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Review of Anthology Adventure: Death
Blurb from the publisher: 'Empathy Zero.
Everything you love is meaningless. Everyone you love is going to die.
You wander through life pretending death will never come, and when you do think about your end you hope it will be swift, that you will not be able to mentally grasp the process of your demise as it happens. But you will, your consciousness remaining active from the point you realize that the end is coming all the way through those long, long moments until the electrical activity in your brain finally, mercifully snuffs out... long after your other physical processes cease. For a time you will be aware of being a dying brain inside of an already deceased body, its diminishing functions being received as intense pain and panic. It will feel like forever as you silently scream to be saved. But no help will ever come. And then your body will rot, your consciousness extinguished utterly, everything that you ever were gone forever.
This is our reality. And yet, as members of a civilization in which we fight for comfort rather than survival, we have the luxury to imagine fates even crueler still. For our amusement.
And beyond that amusement lie those adventures that gave Lamentations of the Flame Princess its reputation. A reputation for publishing situations and scenarios that are nothing more than cruelty disguised as entertainment, designed so that friends and acquaintances will like each other, and themselves, less. Adventures designed to make the sun seem to shine less brightly. Adventures designed to make the embrace of loved ones seem brutally cold. Adventures designed to disgust, repel, and traumatize players as their characters suffer horridly imagined fates and the Referee cackles at sharing their pain.
As all good horror must.
The volume collects Tales of the Scarecrow, The Magnificent Joop van Ooms, Fuck for Satan, and Death Love Doom, four adventures previously only available in print as limited editions. For use with Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role-Playing and other traditional tabletop role-playing games.'
What you get: Your EUR 33 or equivalent will buy you both the print as well as the pdf version of Adventure Anthology: Death, a 90 + 68-page, black-and-white hardcover in A5 format with an integrated black cloth bookmark for the Lamentations of the Flame Princess game line. The book has a (well-justified) 18+ Explicit Content seal featured on its front page.
The reason I am saying 90 + 68 and not 158 pages is because the printed version of the product includes an additional 68-page entry with hooks and vignettes called 'Adventure Number Ten'. In it, James Raggi, the designer, explicitly asks 'not [to] review this adventure or discuss it publicly or online'. I will honour that request when it comes to contents, as well as its strong and weak points. Yet, I cannot in good faith neglect to state that when you buy the print edition you also receive these 68 pages, which are not sold in a pdf form. You can only find these pages in the printed volume and nowhere else. All that having been said, the remainder of the review will cover the book's first 90 pages just as the designer wishes.
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 Adventure Anthology: Death 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, as well as the 68 pages I just discussed cannot be found anywhere else but in 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 2,25 + EUR 4,20 + EUR 4,55 + EUR 4,20 for a grand total of EUR 15,20. Seen through that lens, the ratio between physical and electronic edition is what one usually expects in an RPG purchase, as opposed to that of Anthology Adventure: Fire which practically begs you to buy the combo print/pdf edition. On the other hand, one gets 68 more pages of 'hidden' material if you opt for both.
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 four adventures range in size from 9 to 33 pages. None of them provides a recommendation about character levels, it is relatively obvious however that anything in the range from 1-3 works. None of these scenarios should take more than a session to run. The Magnificent Joop Van Ooms is not even a scenario; it covers an incredibly potent NPC (a cross of Da Vinci, Keanu Reeves, and a few other kick ass characters) as well as his workshop. Both can be inserted in campaigns that border on the weird, have artistic tangents, a bit of weird science and what have you. The contents of this book are not connected in any way. The 'Death' moniker in the anthology's title relates to their deadliness. On the other hand, there aren't that many LotFP adventures which are not incredibly deadly.
Seeing how the adventures (I keep on calling The Magnificent Joop van Ooms entry an adventure for ease of use) are based on wildly different concepts and themes, they don't follow a predetermined pattern. Tales of the Scarecrow is a short side-trek based on a full-on metagaming concept where the players themselves will competitively decide the dreadful powers of one of their adversaries and will be rewarded for it. Fuck for Satan is almost farcical, the joke being that it is definitely not as provocative, rebellious, or in your face as other adventures are, even though ultimately the players will face an arachnid-like penis-and-testicles combo. Death Love Doom on the other hand is one of the adventures that make LotFP extremely desirable or utterly appalling. It markets itself as a haunted house, and indeed it is one: the most gory, deprived, shocking haunted house one can imagine. Genital mutilation. Baby mutilation. Baby killings. If you are looking for subversion and gonzo effects, they are all here.
The strong points: I kid you not: I wanted to review this anthology just because it included the adventure called Fuck for Satan. Who wouldn't want to play an adventure with a name that makes you project the worst you can possibly imagine upon its contents? It turned out that the name is a trick for the most deconstructed anti-adventure ever written (at least when it comes to design-related concepts), that doesn't however matter at all. If you already know what LotFP is about and enjoy it for the raw, uncomfortable, disturbing themes and presentations, there is enough material keep to keep you going for a few full sessions, even more sleepless nights, and a few heated exchanges with your group's participants.
Tales of the Scarecrow is based on the idea that you will dig your own grave. How many adventures ask the players to determine the capabilities of one of their adversaries? Or include 'sprint simultaneously towards the exit like there's no tomorrow' as their main resolution format, while the adventure location hides incredible riches that weigh hundreds of kilos? Or hide other resolution methods in their innards without any hints, so that they can only be found if the characters experiment with everything available? Even though OSR tends to do this, this is still an unforgettable short scenario. And all that, without even including the cannibalism that the characters might need to resort to. If through clever thinking and with the help of Lady Luck you manage to escape and carry loot as well, you will be quite surprised by the sheer destruction a weird grimoire will bring to your campaign (magic-users will cast clerics' spells while eliminating the latter's ability to do so), or by the cursed blade which, depending on what you roll, might hit random targets.
The Magnificent Joop van Ooms really loves number 8, and if you don't get the joke from his first and last name (these continuous Os are not a coincidence) then you aren't as observant as OSR requires its players to be. The Da Vinci/Reeves parallel is not unmerited, and not only because the fictional van Ooms was the former's disciple: Cha 18, Int 18, and the book doesn't ever bother to state the rest of his stats because they don't matter. The guy is into everything and anything. He is no longer the action hero that he used to be thanks to his war-wound, yet we are talking about a virtual demi-god with impossible time-shifting, conjuration, speaking with dead and whatever else you can imagine powers, always through artful projects and bizarre contraptions. Ultra-strong characters can be trite because they do a lot; Joop is interesting because of how he does them, and because he can be used as either a face or a heel.
Fuck for Satan goes full-on meta and turns every single principle of design adventure on its head. This is practically a treatise on adventure writing, if one were to invert every established preconception players and GMs have. The twinkling star (literally, a twinkling star in the sky) hates the GM and will force him to randomly reveal secrets of this adventure (or the ones following, if you are in a campaign) to his players. These include a 60-second 'you-can-see-all-my-notes' madness, reducing the might of adversary NPCs etc. If that sounds unfair, the GM can then inflict all sorts of dreadful effects on the characters. There is an incredibly hard and deadly dungeon which has nothing to do with the adventure, yet which the characters will surely want to explore due to basic human psychology. Meanwhile, the adventure's solution is hidden in a random encounter. On purpose, of course. This stuff, along with the outright unique monsters, the fucked-up metaplot, and the very imaginative traps, is either brilliant as the exception that proves the genre's rule, or totally demented. I enthusiastically go with the former. This is an unforgettable adventure, if played with the right group, and the characters manage to survive long enough.
In another genre Death Blood Doom would have been a snuff tape with torture as its main premise. This stuff is incredibly gory, wrapped around a very honest premise: how much are you prepared to go through just in order to get some loot? The adventure doesn't offer any training wheels; from the first minute onwards the characters will be swimming in blood. In fact, 'swimming in blood' is just a metaphor, and an extremely tame one at that. What you see in this adventure you cannot unsee, ever, and since it involves heavy body mutilation and Frankenstein monsters with all the parts sawn at the wrong places, be sure to have your sleeping pills nearby. The touch of genius? It is extremely unlikely that the players will find out why things happen. This totally amps up the obvious body horror and the juxtaposition it creates with the question I initially mentioned. Either the characters will go all 'I am not paid enough for this shit', or the players will be like 'what the fuck is wrong with you, man?' towards their GM. Priceless. Inimitable, actually.
I enjoy Raggi's writing even when I dislike it. His introductions are sometimes long-winded and crusader-like (and I can see where that comes from), there are however snippets of wisdom in them. The man addresses you directly, explains the metaphors in advance, and overall tries to help the GM understand the adventure, at least when it comes to its conceptual level. He might not always help you run the adventure (keep on reading), but then again, this is a well-established part of OSR gaming: the GM is there to make the adventures his own. Whether that is possible with adventures about mutilated pussies and arachnodicks is of course another question. Even if you don't intend to run them, the adventures come out as good, if outright disturbing, reads. Maybe EUR 33 is a bit much for a horror book, but then again, just because you haven't run them yet doesn't mean that you can't run them in the future.
The book's production values are extremely high. Integrated bookmark: check. The illustrations are made by different authors and follow different styles. Tales of the Scarecrow reminded me of the art of Darkest Dungeon (the PC game), Joop van Ooms uses either literally black-and-white drawings (no grey at all) or fully realistic ones, Fuck for Satan is just weird (and wonky) and the otherwise disgusting Death Love Doom is actually... cartoonish! That's for the best, actually, since the body horror in that adventure is extremely hard to swallow. None of the modules' initial colour covers is reproduced in the print version, even though you can only enjoy them in the pdf. A pity; the cover of Fuck for Satan is as amazing as it is conceptually simple in every level, the font of the title included.
The four pdfs are all of a very high quality. Depending on the pdf, bookmarks go from one to two levels deep. I would have been happier with an extra layer of bookmarks on Death Love Doom, at the end of the day however it is not a biggie. All pdfs have a table of contents, and all of them have live links. All images are extractable.
The weak points: GMs, you have work to do; that is however always the case with LotFP adventures. Horror requires, nay, demands good deliveries, an understanding of timing, the best possible narration and attention to detail. This can come out if the GM is intimately aware of the scenarios and what they aim for, their premise, their promise and their dead-ends. Some of the ideas are half-baked; most of the time the PCs will not find out the whys and the hows behind a situation, only that they survived to tell the tale. In some adventures this might not matter that much (e.g. in Tales of the Scarecrow). In Death Love Doom however a GM might decide to be more lenient when it comes to the characters finding out why things are happening. I enjoyed the adventure the way it is; things are always scarier when you feel them but you don't understand them. Many players however would simply freak out and refuse to continue in something that is buried up to the head in gore and bile.
Setting The Magnificent Joop van Ooms aside, all three adventures are deadly. Can the characters escape the farmhouse, when they themselves helped to partially create it? What is the right time to leave the haunted house, and is it easy to do so? Let me not start about the themes the adventures explore. Mutilated hands is one thing, mutilated genitals on the other hand, or even satanic babies going after the characters while still attached to their tortured mothers, are another. I can't state clearly enough how Death Love Doom is not an adventure for the squeamish; in fact, this is the adventure that gives the book its 18+ age warning. Not that Fuck for Satan is any easier to digest, of course. In many ways the line is like Call of Cthulhu taken to eleven and pulling no punches; and all this, using a fantasy-infused environment, or almost. It is an extreme, and either you like it or you don't. There is really no middle way about it. Three of the modules in this collection strongly demonstrate why.
Two of the modules play heavily with the meta-gaming aspect. Either you like this, or you don't. I wasn't convinced myself at first, I can see merit in it however. Thankfully, if you feel that this ruins your immersion and you want nothing to do with it, it is very easy to omit. On the other hand, if you do omit it all, you will be reducing the originality of the modules.
Fuck for Satan is clearly not for everybody due to its preposterous meta-gaming design principles that border on the post-modern, if not the surreal. First, there is not much to do in order to resolve the adventure unless you stumble upon its solution. I feel this is a fantastic idea to utilize once every ten years in your campaigns. Others won't be able to stomach even that, and might get outraged by having their characters perish in a nigh-on-impossible dungeon. Second, opponents that force characters to pee and shit upon themselves, with their refuse attacking them afterwards, are not what players usually come to a gaming session for. Again, this is a once-in-a-decade, if not less, experience. You decide whether that's good for your group or not.
The Magnificent Joop van Ooms is by far the least fitting part of this book, and the one thing that makes everything else feel disjointed. First, because this is nowhere near an adventure, and the book is an adventure anthology. Most importantly however, we are talking about an NPC that can pull of incredible stunts. He is almost steampunk in LotFP which weird fantasy. He is demi-god-like in a setting of horror. He is more Elminster than Elminster, more Drizzt than Drizzt, both a good and a terrible guy in one. Wait; that's actually a strong point. The question remains however. How does a GM insert such a character in his campaign without unbalancing everything he has built until then?
It is by now evident that LotFP is not yet another role-playing game where genre clichés work as expected. In many ways the line is like Call of Cthulhu taken to eleven and pulling no punches; and all this, using a fantasy-infused environment, or almost. It is an extreme, and either you like it or you don't. There is really no middle way about it.
Adventure Anthology: Fire had these black markings at the edge of its pages so that the reader could easily jump from one module to another. Adventure Anthology: Death has no such thing. Both came out in 2019, so I don't know which came out first, I'd be however happy to see all future anthologies incorporate this very nifty trick. Help the poor GM a bit, will you?
Conclusion: The Anthology Adventure: Death offers good content à la LotFP. Utter weirdness both in-game and outside of it, sexual horror, body horror, outright terror, and all these under the subversive prism of 'if the heroes are really into the adventurer's line of business, or if the players believe that it's cool to play such dreadful characters, then this is what they deserve'. On the other hand it could have been more tightly compiled out of the many adventures and other books that LotFP has already published. If you have never tried LotFP material before and you don't shy away from what no other publisher dares to write and market, this is a great place to start.
For more info on Adventure Anthology: Death and Lamentations of the Flame Princess, visit its website at http://www.lotfp.com.
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