Homebrewing material for LotFP?

[LoA]

So my thoughts drifted back to Eff for a while today, and I thought about re-angling it from a Lovecraftian/Dr. Seussian pokemon thing, to a Lovecraftian/Dr. Seussian Monster Hunter with an emphasis on exploration. Then I thought, what better game exists for exploring a weird world than LotFP. I know that LotFP has an amazing third party support, but i'm wondering about making your own content? What resources should I be looking at for this sort of thing?

[Steerpike]

Is that with the cool Lovecraftian moon thing? I thought that was a great idea.

I don't think you need too many resources for making stuff with LotFP beyond the Referee's Guide, which you can get for free here. There should be a new copy coming out sometime in the future (in which yours' truly will have a monster), but LotFP products take a notoriously long time.

I would also recommend checking out Lusus Naturae, a pay-what-you-want bestiary. It's got some brilliant monsters, so if you're thinking of doing a monster-centric thing it might be worth a look. Most of them are more along the lines of "civilization-destroying horror" rather than typical Pokemon.

Other LotFP books worth looking into for advice on dungeon building might include Veins of the Earth, which is a fantastic weird spelunking sourcebook. Might not be as useful for an overland-focused world.

[sparkletwist]

LotFP is not an immensely crunchy system. It's basically a slightly more coherent OD&D. It's still based largely on just making stuff up, so the amount of crunch you have to worry about when writing your own content is not high, and balance concerns are practically nonexistent.

To get the right LotFP feel you'll want to throw in some random edgelord shit, because that's the main way it stands out from most other OD&D retroclones.

[Steerpike]

Edgelord is one way to put it, although often LotFP has its tongue at least somewhat in its cheek (i.e. Blood in the Chocolate, Broodmother Sky Fortress, Vaginas Are Magic, etc). It's got a slightly kitsch death-metal/B-movie/grindhouse-cinema thing going on in quite a few of the products. It's so over-the-top it can sometimes wink at itself.

But yeah, it's not crunchy at all, and there's no such thing as balance in it, basically. If you want a really tactical game that's mostly about the blow-by-blow of Lovecraftian pokemon fights I might go with a super-hacked 4th edition or 13th Age or Pathfinder or something like that. If you want primarily an old-school horror-exploration game with a monster hunter element I think LotFP would work well.

[LoA]

Edgelord is one way to put it, although often LotFP has its tongue at least somewhat in its cheek (i.e. Blood in the Chocolate, Broodmother Sky Fortress, Vaginas Are Magic, etc). It's got a slightly kitsch death-metal/B-movie/grindhouse-cinema thing going on in quite a few of the products. It's so over-the-top it can sometimes wink at itself.

But yeah, it's not crunchy at all, and there's no such thing as balance in it, basically. If you want a really tactical game that's mostly about the blow-by-blow of Lovecraftian pokemon fights I might go with a super-hacked 4th edition or 13th Age or Pathfinder or something like that. If you want primarily an old-school horror-exploration game with a monster hunter element I think LotFP would work well.

I"m not interested in "balance", and while i'm not out for gory kill fests, a weird exploration based game is exactly what I'm looking for.

[Steerpike]

The Seuss element is very interesting. I think he's an underutilized source of inspiration for fantasy - there's an eeriness to a lot of Seuss that's not really "horror" and is certainly far from the nihilist tentacular ecstasies of Lovecraft, but which can kind of unnerve.

[spoiler=Like Just the Right Level of Creepy]


Plus all of Grinch Night, obviously...[/spoiler]

Do you envision the Seuss influence principally in monster design? Or more in the world at large?

[LoA]

The Seuss element is very interesting. I think he's an underutilized source of inspiration for fantasy - there's an eeriness to a lot of Seuss that's not really "horror" and is certainly far from the nihilist tentacular ecstasies of Lovecraft, but which can kind of unnerve.

Do you envision the Seuss influence principally in monster design? Or more in the world at large?

Definitely taking a ton of inspiration from everything Seuss did for the whole world, but I'm primarily taking from his fine art. People forget, but he tried to become an artist before he settled on making books, and his stuff is really, really good.

Favorite examples"

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And if you're wondering where the Lovecraftian Pokemon thing came from, check out his sculptures

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So the feel for this world is definitely colorful, whimsical, and weird, with an emphasis on the weird part.

[Steerpike]

That's really cool. Illustrations of some Suessian/Lovecraftian pokemon would be pretty amazing.

[Ghostman]

Those paintings definitely look like milieu from the Dreamlands.

[Steerpike]

Those paintings definitely look like milieu from the Dreamlands.

Totally. There might even be a kind of shared artistic lineage. Lovecraft was a great admirer of Sidney Sime, who illustrated many of Dunsany's works, and the Dreamlands is obviously strongly Dunsanian. Suess was cagey about his inspiration but I dunno, I wouldn't be surprised if Sime was influence:

[spoiler=Sime]



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[Steerpike]

Relevant to your interests.

[Steerpike]

Also, have you seen this? "The Call of Cthulhu" as if written and illustrated by Seuss!

[LD]

The rhyming word choices are surprisingly well done in that. (with the exception maybe of page 2).

[Steerpike]

The metre is kinda uneven but the illustrations are really good.