The Campaign Builder's Guild

I've been meaning to ask for a while, why should I check out Lamentation of the Flame Princess? What makes it good, bad, and all around interesting?

Lamentations of the Flame Princess is an old-school roleplaying game whose rules are based closely on older editions of Dungeons and Dragons, but clarified and cleaned up for easier play. However, the "twist" of LotFP is that it takes D&D and mashes it up with a weird fiction sensibility and a bit of grindhouse cinema. As the website suggests, "LotFP is the brutal and wondrous Weird Fantasy tabletop role-playing game born out of love for underground heavy metal, horror literature and film, and in fact all things strange and macabre."

It's basically the creation of one guy, James Raggi IV, an American expat who lives in Finland and has Very Strong Opinions on various gaming subjects.

Though there is no single game setting, a lot of the modules assume a historical setting in early modern Europe, around 1500-1700.

What makes LotFP great, in my opinion, isn't the rules (which can be obtained for free) but the adventures, which are written by some of the best freelancers in the DIY D&D scene. Some of the best include:

- Blood in the Chocolate - a horrific, colourful take on Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
- Death Frost Doom - a classic "negadungeon" or deathtrap dungeon written in a very Lovecraftian style, with a cruel twist at the end
- Better Than Any Man - an adventure about the Thirty Years War and monstrous insects
- Doom Cave of the Crystal-Headed Children - which is about time travel and futuristic technology and a malevolent child-army
- Broodmother Sky Fortress - a gonzo adventure about gigantic shark-elephant men and their floating castle which rains down horrible destruction
- No Salvation for Witches - a really disturbing slasher-movie/haunted house type adventure with some very original NPCs
- The God That Crawls - a harrowing Biblical horror adventure with one of the coolest items I've ever seen
- Fuck for Satan - an absurd black comedy adventure involving a malevolent alien penis-monster (yeah, you read that correctly)
- A Red and Pleasant Land - a bizarre take on Alice in Wonderland with vampires - a beautifully illustrated book I own in hardcover

And just a ton of other weird stuff.

You will NOT like LotFP if:

- You dislike old-school D&D full-stop.
- You want a rules-heavy game or a game with elegantly balanced, modern rules.
- You are squeamish or dislike horror, especially gore and other revolting things.
- You like games where player characters begin being awesome badasses and/or become god-like heroes.
- You dislike games where TPKs are a strong possibility.
- You want adventures that feel "fair" or level-appropriate.

You may very well like LotFP if:

- You like really strange, otherworldly stuff in your games.
- You enjoy horror movies, weird fiction, and the Gothic.
- You like inventive, outside-the-box spells and magic items.
- You like minimalist, simple rules-systems.
- You don't mind making ad-hoc rulings as a DM.
- You enjoy a brutal, uncompromising play-style - think Dark Souls or Bloodborne for the difficulty here.

This pretty much sums it up:



And there is a good chance that if something goes wrong over the course of any given adventure, something like this could happen to the campaign world:

Ooohhh, sounds fun! Depraved Willy Wonka sounds most excellent.  Definitely putting on the list. Still looking for a decent Mecha rpg so I can run a WW1 with giant robots game.

A Red and Pleasant Land is ridiculously compelling.

Shit I should have been playing this for years.

Death Frost Doom is excellent.

One of the things I love about the implied early modern European setting of LotFP is that if you do end up unleashing a horrifying apocalypse of some kind, it feels less like destroying something beautiful you created, like a carefully cultivated homebrew world. It's kind of fun to just wreck 17th century England.

Are you sure those are adventure modules or simply the greatest death metal bands I've never heard of?

Quote from: SteerpikeOne of the things I love about the implied early modern European setting of LotFP is that if you do end up unleashing a horrifying apocalypse of some kind, it feels less like destroying something beautiful you created, like a carefully cultivated homebrew world. It's kind of fun to just wreck 17th century England

That makes sense. Though there's something to be said for aiming some existential threat at a campaign setting that the players have invested countless hours in, and challenging them to avert it. Them's some high stakes (Our group doesn't adventure in Jade Stage anymore, or in Cadaverous Earth, or in Dystopia, because they didn't stop me from wrecking the world. THEY WERE WEAK)

Oh, totally, world-ending apocalypses are fantastic. The problem/glory with LotFP is that you can cause them by accident really easily in most adventures, or even just by miscasting a Summon spell. Here's one of the things you can accidentally bring through if you screw up your ritual, for example:

Quote from: World Under WaterInstead of summoning a creature, a portal was opened to a dimension of infinite liquid. Whether this liquid is something mundane like water or something more exotic is up to the Referee. The sea level will begin to rise immediately, worldwide, at a rate of 10' per Turn until the water reaches a level 50' higher than the caster was when the spell was cast. Once it reaches this level, it will drain away at a rate of 1d10 feet per day.

"Whoops!"

Geez Louise!

Quote from: Steerpike
One of the things I love about the implied early modern European setting of LotFP is that if you do end up unleashing a horrifying apocalypse of some kind, it feels less like destroying something beautiful you created, like a carefully cultivated homebrew world. It's kind of fun to just wreck 17th century England.

Haha! But from then on it got better though, I mean after 17th century.

Quote from: Steerpike

Quote from: World Under WaterInstead of summoning a creature, a portal was opened to a dimension of infinite liquid. Whether this liquid is something mundane like water or something more exotic is up to the Referee. The sea level will begin to rise immediately, worldwide, at a rate of 10' per Turn until the water reaches a level 50' higher than the caster was when the spell was cast. Once it reaches this level, it will drain away at a rate of 1d10 feet per day.

That's so cool though! Amazing, the imagination some people have.

Quote from: Magnus PymThat's so cool though! Amazing, the imagination some people have.

Yeah, I really dig the bizarre quality you find in a lot of LotFP stuff. Most of the spells are pretty standard D&D, but there are some like "Weird Vortex" that can do bizarre things, like hyper-evolve someone so they become physically weak but superintelligent, or creating an umbilical cord between caster and target so that they share hit points, or "Duo-Dimension," which makes the caster 2D so that they can slip between impossibly tight spaces.

I love how the first bullet point on the store page is "Shipping is free within Finland!"

Yeah, I have had decent luck getting the occasional hard copy of stuff at my local games store, but for online purchases I've mostly gone with PDFs. They make really beautiful books though, much higher in quality than you might expect from a very small company. I'm pretty sure Raggi keeps most of the physical books at his apartment before shipping, and he's the only permanent "employee."

Also, I have mentioned this to a few people, but just to shamelessly brag/self-promote, I've got a monster in the next LotFP Referee Guide. I've seen the art for it and it's siiiick. Some real vintage Steerpike grotesquery.