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Review of Barbarians of Orange Boiling Seas
Blurb from the publisher: 'Sometime in the future, over a thousand years since mankind first set foot on the moon, a robotic probe will offload its fusion ramjet and coast into a distant star system, its ancient computer systems powering on to scan the system for potentially habitable worlds.
Its sensor suite will contain instruments undreamed of by any man alive today, but when the beam of its all powerful communications array reaches the nearest listening station several decades later with details on one of the moons of the system's gas giant, it will detail the prior presence of the one thing NO ONE expects.
This book describes a time over fifteen hundreds year prior to that day, shortly after the Catholic church first reached the ice moon of Nibu.'
What you get: Your EUR 15 or equivalent will buy you both the print as well as the pdf version of Barbarians of Orange Boiling Seas, a 40-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 7,24.
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: Confused by the blurb? Barbarians of Orange Boiling Seas is a colonial adventure taking place not in another continent but in another planet, which the characters will reach via a portal. Nominally that portal is set in Going Through Forbidden Other Worlds, another LotFP adventure that we have not visited together yet, it can however be set anywhere you like. The adventure is self-contained; only a small portion of the planet may be visited. It is a sandbox, without a concrete plot; the character's actions will determine how things evolve. The characters will encounter two wildly different factions. The first are the Conquistadors and the Catholic Church, while the second are the primitive semi-Neanderthals who call the planet their home. Factions are not monolithic; there is nuance in what each member of a faction tries to achieve. Ultimately, the players will side with somebody, and might help for that individual / faction come out on top.
The adventure outlines six locales with different characteristics. Expect things like a captured city, a Conquistador fort, sewers, etc.
The strong points: If you ever wondered what you would get by mixing Flash Gordon, John Carter of Mars, and the Conquistadors, Barbarians of Orange Boiling Seas is the answer. I am undecided as to whether it ultimately falls under fantasy or space fantasy. It has some of the latter genre's trappings, e.g. the characters will be stronger due to the planet's lower gravity, and there are mighty hawk knights roaming the skies. Apart from that however, the concept is based on trusted fantasy tropes and some of the usual LotFP weirdness. In both Flash Gordon and John Carter the alien worlds provided the challenges. In this adventure, the challenges are triggered by the arrival of the Conquistadors and the Catholic Church to a planet that has been left alone for millennia. The landscapes and the planet's inhabitants are conspicuously similar to those of Earth (seeing how the Earth is where they came from in the first place). Thus, the characters are yet another party of humans to arrive in a planet that was doing ok on its own anyway, and now have to choose with whom to side. The set up asks interesting questions for which the GM will have to provide the answers. There are some politics, some diplomacy, and a few tough choices. Will you side with the oppressors, or with the oppressed, when both of them are clearly flawed in a way? Do the inhabitants of a planet light-years away really need to worship Christ?
The writing is more direct than GM's usually expect: 'The mummy is a dick and doesn't think anybody is worthy because it holds them to its idealized view of itself from 3000 years ago'. It provides a lot of information about a society that is essentially a Mayan civilization with fantasy trappings before the arrival of the Conquistadors. It is not always focused (keep on reading), the GM however will get some useful things out of it. Players should not expect a Monty Haul scenario lurking behind the premise. There is only one single item of advanced technology, and it is unlikely to make their everyday lives any easier.
The art is... cute! I didn't expect such a stark contrast between the book's cover and the images that adorn the book's inner pages. It is functional, it provides a good idea of what is going on, and can be shown to you players in order to help with their immersion.
The pdf is of an excellent quality. Bookmarks go two levels deep. In fact, there are more than 50 bookmarks for a 40-page adventure. The table of contents has live links. All the images can be extracted. Great work!
The weak points: The GM will have to put in a lot of work in order for the adventure to reach an acceptable level of meatiness. There is no suggested level of play, something that fledgling GMs will find rather daunting, and even more so because the PCs are stronger due to the planet's lower gravity and their access to weapons and magic that most natives do not possess. No NPC has stats. Most locations are described in a rather macroscopic way, requiring serious GM interference. Many of the details that the adventure presents cannot be put into practical use at all. Does it really matter which variant bread comes from? On the other hand, practical, game-related details are either overlooked or are hastily hand-waved. The hex map makes one think of a hex crawl, it is however too empty for what it offers. A full faction can be destroyed if a single room in the sewer complex is destroyed after only a couple of encounters. The seed table that allegedly breaks the monotony of the characters when travelling from one place to another is flat at best. Its entries point towards a barren, ice-age earthen world, not a fantastic otherworldly adventure. Not many things are happening. It's as if most of the living components of a potential encounter prefer being part of the frame than come into the spotlight.
This is in effect the adventure's biggest issues: the otherworldliness of the alien planet is not really explored, and following that, the relationship between the opposing factions comes out as rather simplistic. What is the point of setting a colonial adventure with both religious and societal undertones in an unknown planet, when the planet itself doesn't add its own bizarre components into the mix? The increased strength of the PCs, the hawk knights, and the single piece of advanced technology are simply not enough. They are trappings, gimmicks. They cannot hide for a long time the fact that the adventure is emptier than it should have been.
Conclusion: Barbarians of Orange Boiling Seas is based on a clever combination of materials, yet it doesn't really leave them in the oven as long as it should. As a result, it lacks a clear focus, it offers simple, straightforward challenges, and ultimately does not come out as memorable. If I could be more accurate, I would have given it a 3 / 2,5.
For more info on Barbarians of Orange Boiling Seas and Lamentations of the Flame Princess, visit its website at http://www.lotfp.com.
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