 2018 by 1d4chan>SpectralTime ("Adventures")
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Lamentations of the Flame Princess is a grimdark retroclone made by James Edward Raggi IV. It started out as an Elizabethan version of Original Dungeons & Dragons, but moved in the direction of historical fantasy as the author's interests inevitably changed (and he got dumped by his girlfriend, who was incidentally the eponymous "Flame Princess"). It's most well-known for the little mini-adventures that no one buys from the shelves of your FLGS, with lots of gloom, doom, horror, and NOPE! mixed with copious amounts of the absolute worst DM practices of a bygone era; you know, the ones that make for interesting reading but always seem to cock up royally when you try to play them?

LotFP would probably be a shoe-in to fit all your horror-style retroclone needs, if not for the fact that the creator was such a smug, unlikable cunt. Seriously, he's basically the result of a dangerous experiment to distill all the worst aspects of /tg/'s neckbeardy nature into a single individual, while filtering out all the likable charm and class and replacing it with the lingering bitterness of a douchebag who can't move on from a bad breakup, and his superior, insulting tone and free-floating resentment seeps into everything he writes.

Without fail, his adventures always begin with like five pages ranting about how much he hates people who prefer other games and systems, people who prefer his game and system, people who treat tabletop RPGs as ways to have "fun" and enjoy themselves instead of SRS BSNS, etc. On top of that, most of them are either deliberately designed to be cruel jokes for the DM to play on the players ("Death Frost Doom," "The Monolith From Beyond Space and Time"), or just plain unfun exercises in torturing them for daring to think they are the main characters rather than the DM ("The God That Crawls," "Death Love Doom"). Virtually none of them have "winning" scenarios attached to them, just to drive the point home.

Of course, there is a certain kind of player that finds this sort of unfair, trial-and-error, Tomb of Horrors bullshit to be part of the game's charm. If you can filter out the Raggi, it's not unplayable.

"Adventures"

  • Better Then Any Man: A group of adventurers is sent to root out rumors of witchcraft before the local lord burns the place to the ground. A cabal of ladies have taken over with the aid of monsters from beyond space and time. They probably die.
  • Death Frost Doom: A group of adventurers ventures into a disbanded cult's ancient stronghold. They probably die and/or cause a massive zombie apocalypse. (Or leave, there's nothing really keeping them there until they've passed so many red flags that even the most genre blind of PCs will get the hint). Includes a bonus mini-adventure involving a tower that is also a trap full of Bad Things.
  • Death Love Doom: A group of adventurers investigates the estate of a wealthy family which has recently gone missing. They probably leave in disgust, or die. Solving the problem is probably not in the cards.
  • The God That Crawls: A group of adventurers is kidnapped and thrown into a maze full of forbidden artifacts and a deadly monster for reasons that may not make sense. They probably die. Explicitly for "breaking" groups that feel like they can deal with any monster the game throws at them.
  • Green Devil Face #1: A group of adventurers are recruited to battle thinly veiled versions of people the author doesn't like. They die pointlessly.
  • The Grinding Gear: A love letter to Tomb of Horrors and a relatively lighthearted module after the never ending line of gloomy GM dickery. Note that we just described a Tomb of Horrors-alike as a lighthearted break from GM dickery.
  • The Monolith From Beyond Space and Time: A group of adventurers gets word of a bizarre structure in a secluded valley that warps reality around itself. They'll definitely be very confused and probably wish they were dead by the time they get there. By the time they leave, at least one of them will almost certainly be dead and the rest will remain very confused. And if they try to wander off partway, terrible things happen to force them to come back.
  • Tower of the Stargazer: A group of adventurers tries to get into a paranoid wizard's tower. They probably die or leave empty handed.