Review of Adventure Anthology: Fire

Blurb from the publisher: 'The weirdest starter adventures ever!

For use with Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role-Playing and other traditional tabletop role-playing games.''

What you get: Your EUR 27,50 or equivalent will buy you both the print as well as the pdf version of Adventure Anthology: Fire, a 176-page, black-and-white hardcover in A5 format with an integrated orange cloth bookmark for the Lamentations of the Flame Princess game line. The book also boasts of a four-page fold out.

The product is new, yet its contents are not. The four scenarios mentioned in the publisher's blurb had been published separately from the same publisher a few years back.

The pdf differs from the print edition in that no pdf of the Adventure Anthology: Fire exists as such. When one purchases the print version, he receives the four pdfs of the initial adventures as they were separately published back in the day. This inconsistency is due to a technical matter; the publisher is not out to rob you of any potential additional content, even though the forward to the anthology cannot be found anywhere else but the print edition.

In other words, if one were to buy the pdfs only, he would have paid respectively (in the order the adventures are mentioned above) EUR 5,45 + EUR 6,59 + EUR 7,26 + pay what you want (suggested: EUR 4,54), for a grand total of EUR 23,84. That being the case, if you aim to buy all four adventures it is fairly obvious that buying both the physical and the pdf edition makes much more sense.

Spoiler warning: As much as I am not going to describe, let alone detail the adventures, parts of the scenarios might be revealed while discussing the product's strong and less strong points. If you intend to enjoy it as a player, stop reading now. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, I hadn't read the adventures as they were initially published, nor had I played any of them at that time. Thus, I cannot comment on if and how their initial edition is different to their present iteration.

Contents: The adventures range in size from 27 to 53 pages. The Tower of the Stargazer has a recommended player count and character level (4-8 characters, all level 1), while The Monolith Beyond Space and Time addresses itself to characters of any level. The remaining adventures require GM prudence as to the levels that best suit them, 'low' being the standard assumption. None of these adventures should take more than two long sessions to complete, and even that might be too long. The adventures are not connected in any way. The 'Fire' moniker in the anthology's title doesn't allude to anything.

Seeing how the adventures are based on wildly different concepts and themes, they don't follow a predetermined pattern. The Tower of the Stargazer for example is full of boxed texts, these aren't aimed towards the players however. They are aimed towards the new GM who lacks the experience to run a game. They include designer thoughts, playtest assertions, gaming tips and many more. None of the other adventures shares a similar feature. The aforementioned adventure is location-based. The God that Crawls takes a riff of the life of the real Augustine of Canterbury, The Monolith from Space and Time is James Raggi's tribute to Lovecraft without any Mythos entity appearing, while The Doom-Cave of the Crystal-Headed Children is a reminder of why LotFP is considered gonzo, perverted, and subversive.

The strong points: These are some of the best, the most original adventures I have ever stumbled upon! Granted, they are LotFP adventures and nowhere near standard fare, they all however have something concrete to say.

I wish I had an adventure like Tower of the Stargazer when I first started GMing. The adventure can be enjoyed on its merits as a solid OSR serving with the weirdest of undertones, the wisdom it shares with the reader however is invaluable, if said reader is a reluctant newbie. It is nowhere near what modern role-playing design considers a 'fair' adventure. There are numerous save or die incidents, as well as situations that your characters are unlike to recognize as even remotely dangerous. It follows certain premises, even though it is not fully committed. First, it usually hints about danger. If your players can't figure it out, that's their problem and death is often the solution. Second, the more the characters progress, the tougher things become. This is totally to be expected. This is the quintessence of an OSR design where you must outwit the adventure both as a character as well as a player. The place feels mysterious and deadly room after room. If the characters can't handle the powers hidden inside the tower of a wizard much more powerful than them, what the hell are they doing there in the first place?

The God That Crawls takes two rather standard tropes ('there is a blasphemous entity in the catacombs; escape these catacombs!') and twists it around. Which is that entity? How did it end up there? Are there people really worshipping it, or is something else afoot? And how the hell can you keep ahead, if that thing is behind you all the time? The adventure is a treat for the GMs that can keep the pressure and maintain a fluid pace. Everything is weird (a two-page insert with the signatures of pretty much every person in the conspiracy throughout history?!?! What adventure bothers to do this?), and that includes the handfuls of magical items that are preposterously powerful and which cannot be used in the adventure, the curses that affect not the characters but the way the game is actually played, or the suggestions on how to add real-life weirdness towards the goal of the characters gaining experience.

The Monolith Beyond Space and Time is conceptually Lovecraftian, even though it has absolutely nothing to do with either the Mythos or its entities. Time/space distortions. Mutations. Utter weirdness. Things that the GM cannot express, and the players, being humans, cannot perceive. The adventure addresses itself to extremely experienced GMs and players that do not shy away from otherworldly challenges, and I don't mean that as a visit to Hell in order to bash more monsters there. One really needs to think out of the box in order for the adventure to be resolved. That's a tall order already, seeing how most players can't even register it as a usual RPG adventure, seeing how profoundly their characters will change after encountering the uncaring monolith. This is a unique, original piece. There is nothing even remotely close to it in your gaming library, unless you already own the separately published version.

As for The Doom-Cave of the Crystal-Headed Children, how about a dungeon that is placed right next to what prompted the adventure, but which is otherwise totally irrelevant to the adventure? What about fucking alien machines, or indulging into other weird perversions? Or killing children (which aren't really children)? What about Jesus (yes, that Jesus) trying to soothe you, and when attacked, instead of gore he drips of bread and fish? Silliness abounds, along with weirdness, distractive WTF moments and an overall atmosphere of 'is this for real?'. This is a glorious random-fest that only the most committed can tackle with a straight face.

Seeing how all the adventures are written by Raggi himself, the writing spares no punches. Depending on the situation it can be discursive, break the fourth wall, treat you as a friend, or reveal to you the writer's biggest fears. It will not always help you understand what is going on or tell you how to run the adventure. These two quotes, from two different adventures, are real: 'Light defeats distance: [...] Good luck describing this to your players', 'Oh bloody hell I'm tired of these lists now (can't you tell)? How about you make this [random encounter] yourself?' One thing however is certain. You will have a lot of fun reading the adventures. Chances are that you will never forget them, even if you never run them. How many adventures accomplish that?

The book's production values are extremely high. Hurrah for the integrated bookmark; the book really profits from it. Another little detail I enjoyed are the black markers on the side of the book's pages. That way you can immediately aim straight for a particular adventure even when the book is closed. There are not that many illustrations, the ones that exist however suit the book's tone nicely. The Doom-Cave is the scenario with most of them, and their comedic style makes the adventure even more bizarre and dirty than it actually is. The only coloured images are the adventures' initial covers (more accurately: some of the adventures' initial covers) which get reproduced, along with the gorgeous four-panel image of the fold out. In it, the current incarnation of the eponymous Flame Princess escapes from a pit where the God that Crawls. Good stuff.

The four pdfs are all of a very high quality. Depending on the pdf, bookmarks go from two to three levels deep. All pdfs have a table of contents, and all of them have live links. All images are extractable. In an extremely pleasant surprise, The Doom-Cave of the Crystal-Headed Children has maps that, when clicked, send you back to the main map and vice-versa. It also has numerous live links inside the text. Nice!

The weak points: As is usual with LotFP adnventures, the GM has quite the work to do. Don't expect prepared boxed texts that can be immediately read, or hooks and internal linkages that make sense. A half-baked idea or two will be encountered here and there, open hooks that look promising but never get any time on the stage, and many more. No matter which adventure you tackle, you'd better put serious effort to it before you present it to your players. None of these adventures can be played on the fly, even though the reasons behind this are different.

These here ain't adventures for starting players. When Raggi writes 'Starter Adventures', he means it within the context of weird fantasy, Godzilla-sized shock value, gonzo themes, and incomprehensible weirdness. In other words, if you are an experienced roleplayer and you have never dealt with those themes, these are great adventures to open your eyes with. If you are a starting player or even GM, you are either likely to fumble in the dark unaware of what you are expected to do, or fail to understand the cleverness, the subversion, and the inspiration and hard work that has made its way into the book.

Take Tower of the Stargazer as an example. To survive the adventure players must be aware of how OSR expects them to think. If they aren't, the kill-o-meter will start running the moment they try to enter. This might be annoying for players, and give the wrong impression to the GM. Yes, OSR is deadly, there is however a modicum of lethality. Here, the save or die instances feel more than what even experienced GMs can stomach. If this becomes your idea of creating standard OSR adventures (not LotFP-themed, that is), you might be wondering a few months down the road why nobody likes your GMing style. The Monolith is similar, not because of a particular system's conventions but because of how morbidly uncaring the device is. This is not a random thing that can be inserted in a campaign and let's see what happens before we tackle the monster of next week. This is not just a PC but a campaign-altering adventure. I'd dare say that no player can play it more than once in a lifetime lest its lose its potency. And that, if he can afford to play it even once in the first place. Crystal-Headed Children is everything detractors of LotFP like to fume about. In another time and age Raggi would have been executed for wanking into machines; he would have been then burned for mocking Jesus. Is the adventure more provocative than Towers Two? Not really, but then again Towers Two is not an average specimen; it is by far the most over-the-top LotFP adventure that I have ever playtested. If that is not your style, I don't see how Crystal-Headed Children will fare better even though it is tamer.

Conclusion: Had I reviewed each of these adventures separately, they probably wouldn't have received such high grades. Putting all of them together in a single product however is a masterstroke, and I am not just talking about the enhanced production values and the reduced cost. Adventure Anthology: Fire is clever, it is shocking, it is thought-provoking, it is wildly entertaining in ways that are simultaneously right and wrong. If you are remotely interested in fantasy, let alone horror-fantasy or weird fantasy, this is a must-buy book. Make however no mistake: these adventures accommodate beginning characters, not beginning players.

For more info on Adventure Anthology: Fire and Lamentations of the Flame Princess, visit its website at http://www.lotfp.com.

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