Birtwhistle's Portal of Temporal Convenience #raggisrejects

A while back James Raggi of Lamentations of the Flame Princess fame put a call out for magic items that fit the particular feel of the LotFP universe. Most of them were rejected for one reason or another and people are posting them to the web under the tag #raggisrejects

The following is my reject, Birtwhistle's Portal of Temporal Convenience:

This door appears to be of ordinary size and made of a hard, red wood. Whether the red is its natural colour or it is stained that way is a mystery. Tiny, shallow carvings of arcane symbols cover both facings of the door and seem to swirl around the ornate, silver doorknob.

If this door is placed in a doorway it will swell or shrink to fit the door frame within 1d12 rounds. Once it fits the door its silver hinges will attach themselves to the door jamb within another 1d6 rounds unless someone takes action to do it themselves first. Once the door is hanging and closed the magic activates.

Opening the door converts the room beyond into a temporal anomaly. Anyone entering the room before it is closed will share the same time travel experience and be able to perceive each other. If the door is closed and opened again subsequent people entering the room will see the room as empty and have a different time travel experience requiring its own roll. The door remains for 8 hours after the first time someone uses it to enter the room and then disappears until the occupants exit the room.

To use the Portal of Temporal Convenience a person needs only to open the door, enter the room beyond and close the door. Once inside the person must remain there for 8 hours (the same as the door remains). If anyone opens the door and leaves before the allotted time has passed within the room, they will exit at the same moment they enter. The collision of two versions of the same person will cause a paradox, resulting in a catastrophic implosion sucking everything within the blast radius out of time and existence. To find the blast radius simply multiply the height, width and depth of the room to which the door leads.

If the occupant or occupants of the room remain there for at least eight hours before leaving roll a D30. The result is the number of days forward in time they have travelled. If a one is rolled the Referee must roll 1D6, two D12s, Percentile Dice (D100) and another D30. The D6 indicates the direction in time the party moves: 1 or 2 indicates they will go backward in time and a 3 through 6 indicates they move forward through time. The D12s indicate the month of the year the party arrives in. Choose the result on the die that is closest to the spring. The result of the Percentile Dice indicates how many years the party has travelled. The D30 indicates which day of the month they arrive.

If the door is removed from the outside during the 1D6 hours it exists after the party enters or it is removed by someone else who has used it for a temporal experience that ends before the party inside, the door simply will not open for the remaining party. They can try to exit the room through another door or window but that will result in the same mishap as rolling a one on the D30. The magic of the door makes the doorway safe. Travelling through an untreated portal is dangerous. Any person doing so will take 1D6 damage for every 10 years or part thereof travelled. The only advantage is another portal can be used as an exit before the eight hours has elapsed with no chance of a time paradox implosion.

It is possible that the door will open in a time where the room does not exist. The door frame and the room beyond it will exist as long as the door is open or until eight hours have past. The room can be seen and even returned to through the doorway while it exists. Once the door closes or after the eight hours have past, the door frame disappears and the door falls to the ground.

Edgar Birtwhistle was a wizard whose hatred of winter was only matched by his disgust with travel and foreigners. To solve his problem he spent decades researching and experimenting with forbidden magics and time manipulation before finally creating his Portal of Temporal Convenience. Exactly when the door was created and even when Birtwhistle lived is a mystery as his life is scattered throughout three different centuries. It is believed he lost possession of the door and disappeared out of time when it was removed from its frame by a disgruntled apprentice sometime in the 16th century. The current physical and temporal location of Birtwhistle’s Portal of Temporal Convenience is unknown.

Time Travel and Explaining Your Character is a Super Hero

Our Marvel Super Heroes game is into its fifth week now and we've already run into a serious problem with time travel.

(Inspector Spacetime by Graffitihead)

Our characters travelled back to 1963 to find out who really killed JFK. The reasons for this move are somewhat obscure and possibly not very good. It started well as our invisible super hero team set up to observe, but things unravelled almost immediately. Player Characters should not be allowed anywhere near actual history. If there is a historical event that players can derail and just plain mess up, things will go badly for history. This is the lesson our group learned on Tuesday when we foiled the assassination of JFK.

I haven't run a game featuring time travel yet, but I've been planning an adaptation of an RPG to make it work as an episodic time travel game for a while now (that post is still half done). In an historical setting or time travel game I think the history should be interacted with on a small, personal level. There are people who live there who are affected by the normal progress of history who can also be affected by the presence of the characters. Cool things can happen when those two forces interact.

Having the players derail the major events of the historical setting causes so much trouble for the GM! The effects turn into this awful butterfly wings chain of events, turning everything on its head. I don't know what our GM, Chris, is going to do now that we stopped the JFK assassination. We can only hope that the failed first attempt will force whoever is behind it to show their hand on a second attempt so we can figure out who did it and get back to our own time. Otherwise, our party is doing exactly the wrong thing and will never see our home time again.

One fun problem with time travel is interacting with people outside of your timeline who know about you and drop weird hints with their questions about where the character is in his or her timestream: "Are you married yet?" That's one of those small scale interactions that can be a lot of fun.

Another problem we encountered that was specific to our Supers game is the need to explain what we are since there are no supers in the time we've entered. Thanks to that situation, "I'm a super-hero, bitch!" might become the catch phrase for our campaign.

It will be interesting to see where we take it from here. We've committed to playing the Marvel FASERIP game for 6 months, so if we can't make it work in the alternate timeline we've created we may be rolling up characters again soon.

Our Marvelous Adventures are broadcast over youtube as we play in google+ hangouts, so they are easy to find if you want to check out our super-powered shenanighans in detail.

New Class for LotFP: the Monk

Last post I was talking about moving LotFP forward from the Early Modern Era to a Weird Wild West setting. One trope that is often revisited is the idea of the oriental monk in the old west. There's no reason not to have a Monk Class in the Early Modern Era since travel between continents is viable and cultures are mixing through trade. The main inspiration for the class as I have it here is the monk travelling the old west.

I've been pretty disappointed with the Monk Class in the past. It's often a half-assed thief with super fighty powers bolted on top. The beauty of the LotFP system is the point system for skills is more flexible than the percentages for thief skills so there is no reason to feel bound by any of that stuff. The Lamentations adventure Qelong has the Lotus Monk but it's for NPCs only and is basically a mystical fighter with magic powers. It is not a great fit to make a player character in the old west.

LotFP has a system in place to avoid power creep and protect the Fighter's place amongst the classes. The only class that increases in attack bonus is the Fighter, all the others have the +1 attack bonus they start with. I don't think the Monk Class needs an attack bonus to still have the flavour of a mystic/unstoppable warrior.

Monks are incredible athletes, performing amazing feats of balance and withstanding terrible punishment that would drop lesser people. Taking that into account, the best LotFP class to use as the base for the Monk is the Dwarf. The Monk would use the Dwarf experience table and saving throws. The Architecture Skill would be replaced by both Climb and Stealth. None of the other Dwarf abilities would apply and the Monk would use the D8 hit die of the Fighter and use the Fighter minimum hit points for first level to represent their physical resilience. At tenth level the Monk uses a +3 and no constitution modifier instead of additional hit dice.

(The Climb skill for the Monk Class)

Climb is not the careful scaling of sheer walls the Specialist would do but more of a leaping, acrobatic bouncing from surface to surface to ascend bare walls. Stealth is an obvious choice for a monk.

Despite the obvious vitality of monks the Constitution modifier the Dwarf gets is not entirely appropriate. Much of the monk's abilities come from a greater connection to the world and their training is centred around that. The Monk Class gets a +1 Wisdom Modifier.

To embrace the mystical aspect of the monk, add the total wisdom modifier to Open Doors rolls to show how their connection to the world around them gives them power over it and allows them to punch through doors and whatnot. The Referee can apply any necessary modifiers for different materials but I would likely let the Monk PCs break harder and harder materials as they level up.

The monk in Qelong adds level to AC, attack bonus and so on. With this setup, the Qelong monk becomes absolutely ridiculous around level 8. The LotFP Rules are designed to avoid power creep so I think the standard +1 attack bonus is sufficient and no AC improvement ladder is necessary.

I like the monk as a fast, difficult to hit character in tune with the space surrounding him or her and able to use that connection to the world to fight with a preternatural speed.

Wisdom is a huge factor in the Monk's ability to attack and defend. When not wearing armour the monk adds the total wisdom modifier to Armour Class. This bonus is usable with a shield, while making use of cover and in addition to any modifier from dexterity. As long as the monk is only lightly encumbered s/he adds wisdom to his/her attack bonus in addition to any other modifier. These combinations make the monk pretty bad-ass out of the gates at first level, but if you are using the normal roll-three-in-order character generation it should not imbalance the game.

Monks are experts at evasion and grappling. When wrestling they add their level to the D20 roll instead of their attack bonus. A monk may also substitute the wisdom modifier for the strength modifier. Monks can use either wisdom or strength when wrestling, not both. You can fight smart or strong, but not both at once.

Monks are renowned for their ability to fight with and without weapons. The precision and speed of their strikes defy reason. To represent the flurry of of strikes landing in a single round and the improvement that only experience can bring, the Monk's hand-to-hand damage is determined by level rather than the weapon used. This starts at 1D4 at first level. It increases to 1D6 at second level. At fifth level it increases to 1D8. It increases to 1D10 at eighth level and finally to 1D12 at tenth level.

As a warrior of exceptional training, like the fighter, the monk can use the martial manoeuvres: Press and Defensive Fighting.

That sums it up. A simple version of the monk with a framework of rules that should allow a player to roll to do cool monk-like stuff without making and of the other classes redundant. The focus on the physical suits a more modern setting and will work well with the Weird Old West.

Lamentations of the Old West Princess

"I am thinking of running Death Frost Doom as a Western. Maybe set in the Bitternoot Valley/Mountains in about 1875." A friend of mine posted this on G+ and it blew my mind just a little bit. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it so the only cure is to write it out. (Death Frost Doom is the adventure that put Lamentations of the Flame Princess on the map as an RPG publisher who has recently rewrote and re-released it)

(Possible descendants of the three iconic LotFP adventurers: Alice, Michelle and the Flame Princess)

Right off the bat, the character of Zeke Duncaster fits the old west perfectly. The frozen mountain with an ancient temple that has no business being there is a cool thing to hook in the players exploring the frontier. There's no reason there could not be an ancient empire that the Aztecs or one of the early First Nations managed to destroy in the California mountains. Efforts to erase the cult have failed time and again over the eons in North America. In fact, the more I thought about it the more I realised a lot of the LotFP adventures could be adjusted to fit the old west.

The epic, time-sensitive sandbox Better Than Any Man (downloadable for free here), could easily be set in the south during last days of the American Civil War with only minor adjustments. The characters and their motivations fit the era just fine and the arrival of the Yankees with its puritanical officers would end the same as the army in the adventure.

With similar themes, No Salvation For Witches would fit into a town in the old west as easily as early modern era England. Minor adjustments of names and descriptions to improve the fit could be done on the fly.

The church from the God That Crawls could be located in California or Texas having changed hands from the Spanish Catholics that had settled the area to the protestant Americans who came later and took over. The documents the players found could even refer to Jesuits taking possession of the crawling god and moving him and the dangerous artefacts they found in the catacombs to the new world to keep them all far from civilization. It might have happened during the rise of protestantism in England under Henry VIII.

No Dignity In Death: The Three Brides could be reworked to fit the old west pretty easily as well. If anything, it would work better in early america than in the early modern area Europe. The town of Pembrooktonshire would need a new name, but other than that the insular community could have existed in the Old West. The Knights of Science would need to be reskinned into some kind of violent missionaries or travelling law enforcement like marshals, rangers or even Pinkerton men.

Tales of the Scarecrow would fit into the american west with no changes at all other than minor tweaks to the back story of the guys in the cabin. The cornfield has an american feel anyway.

Scenic Dunnsmouth might work best on the Gulf Coast, especially in Louisiana. All the hooks and reasons for going there still apply. The Elven spy could be changed to an inquisitor (cleric), possibly a weird magic user or diabolist studying the cult for his/her own purposes

Both Death Love Doom and Forgive Us could be set in any coastal town. Death Love Doom needs some massaging to fit the back story into a new time and place, especially the guys in the coach-house. I don't think Forgive Us needs as many changes to work. Really, the coast is not so important as the movement of trade goods in these two stories. They could be set in any prosperous town on a major rail-road route.

Fuck for Satan could be any damn place. Same with the Monolith From Beyond Space and Time. The Doom-Cave of the Crystal-Headed Children (downloadable for free here) can also happen in any small town.

Likewise, The Tower of the Stargazer could be anywhere that a crazy wizard/scientist thought would be beneficial to locate his tower. Maybe near a (now abandoned) mine so Calcidius could build the roof of the tower on the cheap? A Single Small Cut could work in the old west with minor changes too.

Thulian Echoes could be found on the crossing from Europe or moved to the Caribbean.

The Isle of the Unknown could be moved to the Caribbean as well. It could keep its French flavour as a former colony and a GM could spice it up with a some vodoo elements. The Greek statues become something of a mystery, but that's OK.

So all the adventures fit, but what about the rules? How much do the rules need to be altered to get the weird fantasy into the old west?

Lamentations of the Old West Princess or, Weird Weird West

So what about money? The silver standard is easily switched over to dollars at even money. Silver dollars are likely more popular on the frontier than paper money so that aspect of the game can be business as usual. The $50 gold coin was still in circulation in the 1870s so the gp value can be used with this coin in mind. There were also $20 and $10 gold coins but those can be specified, we can assume a gp is the $50 coin. The 2 cent copper was common enough that it can be used as the default "penny" for the campaign, keeping the ration of 1:50 for gp to sp and sp to cp.

The problem with the equipment list is some items are anachronistic and others are just way out of whack with the pricing of the day. The mass production capabilities of the settled areas of the North-eastern United States make a lot of items less expensive than the LotFP equipment lists. Catalogues from 1875 list wagons as only $50 as opposed to the 150 in LotFP. Mass-produced weapons like pistols are less than $5 and a shotgun can be bought for $15. The prices I found for rifles range from $20-$50. The ammunition was dirt cheap, selling for mere pennies. Buying something like a sword might be more difficult since you'd have to buy an old sabre from the war. Depending on the area, such products might be rare and expensive or so common they are worthless. A shortbow and arrows could be traded for or purchased from natives but a longbow or crossbow would not be available except as a collectable antique. Provisions become less of a hassle as canned goods and dried beef are plentiful.

Enough of the list matches up that it could be used for character generation at least and then prices out of old catalogues and some judgement could be used while resupplying in town.

There are some changes that need to be made to the rules...

Firearms

(Princess of the old west, Annie Oakley firing over her shoulder with a mirror)

There are all kinds of terrible black-powder muzzle loaders still kicking around the 1870s West so the normal LotFP firearms rules can be used for those. The muskets of the civil war era are much faster to reload and the use of caps to ignite the charge is much safer. These would function as arquebusses as listed with a three-round reload time and a misfire only on a one in twenty.

Armour penetration is still the same for all firearms with 4 points of amoured AC ignored by them.

These things are obviously more accurate than the antique weapons of the early modern era. I would just take the ranges for modern firearms and convert them to yards instead of feet. Short barrelled pocket pistols like derringers could continue to use feet for range and have the same doubling of penalties at range for the early modern unrifled pistols, but with a two shots and a single round for reloading. They also do only 1D4 or 1D6 damage because of the smaller calibre.

Shotguns use the same ranges as the old muzzle-loaders but instead of incurring penalties to hit at range it goes from 1D8 Damage at short range, to 1D6 at medium range, and 1D4 at long range. It has no armour penetration and reloading a single or double-barrelled shotgun takes one round.

Revolvers of this period are single action, allowing for a single accurate shot per round. They usually have a six round capacity and can be reloaded with cartridges in two rounds. Some revolvers don't use cartridges and the cylinders are loaded with a ball and black-powder. This takes a lot of time and users often carried multiple, pre-loaded cylinders. Switching out a cylinder takes one round loading a cylinder with ball and powder takes 18 rounds. Pistols still do 1D8 damage.

Revolvers can be "fanned" by holding down the trigger and slapping the hammer back. This desperate act adds +1 to hit for every three rounds expended.

Lever-action rifles are known as: "the guns that won the West." My google-fu is weak today so it was difficult to find any definite information on the magazine capacity of these weapons but five rounds seems to be the consensus. Apparently modifications could be made to expand that to 8 or even 13, but I leave that up to the judgement of the GM. I'll likely go with five.

Reload time should be one round of time for every three cartridges. Damage is the standard 1D8.

Lever-action rifles still had a chance to misfire because the tubular magazine caused rounds to go off inside the rifle from time to time. It was rare enough you can ignore depending on your game. Maybe even swap out one or two of the results on the optional D30 critical miss tables for an exploding rifle so it can still happen.

When using a rifle or shotgun in melee they do 1D6 Damage. A pistol is pretty heavy and can be used as a small club for 1D4 Damage.

Classes

The classes as written don't all fit the Weird West model so a few modifications need to be made.

The Cleric:

The 19th century cleric is more of the Solomon Kane type than the Crusader of the OD&D and LotFP rules. Taming the west with a bible and a six-shooter we can get that faith-based frontiersman with a few changes.

(Clint Eastwood in Pale Rider)

The first-level spell Turn becomes a reusable ability. It can be used against any unnatural creature such as a werewolf, undead or mutated thing. A result of Turned on the table means the creature is held at bay and cannot approach the Cleric or harm him/her in any way. A Destroyed result means the creature is actually turned as normal and must flee from the Cleric's presence. The Turn table could also be used to remove fear in a cleric's companions. Roll turn against the hit-dice of the fear causing creature or NPC and if it succeeds then 1D6 + the Cleric's hit dice in people of the group will rally. This group may in turn inspire others allowing another moral roll for hirelings and henchmen at +2.

The Cleric is no miracle worker on his or her own. Clerics don't cast spells, but can use cleric scrolls as normal. These artefacts are ancient prayers written, illuminated and specially prepared in the past. The Cleric accesses the power of the prayer by reading it aloud. It takes one round to read for every level of spell cast from the scroll and the cleric can do nothing other than walk slowly during that time. After the cast the player rolls a save verses Spells to see if the scroll's holiness fades and the scroll is exhausted. The maximum spell level a cleric can cast from a scroll is equal to the maximum spell level available on the cleric's Spells Per Level section of the table on Page 11 of the LotFP  Rules and Magic book. Every level beyond that takes a -1 penalty to the Save verses Spell roll. So a fourth level cleric casting a fourth level spell from a scroll takes a -2 penalty to their Save roll because the normal maximum spell level they can cast is level two.

Scrolls don't need to be scrolls to work this way. It could get weird with something like a mummified saint's hand being invoked to cast cure light wounds and so on. There's no limit to the strange that could be applied here.

The Fighter:

The Old West is full of gunfighters, ex-soldiers and hardened mercenaries. Fighters stay the same.

The Magic User:

There's always someone willing to endanger their soul and study forbidden texts in exchange for knowledge, power or both. The god-fearing folk of the frontier would be quick to burn a witch or other heathen displaying any unnatural powers so a player needs to be careful. The class stays the same but the spell list would change slightly as even more has been lost in the face of modern progress. I'd remove Magic Missile and Sleep from the level one spell list and replace them with Summon for the purposes of creating the first spellbook. Other things I'd be tempted to remove are Fly and the Wall of X spells.

The Specialist:

(The Weird West Specialist has some new skills to choose from)

The specialist doesn't need to change but I would add medicine as a a skill. The barber surgeons and country doctors of the old west have the benefit of modern techniques that make it possible to save a character from what would have been certain death in the Early Modern Era. If a PC is reduced past the usual a person skilled in medicine can treat them if they are reduced to -4 hit points or worse. They must have surgical tools, sufficient light and time to operate.  They make their D6 skill roll as usual but take a -1 penalty for every three points of damage suffered past the negative three threshold. So a character with -9 hp could be saved with a medicine roll made at -2. The medicine skill could also be used as for first aid type actions made while resting after a fight. Patching up a character's would would mean they regain 1D4-1 (0-3) hit points for anyone with at least one point in Medicine.

The Dwarf/Wild One:

There are no magical craftsman living under the Rockies and trading fine axes and other goods with the humans of the surface world. Dwarfs simply do not fit this campaign setting in any way. I usually swap in Barbarians to fill this niche in a human only campaign but those are anachronistic and no better fit.

The main feature of the dwarf class is it is a survivor. It has amazing saves and the best hit points in the game. That's why it could be changed to the Wild One with only a couple of changes. The frontier was frought with dangers both natural and man-made. Mudslides, terrible winters, native attacks and simple bandits could mean any community or settlement. The Wild One is a sole survivor of some kind of disaster. S/he survived through luck, skill or sheer bloody-mindedness and has come through it even harder than before. A few seasons on his/her own before making contact with civilization again has made the Wild One a natural adventurer. The Architecture skill could be replaced with Climb or Bushcraft depending on the circumstances of the Wild One's origin. Tough as nails and used to relying on themselves for everything, the Wild One keeps the Constitution bonus and extra encumbrance allowance of the Dwarf.

The Elf:

There are no elves prancing through the Old West. You could replace them with the Diabolist Class I described in an earlier post. Another option to get something exotic into your campaign is to adapt the Lotus Monks from the Qelong adventure.

The Halfing/Native:

There are no magical little people farming hidden valleys in the Old West either. The easiest way to use this class as written is to reskin it as a Native. The excellent Saves represent their experience with the dangers of the old west and the resolve required to live there without modern conveniences. They rely on each other and their communities so they don't have the extreme hit points of the Wild Ones. The Dex bonus could be restricted to only when they are lightly encumbered. Bushcraft and Stealth fit the Native culture well enough for warriors and hunters of most tribes across north america.

The main problem with playing a Native character in the Old West is the terrible prejudice they face. The player and GM should really discuss how this will play before the game. Racism is not fun, but different people like to play through different things. Just talk it out during character generation.



There's not much that needs to happen to make LotFP fit the Old West or to make a Weird West campaign. I know there are other games out there but if we're adapting LotFP adventures and its weird, horror-based aesthetic to the campaign we might as well make these minor tweaks once and just roll on forward than constantly revise between systems during play. Besides, I already have copies of the LotFP Rules so I'd rather make these changes than buy Call of Cthulhu - Old West Edition or Deadlands or whatever.

Return to Marvel Super Heroes!

My group has started playing Marvel Super Heroes for about three sessions now. Before that I don't think I'd played it since maybe 1991. I went through a phase in the 90s where I delved into increasingly complicated RPGs with crunchier and crunchier systems. I think that trend probably culminated with HERO Fantasy. Nowadays the pressures of kids, business ventures, career and other creative pursuits makes a fast, rules-light system like MSH pretty much perfect.

This is not some grognard post about how RPGs peaked in the 80s or how I don't need new games. No, what struck me about the system after returning to it after so long is how similar it is to a new RPG. People keep telling me that Fate is the best system for a supers game. Now I understand why. 

The Fate Core system and its streamlined version Fate Accelerated Edition share a common language with Marvel FASERIP. There is a ladder of adjectives describing both the ability of the characters and the intensity of the action. Granted, the language of MSH is more over-the-top with words like "Incredible" and "Amazing," but it is a comic-book game. Words like "epic" and "legendary" fit Fate's assumed fantasy setting even if they seem a bit dry in comparison. The feats and stunts of both games match up well enough that it seems like no accident. Both games also lack the lethal element you find in a lot of old school RPGs.

The real kicker though, is the special Fate Dice. Marvel Super Heroes uses percentile dice and a chart. In a single roll you get your result and the degree of your success (like how much damage you do). Charts fell out of favour sometime in the 90s (probably around the same time dice pools became all the rage). The fancy fate dice offer the same variation of success in a single roll that you get with the Marvel FASERIP system without the cumbersome retro chart from the dark ages of gaming.

(cumbersome retro chart from the dark ages of gaming)

The place where the systems diverge the most is the randomness of character generation. Even though you are allowed to choose powers after rolling the categories in MSH (so you don't end up with opposing powers or silly combinations), rolling randomly for everything is the default. Fate is all about choosing all the elements of the character to build something interesting. I find I get more interesting characters by discovering them through rolls. Had I chose my character's abilities I would have made them all water-based and had a character that could transform into a mass of fresh water so I could move freely and paralyze vampires with ease. Instead I ended up with the Crimson Cricket, an armoured strongman with a sonic attack and wings. The light manipulation power I rolled turned out to be pretty useful against vampires as well. Oddly, the player in our group who min-maxes (he calls it optimizing) his characters chose a similar power group, without the light manipulation. It will be interesting to see how we differentiate ourselves on the team despite that.

Certainly there are more differences than similarities between MSH and Fate, but gameplay for the two games has a common feel. I remember a lot of gamers having trouble moving between MSH and other systems back in the day. The distinct, loose nature of the Marvel system with its one-quick-roll-and-you're-done style of play might account for that. It also might account for why the game hangs on today. There is so much love for Marvel Super Heroes on the internet it is insane. There is even a website with free downloads of all the MSH rulebooks, supplements and adventure modules called Classic Marvel Forever. The site has existed for 14 years so it's safe to say Marvel is letting it slide. The fact that such support exists for an out-of-print game from the 80s blows my mind a little.

Our group isn't exactly playing Classic Marvel Super Heroes. We're using the revised basic rules pretty much as is, but the assumed universe is not the Marvel Universe. In true comic book style we're dimension-hopping through realities with Lamentations of the Flame Princess's Alice in Wonderland inspired setting, A Red and Pleasant Land, as our ultimate goal for long term campaigning. At the moment we seem to be moving through different fictional settings. Since our GM is a Robert Heinlein fan I assume we're moving through fictions like the characters in The Number of the Beast. While they spent a good while in Oz, our characters are destined for a jacked-up Wonderland.

If you are interested in the game you can find info from the GM's perspective over at the Dorkland! blog. If you are really curious or jonesing bad for some FASERIP, you can also check out our actual play videos on Youtube.

Bad News on the Doorstep?

The New Year is rolling in fine with some fantastic RPG material landing on my office doorstep (figuratively speaking) on the 13th. I was sick as a dog and lying in bed at home when the office manager texted to let me know a box had arrived from Finland for me. Despite battling a nasty case of the flu I dragged myself in there after hours to collect my collection of madness from Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

By the time I got the thing in my hands I was feeling a lot better so I opened it up right there. As I peeled back the packaging I was greeted by the words: "YOU ARE DOOMED."

What a great start!

It sounds like bad news to the uninitiated, but in LotFP that just means the stakes in this adventure will be high.

I lifted each of my seven new treasures from the box with slow, deliberate care. Turning them over in my hands and enjoying their look and feel. I flipped through them, glancing at the pages as they spun past. Stopping here and there to take in a piece of particularly arresting art. I laid it one on the table in front of me and once I was done took the whole thing in.

The random postcards were a fun freebie. I was impressed with all of the books. The PDFs just don't do them justice. Still, there is a reason I unpacked them on the red table. I live in a mining town in what many in Canada just refer to as "the North." There are still plenty of people living much farther north than me, just exponentially more to the south. Because of the mild remoteness of my location I have had the pleasure of reading on the internet for a few weeks now about how wonderful A Red and Pleasant Land by Zak S is. One heartless person has even teased me about it without mercy. My anticipation for this particular book had built up to a near frenzy. 

I was pleased that as thing the book lives up to the hype and more. It feels good in my hands while I read it and it feeds my eyes with vivid visuals and balanced layout. I'm taking my time with this one so I'll post proper reviews of it and some of these other books later. For now, I'll stick to first impressions and the highlights that caught me during my unboxing.

Death Frost Doom I'm saving for later. It's the adventure that launched the Lamentations brand. I didn't even open it. Crazy right?

I have a copy of the original Tower of the Stargazer and I've run it a few times so I left the new one aside for now as well. I'll compare the two side by side when I have time.

I've mentioned Zzarchov Kowalski's innovative adventure Thulian Echoes on the blog before, but I know it will eventually get a post to itself. Yannick Bouchard's cover is fantastic and Kelvin Green's interior art lets you know things are going to be weird.

What I was really waiting for from Kowalski was his Lovecraft inspired, adventure creation tool Scenic Dunnsmouth. It's full of seductive, creepy corruption and weird time anomalies. Because each adventure is freshly generated, it's possible to play it more than once with the same group and have wildly different adventures. The kicker for this one though is Jez Gordon's interior art. His signature heavy black shapes are foreboding on their own, but in this book there's a hazy coloured glow on many of the images, hinting at the corruption that could be anywhere in the adventure. I'm hoping to run it sooner, rather than later. It would work well as an intro to A Red and Pleasant Land since the featured river could serve as a way into the Land of Unreason. Regardless, I hope I get to use it sooner rather than later.

The impact of the full colour art in No Salvation for Witches surprised me. It's another one that needs an in depth review. I'd like to play it first though. I'm not sure how the time limit will play out. There's enough clues to figure everything out but they are spread out far enough there's little chance to get all the pieces of the puzzle in time to take action. In the meantime, I can tell you the production values of this book are wonderful. I am thrilled I contributed to crowdfunding project that got me NSFW.

I'm happy to get it all! There's a great collection of RPG madness here to use, inspire me, or dip into to give a lagging campaign a jolt. My LotFP shelf just keeps getting bigger and better.

We Can Only Go Down From Here: The Next Logical Step For LotFP!

Lamentations of the Flame Princess is making all kinds of waves with the new releases. I'm still waiting on mine to show up and it's making me a little crazy! I've been thinking about what I have coming and the rest of the catalogue and my wheels are spinning! I've skimmed the PDFs of my imminent arrivals and found an interesting pattern that builds on what James Raggi has done and the things he has in development.

The pattern I am talking about is a slow build toward a Hollow Earth setting. The assumed setting of the Early Modern Era was rife with legends of a world inside our own. A quick internet search will show that there are people who still believe there is another world inside ours and a secret history to go along with it. It's a weird location with almost limitless potential. Because any characters exploring the Hollow Earth would be from the historical world of the Early Modern Era there is still a "normal" experience for players to balance against the weird. The proximity to the real world also allows for some opportunities for extremely ordinary things from our world to be found in the hollow earth. All these things allow for a completely new world full of strange new things to explore while still keeping to the basic tenets of Weird Fantasy Roleplay.

The most famous Hollow Earth fiction is probably Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar series. One of things that captured my imagination about Pellucidar from a gaming perspective is how the constant daylight affects the perception of time. Here in Canada it is possible to live far enough north to experience "the midnight sun" during the summer. I don't live that far north (thankfully!) but I have friends who have and other friends who currently work up there a few weeks at a time. It can mess with a person's circadian rhythms. It has even been known to drive people mad. It's not a far jump from there to Burroughs' ideas of time having no meaning in Pellucidar.

Burroughs took it a step father though. In his stories the perception of time is a necessary part of its working. Because the characters could not perceive time passing they could not be affected by it in the same way as a person living on the outer surface would be. This means PCs taking a "night's rest" need to set a watch or they might sleep for the equivalent of a hundred years. It also means they consume resources such as food and water at irregular rates. Going inside a space where time is important in terms of how long a torch lasts might be shocking after they get used to unfettered time in a wilderness crawl. The short and long rest mechanic from 5e D&D could fit well into the fluid time of Pellucidar. Let's hope WotC gets on with their update to the OGL so it can be ported in.

The mutability of time makes things a bit difficult for a GM who is tracking the actions of other factions operating concurrently to the PCs. Things like distance and resources will have to determine what can happen in the background while the PCs act but with time the way it is pretty much anything can happen. The beauty of LotFP is there is already a blueprint for dealing with these kinds of issues in The Monolith From Beyond Space and Time.  Time in that adventure moves at different rates for different characters. Distances are relative and it takes quite a lot for the players to wrap their heads around what is happening. So much of the groundwork for Pellucidar's strange time is done for LotFP.

Another thing I love about Pellucidar is that the inner earth is protected from the trauma experienced by the outer world. That means there are still dinosaurs! Besides the fantastic that could exist hidden from our view in the hollow earth there are all the creatures from every era of earth's history down there. All the creatures of legend that seem to appear and disappear like Sasquatch/yeti, the slender man and the moth-man could all be residents of the hollow earth that somehow made their way to the surface as well. Again, the possibilites are endless. The hollow earth with its disconnected time and entrances through the ground could explain the legends of faerie mounds where people entered the land of the fey only to return to a time hundreds of years after the one they left.

When it comes to dinosaurs though, LotFP has it covered! The infamous adventure setting Carcosa has dinosaurs but it's the still-under-development World of the Lost that I think is being written by Rafael Chandler that leads me to believe a hollow earth full of dinosaur shenanigans is on the way. It's clearly inspired by Conan Doyle's Lost World and is a mere step away from Pellucidar.

Getting back to Carcosa, the depravity of the snakemen of that product matches up well with some of the terrible creatures of Pellucidar. The low placement of humanity on the Carcosan food chain also fits in well with the character of most hollow earth stories and is just as ripe to be upset by enterprising PCs as it was in the original stories set in Pellucidar. The Judges Guild style hexcrawl format used in Carcosa also would serve well to cover a section of the hollow earth in detail.

A Red and Pleasant Land by Zak S. deserves mention in this progression toward a hollow earth setting as well. Its Land of Unreason is a world apart with its own rules and is difficult to access. It's not much of a reach for players to adventure in the hollow earth after their characters survive (or don't survive) A Red and Pleasant Land.

Besides all this conjecture and guessing on my part there is the Thulian Echoes adventure! In that one by Zzarchov Kowolski there is an explicit stairway to the hollow world. The adventure gives no clues as to what the hollow earth itself is like but the journey is described as a long one and there are random encounters that include the corpse of a Triceratops! In Thulian Echoes there are creatures down in the earth's crust inspired from other works such as the Vril from Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Vril, the Power of the Coming Race (originally published as The Coming Race in 1871). There are also devolved versions of the elder creatures from H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness.

Excerpt from Thulian Echoes page 16 - image by Kelvin Green

I like the inclusion of the creatures from At the Mountains of Madness. It could mean that the cyclopean city set in Antarctica was an outpost of a grand subterranean civilization that still exists in the hollow earth. With time as mutable as it is, little time could have passed for that civilization and they might be still wondering what happened to their city they only recently lost contact with.

Image by Kelvin Green

The disconnect with the progression of time between the out and inner surfaces of the world means characters could encounter lost legionnaires from Rome, people of Egypt or any era of history. A GM could even mess with players by having their characters encounter explorers from an era a hundred or more years after their own to show how they've lost time on the inner surface.

The time thing gives me an idea for an interesting location. A mad old wizard's tower where the incredibly ancient man wears the ravages of time on his wrinkled skin as he tends to water clocks and endlessly winds the clockwork of the tower itself in an effort to bring time to the hollow earth. It could create strange time effects near the tower and give rise to a host of magic spells based on controlling time in the tower's library.

I like the idea of a hollow earth or Land of the Inner Sun campaign setting. In fact, if James Raggi of Lamentations of the Flame Princess doesn't get the ball rolling on this thing in some official way I might have to go ahead and do this one myself.