Review of More Than Meets the Eye

Blurb from the publisher: 'Such heroic nonsense!

More Than Meets the Eye is a short adventure for characters of any level, 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 More Than Meets the Eye, a 16-page, black-and-white softcover with full-colour covers in A5 format for the Lamentations of the Flame Princess game line.

The pdf can be purchased alone for EUR 4,50.

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: For those who didn't immediately get the meta-gaming reference from the title, More Than Meets the Eye is a humorous, grim-dark fantasy riff of... Transformers. As in Autobot and Decepticon Transformers. These Transformers however are not metallic, but fleshy. They change form into things like manors, harpsichords (that would be the leader of group 'D', winkwink), and coaches minus the horses (leader of group 'A', hmmm). There is the Primal Matrix that both factions want, many weird things lying around, and a village full of mutilated villagers. Apart from that however there isn't much of a plot. The adventure is a sandbox, with the players needing to take the initiative. The designer describes it as Yojimbo, or A Fistful of Dollars, with aliens. Meaning, the PCs will have to find a way to make one faction neutralize the other, so that the humans come on top.

The strong points: This is one of the most funny and ridiculous adventures I have ever read and playtested, and I mean that in a good way. Taking its size into account, you won't need more than a quarter of an hour to read it (and laugh out loud most of that time), and even that might be too long. It requires knowing your Transformers, not because it goes deeply into lore, but because that's the only way the jokes make sense. The designer doesn't hesitate to break the fourth wall, use comedy gratuitously as if he addresses an inebriated friend, and go into tangents about things like the languages spoken in Cornwall, how aggressive Cornish speakers might be towards befuddled English speakers, and the likelihood that the players will encounter surviving villagers named 'John'.

Incidentally, these are not exactly the Transformers that we know and love. They are fleshy, gooey, stink quite a bit, and let me not start with how they reproduce. When they transform their mass doesn't magically disappear; fleshy stubs are hidden inside the object they emulate. The objects they transform into are ridiculous, as are their names. Madrigal the Harpsichord, any idea who that might be? In a LotFP signature move, group 'D' (the groups are not otherwise named for IP reasons) are the good guys. They are, and I quote, 'political dissidents [...], confused, scared, and just want to be left alone'. Group 'A' on the other hand 'is the alien space police, [...] a bit dull and severe'. Both are dangerous and inherently deadly. How can the PCs handle this? Will they align with somebody? Will they help the Ds, even though these creatures don't particularly care about the small, two-eyed living beings inhabiting this world? Will they aid the As who want to either kill, or capture and kill, after a fair trial, the Ds? Or will they capture and use the Primal Matrix, which works in a way not dissimilar to a Deck of Many Things, but with the weirdness amped up to 11? Randomly changing class is one thing, randomly dying is another, but being randomly turned into an ethnically East Asian / Southern European / indigenous North American is not what adventures usually go for.

I am laughing throughout writing this review. The humour hits the right buttons. I don't know what the Transformers have to do with an angry Cornishman shouting loudly to an Englishman, but it's damn funny. I am not mentioning any more of the ludicrous jokes in the fear of spoiling its ambience, yet there are a few of them. Equally funny is the fact that many of the things that get described aren't that likely to be used. The Primal Matrix is one of them, and the alien spaceship (the Saddest Spaceship, to be precise) is the other. If it does, expect results like not arriving when expected (arriving earlier that departing is a very distinct possibility), being destroyed (that's rather bland actually), and arriving in... Carcossa? Ooops. And that 'ooops' comes after the realization that your players can potentially end the adventure with a spaceship in their hands. Who thinks of this stuff?

Does this play well, then? It plays great if everybody is on board! I can't see how this can be played with a straight face; expect tons of metagaming relating to the Transformers. The GM might or might not need to prepare, depending on how well he can tackle things on the fly, and whether he and his players are Transformers aficionados. The adventure is written as a sandbox anyway, so once it starts you won't control anything. There is a minimalist village and no objective; if the characters want to aid the Ds, and many of us root for the Decepticons just because, here is a chance to actually do it and be on the right at the same time. The adventure's feeling is simultaneously silly and serious, or at least it should come out as both, seeing how grim A Fistful of Dollars is. There are however hard prerequisites in order for the adventure to even hit the table. Keep on reading.

The pdf is of an excellent quality. The fact that it has 11 bookmarks in an adventure of 18 pages says something already. The table of contents has live links, while the goofy / gooey images can be extracted and shown to your players when needed. They fit the tone of the adventure just right.

The weak points: If you don't know or don't care about Transformers this adventure is pointless. First, you will fail to understand the concept. Second, you will miss all the jokes, and I do mean all of them; even the ones about Cornwell are funny because Cornwell has fuck all to do with the Transformers. Seeing how there is nothing but concepts and jokes here, you will have paid for something that will not make sense. Like a cookbook in Cornish.

The adventure's issue is that never commits to itself. It is a clever, original, very funny idea (ping!), it is not however developed at all. Easy example: it does not recommend a character level. Raw strength is clearly not the solution, taking the hit dice of the aliens into account. The dead villagers, or should I say the horrifyingly mutilated villagers lying left and right are an indication of what is going to happen if the PCs resort to violence. Subterfuge should be the answer, then. Yet, how can one use that, when the dynamic between the different aliens is not described at all? Decepticons often lost back in the day because of the dysfunctional relationship between Megatron and Starscream. The latter's fleshy avatar is absent from this scenario. I can guess who the members of each group are (Madrigal and Zenith are obvious), yet I don't really know their weaknesses (except from alcohol, because these Transformers can't handle it at all). No word is dedicated to their relationship to their leaders, or to the members of the opposing force, if such a relationships exists. If I were a new GM I'd be totally lost. How can my players find an opening and exploit it if they have nothing to hold on to?

To that, the answer is 'the GM should wing it'. So here is the problem: if you like Transformers, you will be annoyed because this is a brilliant idea that few people can come up with, yet which is still at the 'hey guys, listen to this!' stage. It does not break any ground when it comes to practical implementation. It lets you figure out which alien corresponds to which Transformer, so that, with your knowledge of the franchise, you can play them appropriately. You will also have to figure out yourself what the goal is. As written, this one-session scenario will either have everybody killed, or everybody killed and the world ransacked by aliens, or only some characters killed and the others befriending (or having made an enemy out of) a living space-ship. That is not what GMs have in mind when inserting an adventure into their campaign. If you want to base things on this, to juice it for more than one session, or even create a coherent campaign out of it, you are on your own.

If on the other hand you don't know, or don't like Transformers, you will be annoyed because you purchased an idea at the stage of formulation without any hard fact to run it. Here's to nothing.

All that having been said, it'd be pointless for me to repeat how, if the characters come out of this alive and successful, they will end up with a spaceship. Which can drive them mad. Or allow them to time-travel. It is most likely that you will play this for the laughs, not as part of any semblance of campaign.

Conclusion: More Than Meets the Eye is an incredible, outrageous idea, which unfortunately never transcends the larval stage. If you know your Transformers, you are willing to put work on it yourself, and play it as a comedic one-off with all your players on board, it will be a blast. If I could be more accurate, it would have given it a 3,5 / 1,5.

For more info on More Than Meets the Eye and Lamentations of the Flame Princess, visit its website at http://www.lotfp.com.

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