The Monolith From Beyond Space and Time

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The Monolith From 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 From 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 happen in 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 also been invaded by the alien possessors. The only way to stop the possessions is to close the Monolith (itself an agonizing ordeal, as described below), 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.

Inside the Monolith

The monolith's interior initially appears to be an endless corridor that is in fact an infinite maze- if anyone thought to avoid the aliens by covering their eyes, this will be a problem as they will instead be surrounded by walls with no way out until their eyes are uncovered. The corridor seems to always be ahead of the PCs regardless of their actual direction, which poses some very interesting navigation challenges. Especially since distance and time do not exist inside the monolith (this also means characters will never age, which for reasons described later is not a good thing)- the only way to get anywhere is to wish to be there, which makes as much sense as you'd think.

The only creatures inside are impossible to detect unless the PCs want to find something they can fight. Despite their freakish appearance they all do piss-poor damage and die in one hit from any weapon.

Locations Inside the Monolith

• "Control Room": Anyone looking for some kind of control room will find themselves in a strange place made of gray spongy stuff lined with tubes full of liquid and electrical pulses everywhere. "Of course" the person in question has actually traveled inside their own brain...somehow. PCs can enter the brains of other PCs as well as themselves, and there are two full pages explaining how the party can give each other brain damage by fucking around with this. Also, when returning to normal consciousness PCs are given the chance to become "one with the multiverse", killing them off but giving a bonus for the next character they play as.
• Healing Room: The pod in this room will put you to sleep for a period of time (which can be forever), and after that you wake up fully healed. If someone tries to open up the pod before it opens on its own, random shit happens. Destroying the pod retroactively puts whoever was inside in an entirely different pod in an identical room.
• Literally Anywhere: If a PC wishes they were somewhere other than the valley, the monolith will be teleported (along with the Guardian) to absolutely anywhere at all, including the past or the future. Incidentally, travelling to the future will kill one party member, grant another party member a bunch of levels ("so they'll argue against returning to the past"), and age everyone else by up to 100 years.
• "Adventure": Anyone who wants to find something a little more normal will be transported to a completely different setting. No, really. The DM is advised to pick out a random module regardless of system or genre and then open it to a random page- the character is now there. Just in case it might be something that could actually be fun, all of the monolith's weirdness continues to affect that victim. The only back to the character's own world is to find the monolith again and reenter it.
• The Weapon: Wishing for an armory or a weapon will bring the character to a room that's empty save for a rune-covered pylon and a transparent case containing what looks like a mutant tapeworm. Opening the case causes the worm to infest the host. The host then becomes repulsive to all wildlife (and most people), instantly kills slimes and similar monsters by drinking them to death, grants damage re-rolls in melee attacks, and can be commanded to attack enemies or even charm them. It also causes anyone who sees the worm enter or exit the host to become immediately hostile, and if the host is charmed the worm will desert the host in favor of the charmer.
• The Head of Carter Holmes: Wishing for treasure takes you to a room with the severed but still-living head of a very evil mage. He wants to die, and will tell the players that whoever eats his brain will gain his magical powers. While he's not lying, the power boost only works if he's alive when a given piece of brain is removed and eaten. And to up the disgust even more, he's still able to feel all of it and will encourage the players to eat his brain even as he's reduced to incoherent groaning. Apparently the lotus eaters weren't enough to appease Raggi's cannibalism fetish.
• The Exit: A seemingly ordinary hole in the passageway appears for anyone who wants to get out of this shithole or is smart enough to wish for "the solution to this adventure", with a big stone door standing open by it. The PCs are invincible to all attacks from the monolith dimension as long as they touch the door, and by shutting it the monolith and all of its related insanity winks out of existence until the door is opened again. Unfortunately, the door has to be held closed from the inside, and it has to be done by a character inside the monolith (so in other words they're stuck inside forever). Did we mention that not closing the door when you leave means those alien spaceship possessor things will keep taking over your body? Oh, and don't even try to get around it by using some kind of anti-magic spell or you'll tear open a hole in reality that destroys the entire valley and spawns an infinite number of eldritch abominations to flood the rest of the world because accidentally triggering the apocalypse worked so well in Death Frost Doom.