Review of The Idea from Space

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Blurb from the publisher: 'Mind vs muscle.

The Idea from Space is an adventure suitable for low-level characters for use with Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role-Playing and other traditional role-playing games.'

What you get: Your EUR 9,90 or equivalent will buy you both the print as well as the pdf version of The Idea From Space, a 32-page black-and-white softcover adventure in A5 format for the Lamentations of the Flame Princess game line. The pdf alone can be purchased alone for EUR 6,99.

Spoiler warning: As much as I am not going to describe, let alone detail the adventure, parts of the scenario might be revealed while discussing its strong and less strong points. If you intend to enjoy it as a player, stop reading now.

Contents: The Idea From Space takes place in a remote island near relatively underdeveloped shores. The map portrays the said island right next to Terra del Fuego, in 17th century Latin America, even though it is irrelevant whether the Viceroyalty of Peru or the Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata is in charge of the general area. As with other adventures in Lamentations, it can be easily set in other worlds or remote areas. The adventure is a sandbox of sorts, with two main factions to interact with. It is location-based and requires exploration as well as fighting, even though the latter can be regulated. Plot-wise, the characters will first have to sort out what is going on, before deciding whether they want to help or even become an alien entity which tries to propagate itself throughout the world, or help an ancient god find new followers like in ages long gone. Depending on how your players approach this and how intensive you wish to make the experience, it can easily last for two sessions.

The strong points: The fundamentals of this adventure are outright gorgeous; gorgeous! One island, two alien entities. One is a bona fide ancient island god, the other an alien entity, and a relative new comer at that. They won't force you to join them, but at some point in the adventure, earlier than later, you will want to join them. One will grant superhuman strength and a physique more muscled that professional WWE wrestlers (sans dope). The other will give you participation into a hive mind, which you can leave any time you want, and all sorts of traits like collectivly shooting beams (!) should you decide to. You choose; it's all about free will. If a role-player seriously suggests that his white as a dove character will never take sides, he has no clue what he is talking about.

Statistically speaking, you will choose, it's inescapable. And that, just that, the temptation and the option of partaking in one of two seemingly reasonable choices at the end of the world with nobody around, is why the adventure is unforgettable. A master GM will use all the dirty tricks in the book to make this choice about the players as much as the characters, without however this becoming obvious. The relevant friendliness of the two groups, the possibility to explore, to understand what each group is about, to sympathize even in a sword and sorcery world where the ethics and behavioural constructs of high fantasy don't hold sway, is going to work its way to the minds of the players who are trying to solve a potentially unsolvable, weird adventure where any ending may take place due to player intervention. Can it end in a TPK? Easily. Should it? No. Who will win? It depends. Will Xaxus escape into the world? Maybe. One thing is certain: true choice means that there is no good nor evil. There are deities (and aliens) only because humans are nothing but ants in front of them. They don't get care about you. They don't mind the power you obtain, or how you will use it. What they do, they do for themselves. They are otherworldly in nature, because they are out of the blasé considerations of mortals. Only a fool would worship gods (or aliens) like this anyway, no matter the rewards.

I don't want to mischaracterise the adventure by saying that it addresses itself to a mature audience; isn't Lamentations overall addressed to those who seek entertainment in the bizarre? There are mentions of sex in the adventure (fucks, to be more precise), as well as full frontal male nudity which however comes out as relatively harmless (until the fucks happen). The island, when seen as a self-contained location, is a rather obvious design. Yet, the feeling it exudes is one of power, the ultimate triumph of nature over man, without any magical bullshit about it. Through remoteness and scope, the surroundings come out on top. The locations are deliciously bizarre even for Lamentations standards. I am not talking only about the two mountains whose tops are linked with a suspension bridge (good grief!), but also for the bone-littered canyon (human bones, if you were wondering), the theme (the Hulk clones vs the blow-dart spitting intelligents), and other pieces of sheer brilliance. The room from where the heroes can allegedly speak as the idol itself reminded me strongly of (the otherwise irrelevant) Dan Lawrence's Storm, that I started laughing on my own. A weird adventure like this is not below mixing the real supernatural with cheap tricks that some natives do to control the others. And did I mention the dope-plant which can nourish, but at the same time drug those who eat from it, or the clone-plant whose method of reproduction is the creation of a homunculus identical to the last character it drew blood from? I cought myself thinking 'did I actually read this or did I make it up?' at some points where my mind drifted to adventure preparation in contexts which, for a lack of better words, were outright unsuitable.

The weak points: With only thirty two pages in A5 format you shouldn't expect a lot of details. There are a lot of things on this adventure that a GM will have to think hard about, and even more so if he plans a campaign for the PCs that actually survive this. To start with... a remote location right next to Terra del Fuego in the 16th century?! That's the bloody end of nowhere. How do PCs get close to that? The adventure does not link to other ones from the series as far as I am aware of, so good luck with something as basic. Thankfully the location can be ported, yet again, this requires a bit of thinking. If that weren't enough, vital data in either numbers or concepts is missing. It might sound trite, but on sandboxes I want some concrete guidance about who might be met, when, and where, what is the roster of each faction (exhaustively, not approximately), plausible character insertion etc. Here things happen the old-fashioned way: you study, you take notes, you fill in the gaps. There are a lot of them.

There are many, I do mean many, non-saving throw occurrences in lethal situations. Some of them might be spotted in advance, others however might not. OSR tries to convey a certain feeling, true, yet I was under the impression that the death-without-reaction is a universally panned mechanic that even OSR publications dislike. Here it happens more often than I would have liked.

Once again, the GM does not receive the help that he deserves. Boxed, ready-to-read texts are old-school, yet this adventure offers none. GM only information is gratuitously mixed with the information that the characters should immediately obtain simply by entering a location. Come on, this is an easy thing to sort out. Sort it out, already.

The maps are not easy to understand. In contrast to other Lamentations adventures, they are all found at the end of the book, even though the descriptions of the areas they describe are found dozens of pages earlier. There will be a lot of page-flipping just to understand what is going on and where.

The pdf is of an acceptable quality. The links are live on the page of the table of contents, yet there is no electronic table of contents already in place. Also, locations do not link to other locations. I admit I am perplexed. I got the impression from Forgive Us that the optimal route was known and was followed. Why wasn't the same process also followed here as well?

Conclusion: I enjoyed the bold concept of The Idea From Space, which, even though not new is definitely fresh and well-thought of. Everything is an option, and the fact that things can end more or less peacefully in such a quaint scenario is proof of how well-written the adventure is. Now, if only it helped more the GM run it.

For more info on The Idea From Space and Lamentations of the Flame Princess, visit its website at http://www.lotfp.com.

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