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kingtycoonI've been thinking - maybe I should add my voice to the howling chaos of the world's maniacs and really get down with talking about the narrowly defined interests that drive me. I could... 'blog' about them, if you will, thereby adding 'information' to the 'internet'. And then I thought - 'maybe?' Hell, anytime you think you should maybe do something, really you should just constantly do it.
So I decided I'd try and review every game that is in my house. There are a lot of games in my house so this might take a bit of time. Today, I'll go with a new and I think rising star in the household collection.
The deal here is that a bunch of people know about this game, and have said some things about it already, some of it has been super funny
Really, if you've not looked at this book, you've already looked at this book. If you've ever rolled the dice - then you've had a hand at Lamentations of the Flame Princess - you know why? Because LotFP recapitulates the words of the patriarchs. If we take Gygax and Arneson as our Elija and Moses and Tolkien as Abraham - then we have to regard Mr. James Edwward Raggi IV as the Luther of gaming. LotFP is like the 99 theses nailed to the door of Wizards of the Coast HQ. "Hasbro!" He seems to say "Somewhere in these dusty old game books a great idea got lost..."
And it's true! I'll probably get around to talking about all of the iterations of games that have come around in the last 30 years of the excellent and burgeoning hobby - but for the moment it's always nice to look into the roots. What's especially cool is to think about how now - I think - we're in some silver age of pen & paper gaming. This book harkens back to the golden age, when the only coast with wizards that mattered was on Lake Geneva.
The artwork... I like the kind of outsider look of the line drawings - that gives a strong verisimilitude that never fails to please me, a harkening back to a simpler, better time. I am down with most of the art in the Grindhouse Edition of the LotFP set that I got. I am also really down with the cute little boxed set that came with three books - the Referee's guide, the main rulebook and a... 'tutorial book' as well as a handfull of preprinted character sheets and the cutest, tiniest set of dice I've yet seen. They're adorable - look.
Now, mainly I checked on the rulebook - it's all here, what you're looking for Fighter, Cleric, Magic-User, Speicalist, Dwarf, Elf, Halfling. Now... I've got opinion on these matters! A lot of them. You know what I think is dumb? That clerics are dudes who fight and pray. Why doesn't the cleric do - you know... office work? Cleric. That's goony but not canonical. I accept, I have no choice. It is the designation for the ages. Magic-User is a whole other animal though. I could probably look into it and learn or speculate as to what pressures or interests prevented the olde-schoole from calling a Wizard a Wizard, but I am down, I accept. Magic-User. Fighter? Fine I guess? Warrior was too...? Something. The Thief hasn't been the thief in so long - I miss it! Though the speciaist is better than the thief ever was with simpler roles and straightforward mechanics - no percentile rolls slapped on top of some other rules.
Really the whole thing is simple and elegant, it's got what you want in a ruleset - a couple of fun options, a few strange elements (I love the system for determining if you know a language the first time you are exposed to it - no needless bookkeeping and guessing before the fact what will be useful). It also lets you create terribly fragile looking, altogether feeble, barely effective characters who may, with tremendous luck and caution, make it to the next level - where they will gain Hit Points and not much else.
More than half the book is made up of spells - and these are a lot of old favorites - magic missile, featherfall, old friends, sure. Right up until you get to the 10 page exegesis on Summoning toward the end. This is really where you see what this game is about.
Sure, before you got there you had some indications - Alignments? All Clerics are Lawful and must believe that there are rules and plans in the universe, all Magic Users and Elfs are chaotic and must agree that the universe is just a terrible mess that does what it wants without cause. Everyone who has ever lived is really just Neutral though - since they have no control or perception over the enormous cosmic entities that may or may not play dice with the multiverse. okay?
Summoning though puts an exclamation on the whole affair - I mean, sure there's a definite sense of where we're going - When I said Tolkien was the Abraham of our shared idiomatic perception, Ragge is seeing Lovecraft and Howard as the Adam and Steve. It is all about the Weird Tale and you can end up summoning - by accident, some kind of brain with adhesive teats and feathered tentacles. Nice random table. And there are fun rules for determining if the beasty is under your control or if you are under its. What's more - you can end up summoning really messed up things - like "The Incorrect Equation that is Nonetheless True." The description of which is incoherent but seems to suggest that the summoner attacks clerics immediately.
Human sacrifice is a big part of the game and so are hirelings - hey - when you're pretty severely encumbered just by armor, you probably need a retinue of bearers - and hey, the Magic User might even need to sacrifice them later in order to summon up monsters - so you can really see a Heart of Darkness theme developing out of the mechanics - a journey to the Kurtzian abyss of adventuring. I'm sold. I'm totally down.
Just looking over the book I was immediately thinking of adventure scenarios - which is what you want from your game-book. Burlap clad-men, with scarecrow masks covered in writing and arranging the bird bones in a pentagram in their fallow fields - they're secretly the town's officials, and they've got muddy shovels in their houses - it was them exhuming the dead! But who is it that has been carrying out the strange rites in the ruined church!?
The Referee book - Man, I don't care about referees. Dungeon. Master. That's what we're called, that is who we are. GM? Fuck you, Storyteller? We're all telling the story together, why's he the important one? Is it because he's master of the dungeon? I think that it is. I think you agree. This book is familiar to anyone who's run a game before - the magic items are immediately more magic seeming (Ouija board) and the monsters are... not exactly present. Guidelines for coming up with monsters and then declaring that they should be sparingly included is neat advice - it is for Weird Tales - where the monster is revealed in the third act only which will certainly make it scarier and definitely prevent any kind of goblin-fatigue. One thing we all hate is when a player knows the monster's stats better than the DM and runs the table on you. None of that here, guidelines > stat blocks. There's also the old saws about how to make a universe... blah blah, how do you devise your own cosmos? As. If. For real though - I think at a young age I read those sections (that appear in every book like this) so avidly that I just internalized the whole thing and my internal DM setting was turned permanently to ON. Seriously, thanks LotFP - but I look at the chirstmas tree in my house and I'm thinking about what it's attack and damage rolls are, it's hardness rating and how effective it would be as a holy symbol. That is the monster that got summoned into me.
There's also a sample-adventure - which I found to be, just, a little insulting. I mean, the whole package came sealed so I couldn't look it over before buying, but I might have not if I'd seen that a third of the thing is just a choose your own adventure. I'd much rather they'd tucked in a module, or a map or a setting? Something besides the intro adventure for solo-players. Really I'm not sure why you would write such a thing at this point in time. Really you could manage all that with a few hyperlinks at your product's merchant site. Just saying, it's a decent book but you know, I didn't think it added a lot of value to the package, though I am always amused by the suggested reading sections that designers offer - hey, that's how I figured out about any books back in small times - so thanks for it! But the biographies of Lovecraft and Howard and Poe... I know you guys are great and mean well, I'm down, totally sold and into it -but there is Wikipedia - please create an adventure for me instead of telling me things that I can know by having a smartphone. Thank you.
Do you want a rating system? Do you want a number of stars?
I say this game has a Caster Level of 7 - Better than Disintegrate, not quite as good as Trap the Soul
So I decided I'd try and review every game that is in my house. There are a lot of games in my house so this might take a bit of time. Today, I'll go with a new and I think rising star in the household collection.
Lamentations of the Flame Princess
The deal here is that a bunch of people know about this game, and have said some things about it already, some of it has been super funny
Really, if you've not looked at this book, you've already looked at this book. If you've ever rolled the dice - then you've had a hand at Lamentations of the Flame Princess - you know why? Because LotFP recapitulates the words of the patriarchs. If we take Gygax and Arneson as our Elija and Moses and Tolkien as Abraham - then we have to regard Mr. James Edwward Raggi IV as the Luther of gaming. LotFP is like the 99 theses nailed to the door of Wizards of the Coast HQ. "Hasbro!" He seems to say "Somewhere in these dusty old game books a great idea got lost..."
And it's true! I'll probably get around to talking about all of the iterations of games that have come around in the last 30 years of the excellent and burgeoning hobby - but for the moment it's always nice to look into the roots. What's especially cool is to think about how now - I think - we're in some silver age of pen & paper gaming. This book harkens back to the golden age, when the only coast with wizards that mattered was on Lake Geneva.
The artwork... I like the kind of outsider look of the line drawings - that gives a strong verisimilitude that never fails to please me, a harkening back to a simpler, better time. I am down with most of the art in the Grindhouse Edition of the LotFP set that I got. I am also really down with the cute little boxed set that came with three books - the Referee's guide, the main rulebook and a... 'tutorial book' as well as a handfull of preprinted character sheets and the cutest, tiniest set of dice I've yet seen. They're adorable - look.
Now, mainly I checked on the rulebook - it's all here, what you're looking for Fighter, Cleric, Magic-User, Speicalist, Dwarf, Elf, Halfling. Now... I've got opinion on these matters! A lot of them. You know what I think is dumb? That clerics are dudes who fight and pray. Why doesn't the cleric do - you know... office work? Cleric. That's goony but not canonical. I accept, I have no choice. It is the designation for the ages. Magic-User is a whole other animal though. I could probably look into it and learn or speculate as to what pressures or interests prevented the olde-schoole from calling a Wizard a Wizard, but I am down, I accept. Magic-User. Fighter? Fine I guess? Warrior was too...? Something. The Thief hasn't been the thief in so long - I miss it! Though the speciaist is better than the thief ever was with simpler roles and straightforward mechanics - no percentile rolls slapped on top of some other rules.
Really the whole thing is simple and elegant, it's got what you want in a ruleset - a couple of fun options, a few strange elements (I love the system for determining if you know a language the first time you are exposed to it - no needless bookkeeping and guessing before the fact what will be useful). It also lets you create terribly fragile looking, altogether feeble, barely effective characters who may, with tremendous luck and caution, make it to the next level - where they will gain Hit Points and not much else.
More than half the book is made up of spells - and these are a lot of old favorites - magic missile, featherfall, old friends, sure. Right up until you get to the 10 page exegesis on Summoning toward the end. This is really where you see what this game is about.
Sure, before you got there you had some indications - Alignments? All Clerics are Lawful and must believe that there are rules and plans in the universe, all Magic Users and Elfs are chaotic and must agree that the universe is just a terrible mess that does what it wants without cause. Everyone who has ever lived is really just Neutral though - since they have no control or perception over the enormous cosmic entities that may or may not play dice with the multiverse. okay?
Summoning though puts an exclamation on the whole affair - I mean, sure there's a definite sense of where we're going - When I said Tolkien was the Abraham of our shared idiomatic perception, Ragge is seeing Lovecraft and Howard as the Adam and Steve. It is all about the Weird Tale and you can end up summoning - by accident, some kind of brain with adhesive teats and feathered tentacles. Nice random table. And there are fun rules for determining if the beasty is under your control or if you are under its. What's more - you can end up summoning really messed up things - like "The Incorrect Equation that is Nonetheless True." The description of which is incoherent but seems to suggest that the summoner attacks clerics immediately.
Human sacrifice is a big part of the game and so are hirelings - hey - when you're pretty severely encumbered just by armor, you probably need a retinue of bearers - and hey, the Magic User might even need to sacrifice them later in order to summon up monsters - so you can really see a Heart of Darkness theme developing out of the mechanics - a journey to the Kurtzian abyss of adventuring. I'm sold. I'm totally down.
Just looking over the book I was immediately thinking of adventure scenarios - which is what you want from your game-book. Burlap clad-men, with scarecrow masks covered in writing and arranging the bird bones in a pentagram in their fallow fields - they're secretly the town's officials, and they've got muddy shovels in their houses - it was them exhuming the dead! But who is it that has been carrying out the strange rites in the ruined church!?
The Referee book - Man, I don't care about referees. Dungeon. Master. That's what we're called, that is who we are. GM? Fuck you, Storyteller? We're all telling the story together, why's he the important one? Is it because he's master of the dungeon? I think that it is. I think you agree. This book is familiar to anyone who's run a game before - the magic items are immediately more magic seeming (Ouija board) and the monsters are... not exactly present. Guidelines for coming up with monsters and then declaring that they should be sparingly included is neat advice - it is for Weird Tales - where the monster is revealed in the third act only which will certainly make it scarier and definitely prevent any kind of goblin-fatigue. One thing we all hate is when a player knows the monster's stats better than the DM and runs the table on you. None of that here, guidelines > stat blocks. There's also the old saws about how to make a universe... blah blah, how do you devise your own cosmos? As. If. For real though - I think at a young age I read those sections (that appear in every book like this) so avidly that I just internalized the whole thing and my internal DM setting was turned permanently to ON. Seriously, thanks LotFP - but I look at the chirstmas tree in my house and I'm thinking about what it's attack and damage rolls are, it's hardness rating and how effective it would be as a holy symbol. That is the monster that got summoned into me.
There's also a sample-adventure - which I found to be, just, a little insulting. I mean, the whole package came sealed so I couldn't look it over before buying, but I might have not if I'd seen that a third of the thing is just a choose your own adventure. I'd much rather they'd tucked in a module, or a map or a setting? Something besides the intro adventure for solo-players. Really I'm not sure why you would write such a thing at this point in time. Really you could manage all that with a few hyperlinks at your product's merchant site. Just saying, it's a decent book but you know, I didn't think it added a lot of value to the package, though I am always amused by the suggested reading sections that designers offer - hey, that's how I figured out about any books back in small times - so thanks for it! But the biographies of Lovecraft and Howard and Poe... I know you guys are great and mean well, I'm down, totally sold and into it -but there is Wikipedia - please create an adventure for me instead of telling me things that I can know by having a smartphone. Thank you.
Do you want a rating system? Do you want a number of stars?
I say this game has a Caster Level of 7 - Better than Disintegrate, not quite as good as Trap the Soul
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no subject
Date: 2012-12-15 08:01 pm (UTC)Anyhow, I hear good things? Sure. I'll tell you what though, I...I hate it when a book is made up of spells, mostly. Just like, saying, "here, play the wizard, why would you play something else, 60% of the book is devoted to wizards, come on."
Which, by the way-- if you want to just have a Wizard game, that is fine, too.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-15 08:30 pm (UTC)This was on the shelf at the store next to the supplement made by the pornstar d&d players that you like - so I assume there's an affiliation? I might get that book - but what I did get instead was the Caracosa supplement/game - which... Holy Fucking Shit. I'll get to that one eventually.
I wonder if I'll comment to each game or each book individually - probably game by game.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-15 08:50 pm (UTC)...actually, now that I say it, I'm lying. I've been thinking in WoD of having a "human XP" bonus. So in WoD you get ~3-5 XP a session-- mostly on the low end if your Narrator is me-- & I was thinking that a +1 for being human that disappears when/if your character...starts getting clockwork limbs or taking Bene Gesserit drugs or makes a Pact with the Thing.
I, yeah, wanna give Carcosa a look; people talk about it. Then again, I think you maybe have a greater fondness for the Old School? Anyhow, yeah, Zak's DnD book is published by that guy & they are pals.
Do you buy minis at all? I think we haven't talked about this in a while; are you still "I have Lego minifigs, that is enough" or what?
no subject
Date: 2012-12-15 09:00 pm (UTC)I liked picking out this week's monster encounters based on the minis that we had - but in the end I also really hated caring about tactial movement in any game that's not 4e. Like - pathfinder doesn't need a map or minis because shit is super-simple. A fighter will run up to a thing and stand in front of it punching for two rounds. That is all.
LotFP also has range and distance rules but I find them to be more punitive than awesome and would not bother with them too much - nice randomization in there though.
What's good about the old-school is something that is never addressed by game publishers because the game publishers realized that they were not making the big-cash-money-wad from selling modules crowdsourced by players and that what they should do instead is come up with rules, and then books upon books of new rules to help suck the imagination out of the whole thing.
Now sure - there's players and DMs who are not good at gaming who are like - You can't accomplish things not in the rules - and fuck those guys - then again there are guys who are all - I will try anything and think resourcefully about puzzle solving - hurrah those guys - those are the guys who like and respect the first wave.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-15 09:05 pm (UTC)DM: "No, you aren't attacking the leader, that guy is on the other side of the chasm"
PC: "No, I definitely am attacking him, I said I was."
DM: "Well, considering he's on the other side of a chasm shooting arrows at you, & you are dual wielding longswords, no."
PC: "Well then I would have done my last three rounds differently!"
I hate that, & just having minis on the map-- I use the hex side-- dispels that. I use 'em as props & I'm really into that. Into the "vaguely tactical but not super high maintenance" role of minis in the game.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-15 09:27 pm (UTC)They have rules in this book about mapping - how you have to take your time and one of the players is in charge of the map - which is an old staple that got abandoned here in the silver-age. I like the dungeon tiles and the hex-map, I do - but I certainly don't prefer them to having players create a map of where you say they're going and then at the end comparing it with the map you created in advance - that's actually pretty rewarding and a good scorecard for dungeon-mastering.
But chasms and positions - there probably does need to be some amount of marking and placeholding.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-15 09:32 pm (UTC)