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Review of Frostbitten & Mutilated
Blurb from the publisher: 'Sometimes the snow will not stop. Under its particled screen like layers of veil that would make of the world a bride to the unknown, vast and unseen groom all civilization is wondering from its hearths and stone corners: What is to be done about the women? They spit and rage, they drown the taxmen, they hack the bellies of snakes and eat what they find, they abort babies and squeeze their milk into the bellies of troll-cats, they dwell apart among the wide white peaks, raiding, scheming, speaking to animals, willful and without trade or diplomatic discourse - the witch-women and amazons. They dominate and divide the Devoured Land. Who can see this ending well?
From the multi-award winning artist/writer behind Vornheim: The Complete City Kit, Red & Pleasant Land, and Maze of the Blue Medusa, this book details the bleak white wild created on the spot where the first goddess took the first bite out of the Earth, which maintains the balances and arrangements that held sway in the first days. It contains wolfpacks, cannibal giants, trolls, demons of the apocalypse, as well as a wilderness kit with enough tables, generators and tools to keep your players busy until hell freezes over.
Frostbitten & Mutilated is a setting book suitable for use with Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role-Playing and other traditional role-playing games.'
What you get: Your EUR 25,30 or equivalent will buy you both the print as well as the pdf version of Frostbitten & Mutilated, a 146-page black and white hardcover setting/adventure in A5 format for the Lamentations of the Flame Princess game line. The pdf can be purchased alone for EUR 11,37. The adventure was nominated for five 2018 Ennies (Best Art and Interior, Best Monster or Adversary, Best Setting, Best Writing, and Product of the Year) and won the Gold or Silver iteration of the first four ones.
Spoiler warning: As much as I am not going to describe, let alone detail the adventure that forms part of the setting, 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: I prefer to summarize in my own words what roleplaying products contain, but no matter how hard I would have tried I couldn't have possibly bested the book itself in entertainment value:
'This book basically has three parts. First, tools and toys to help you make adventures featuring extremely metal things like warrior women, frost giants, and apocalyptic monsters. Second, a specific setting (The Devoured Land) with specific places in it and maps and specific people and monsters that want specific stuff that you can use if you want. Finally, a calendar of events that begins when the party arrives in The Devoured Land and which will move forward if the party doesn't do anything about them. You should be able to use all, most or some of these parts without anything bad happening. However, I don't recommend using none of them - I mean I don't know your situation personally but probably if you do that your game will suck and you'll die weeping on a pile of rags, universally despised.'
The book starts with reference material and recommended reading, as well as the themes behind the adventures in The Devoured Land: Gold, Anarchy, Wisdom, or even Embryoctony (abortion, if you prefer). The Devoured Lands have two main civilized places which are described in less than a handful of paragraphs each. The one is the equivalent of Viking-era Trondheim, while the other is the equivalent of a medieval harbor.
The first major part of the book covers the inhabitants of The Devoured Land and their interaction to one another. There are four types of Amazons, all sorts of wild animals (all of which possess human intelligence and have their own goals and aspirations), demonic creatures and what have you. I am counting over 35 entries, each accompanied with an artsy image and a few bits of text.
The Calendar and Map chapter covers the locations of The Devoured Land and the events that are to transpire there once the characters arrive. Time has been stopped in a permanent loop, in order for certain grim events to happen once the right gears fall into place. The campaign of sorts works as hexcrawl exploration (or rather squarescrawl, since it is based in squares instead of hexes) with one encounter per square.
There are two main locations of adventure, the Dim Fortress and the Sevenfold Tower are more elaborate, with almost half a dozen pages devoted to each.
Rules-wise the book offer new character classes (Amazon Warriors and Witches as character classes), new spells, new substances and new skills in The Devoured Land. It also provides advice on running wilderness sandbox adventures, before closing with seventeen pages of random tables. These include adventure elements, adventure locations, the use of a chess variant as a divination game, new tribes, how to break curses, confrontations, random loot to be found when searching a body, random loot to be found in a location, a table for better describing violent injuries and many more.
The book closes with a four-page index.
The strong points: If this book has anything, it is feeling. It does not try to impress you with complex backstories, elaborate interactions, or facts that make sense. This is a work aiming for the gut, for the reader to immerse himself in a cold and desolate world where everything is dangerous for the characters in ways they cannot even fathom. Lamentations of the Flame Princess is probably more hardcore when it comes to aesthetics than any other system out there, and Frostbitten & Mutilated is a good example why. Abortion tourism? Check. Women as a brutal force of nature? Check. Intelligent animals, but within the confines of their true nature, and not as yet another animal-man hybrid rehash? Check. A harsh arctic landscape, forever locked in brooding Groundhog day until the utterly despicable finally happens? Check. The book is not a travelogue; it is a kaleidoscope of horrifying and disturbing ideas against the backdrop of arctic desolation. The fact that it invents new, scary stuff while retheming existing concepts counts on its favour.
To mention but a few, I liked the weirdness of the misshaped animals, the greedy and malevolent crows, or the stubborn but talkative goats (at least until one finds the means of talking to them). Trolls, and I kid not, is a retheming of internet trolls (!) into their mythological counter parts than vice-versa. Trolls are fed and fondled by Pearlholders, the setting's reimagination of Christians. It is thus symbolically no coincidence that the goats hate trolls. Witches are as death metal as they can be; having sex with them will transform you into a toad. And did I mention that they have the shadow of an animal, and somewhere one lone animal has theirs? The treatment of the Frost Giants raises eyebrows seeing how each of them is over 60 meters tall (!), while the setting's boss adversaries are bad ass enough to have different allocations of hit points per body part. You will need to reduce the head's or the torso's hit points to zero if you face them and you wish to somehow defeat them. There are also clever ideas blending rules and theme, with the characters that get to survive the sheer presence of Nidhoggr gaining not only XPs but actual points of wisdom.
There are so many things that are as mesmerizing as they are off-putting that I could go on for a while. A cat licks its paws while blood pours from its eyes. Chess used in divination, where the future becomes the arena for an adversarial face off. Is the game really about divining the future or about shaping it?
The adventure part of the setting is a squarecrawl, with its encounters being as abstract as the remainder of the book. In some cases they are no longer than two liners, allowing the referee to shape them as he wishes. Even at such impossible shortness, they are extremely evocative, and specifically since the writing shuns verbs. A good referee with a grim voice and an immaculate sense of presentation will have a field day with those. The Dim Fortress and the Sevenfold Tower can provide quite the horrifying entertainment. The latter is about overcoming sins (in the Christian sense) in situations that a PC is unlikely to know that he is getting tested.
As a referee I can't have enough tables like the ones included in this volume. They are easy to use and port in any campaign, they are not however standard. Their quirky and morbid character sets them apart, even when at times the material is closer to old school roleplaying than it should be. I mean, who carries a bear trap with him?
I enjoyed the black and white art. The theme that holds it together is that it is dark and disturbing, that it wishes to make the reader feel uncomfortable. The different pieces however are very dissimilar to one another. This is what stuff inside nightmares look like. Seeing how the book aims for feeling more than it aims for content, it succeeds in what it tries to achieve.
The pdf is of a good quality, with a table of contents going three levels deep. It could have been better done since sometimes the different levels of links don't make much sense, it still however counts as a positive. Even more so because a small publisher does it.
The weak points: This is a product on A5 format. That wouldn't be bad in itself were the amount of dead space is surreal. There is quite the number of two-pagers where text is some 20% of one page, the art occupies a part or all of the other page, and the rest is just... empty.
I probably understand the reasoning. This is an effort to make the initial reader (the referee) feel the desolation, the emptiness, the despair. The problem? That art direction might have some punch when one is reading the book for the first time, from the second reading already however it fails miserably. I want to believe that the objective of such a book is not the referee's solo gratification; this is about creating a cohesive world (no matter how weird or extreme it is) and transmitting information to players. Yet, a referee cannot do that if he lacks the info, and that is very likely to happen most of the time. Most of the book's many very cool ideas come out as unbaked, as a promising, creative start which stopped dead in its tracks. There is a wow factor when one reads such ideas for the first time, when you start however piecing them together not many things add up.
Secondly however, and even if the referee had the info, at no point does he get any practical, down to earth advice on how to use it. There is this bizarre piece at the beginning of the book about how the landscape and everything in The Devoured Land should be treated as if it utterly and irrevocably hates the heroes, that's however it. So, if I am new to roleplaying, or if I am an experienced but not that good a referee, where do I actually go from there? Not that far, to be fair.
Thirdly, not everything feels as well-made for the setting. I liked it, and I like tables, yet many of them can be easily used practically anywhere. 'Anywhere' is different to 'terrifying arctic landscape'. Such a generic nature makes the book feel even more like an unfocused collage of ideas.
This all might not matter in the end, seeing how deadly the setting is. There are chances of encounters every two hours, i.e. 12 potential encounters per 24-hours, out of which some 6-8 will statistically happen. Taking into account how much the setting hates you, you might want to tone things down, or you will be looking at one TPK per session.
The Dim Fortress is the first linear dungeon I have seen in a while. It is also the first dungeon I have seen in a while with the main baddie being held behind walls which barely hold him, without any way of exit should he somehow break free. I dig the concept of building a prison around such a menace, yet there are mechanical limitations here. Thing don't feel right, and for a book that is based on feeling, that is an enormous failure.
I stated that I liked the art as a piece of inspiration. These however are not images that you can meaningfully show to your players during actual play. They are abstractions, hazes within the fog, edgy artistic representations. In an RPG where the input of your five senses matters, they don't help that much, or at least not all of them.
Typos. There are quite a few of them. Ufff.
Conclusion: Frostbitten & Mutilated is different to most other campaign settings out there. It is abstract and tries to convey a feeling of cold and despair more than it does information. It acts more as inspiration to the referee than as immediately usable material. I enjoyed the edginess, the darkness, and numerous of the ideas in here; dozens of them have found new homes in my other campaigns or one offs. Yet, I can't but state the obvious: the referee will have a lot of work in his hands. With all the amount of dead space in the book, this is rather disheartening.
For more info on Frostbitten & Mutilated and Lamentations of the Flame Princess, visit its website at http://www.lotfp.com.
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