I received a very special package from Finland yesterday. I wasn’t expecting to receive this package so quickly, but thanks to the marvels of priority post it’s here just a few days after I pre-ordered it.
To begin with the title, I love it. Lamentations of the Flame Princess is wonderfully anomalous name in a sea of “x and y” titled retro clones. Given the author James Raggi’s interest in Metal it makes sense that the name reminds one of old band names like Estuary of Calamity or Cradle of Filth and immediately evokes a fantastic setting. Who is the Flame Princess and what does she lament? You can’t not want to know.
Packaging: Shipping was insanely fast and great care was taking in boxing the game for transit.
Tightly packed
Production Values: The box itself is of the same heft as those put out by large-scale game publishers, but the attention to detail and the art is simply outstanding. When the cover art of a game makes you want to play it, you know the producers have succeeded in making something special. The rules booklets are almost as sturdy as the OD&D ones, but much better looking.
LotFP Box
Content: The first thing you encounter in the box is a warning and a welcome. The warning is a tongue in cheek caution about the purported hazards of role playing games that reads as an homage to the moral panics surrounding D&D in the 1980s. The welcome maps out the contents of the box and directs readers with differing levels of familiarity with the genre to the most appropriate books – handy for those who want to jump directly into play. This is followed with a note on the exclusive use of the masculine pronoun in the text which while playful becomes problematic with the use of the term “girls” to discuss the presumed absence of women gamers. Aversion to politically correct language is understandable, but if we want to grow the hobby then this sort of detail does matter. That said, there is a positive example of a female gamer in the tutorial.
Under the Hood
The Tutorial book: At a substantial 50 pages, this book is well written and well edited, provides one of the clearest examples of play I have read anywhere; not only in terms making game mechanics understandable, but also in its description of an adventure setting. This includes a choose-your-own-adventure type scenario that gives a sense of dungeon delving, mapping conventions and a fun to read example of party play. While interior art is nearly absent in this book, the lively prose keeps the reader engaged.
The Rule book: I think a playtest will be required in order to speak to the mechanics of the game, but they read as straightforward and simple retro rules: Elves, Dwarfs and Halflings are their own classes; Alignment is limited to 3 categories (good and evil are absent); There is a substantial list of equipment (including everything from lard to a seafaring frigate); Certain types of treasure count towards XP; And, rules for combat are streamlined but they include sections for a variety of situations including parrying, morale, mounted combat, and grappling.
At first glance, the most revolutionary thing I found in the rulebook was an indexed character sheet that references the pagination of the relevant rules. This is a remarkably straightforward and effective way of quickly making the game understandable to newcomers – it seems like a small thing but why hasn’t this always been the way game developers do it? Simple but brilliant.
The Magic book: This book is workmanlike with a 52 page collection of Cleric and Magic User spells. The cover art on this book is among my favorite in the box, but the interior art is a bit of a mixed bag. This doesn’t detract from the overall book as the boxed sets that this game is modeled on are infamous for giving us crazy art. For example the image on page 7 looks very “War of the Worlds” with giant tripod robots with tentacles (which I found jarring) but I think the intent was to evoke a Weird Fantasy setting as opposed to an ordinary High Fantasy setting.
The Referee book: This serves as an optional GM’s guide but is in many ways the heart of the set. It is here that the Weird in Weird Fantasy is fleshed out and explained. Put simply, Weird Fantasy takes the players from conventional situations and introduces them to great perils that undermine their sense of security in the world their characters inhabit. The normal gives way to the dreadful and with this shift characters are on their way in their adventures. Monsters are rare and, well… monstrous. There is no “monster manual” per se but the book gives advice on the creation of monsters specific to any given campaign.
Raggi’s Weird is more than simply a translation of Lovecraft into Tolkien. My read is that the goal of Weird Fantasy role play is to highlight the uncanniness of the beasts, cultists and locations that the players will encounter in order to increase their sense of danger, wonder, and ultimately, their emotional investment in the game. An additional “Recommended Reading” pamphlet serves to introduce players to a selection of horror and fantasy greats. And, although the list focuses principally on early 20th Century writers, China Mieville’s New Weird writings seemed like a notable absence in this bibliography – I realize that lists of this sort are meant to be evocative and incomplete but he seems like a great fit for the genre.
The Tower of the Stargazer: This introductory adventure provides a clear and coherent delve that looks straightforward enough for newcomers but still has room for expansion from more experienced referees. It includes helpful meta-commentary throughout that will help new referees to run the game and better understand adventure design. Also, the map of the adventure’s seven levels is nicely executed and very legible.
Weird New World: Some RPGs include an introductory adventure, but Lamentations goes on to provide a sandbox campaign setting for larger exploration as well. This supplement is highly evocative. Locations are sketched out only briefly requiring Referees to make the setting their own – but as a whole it provides a nice starting point for a campaign. It has an interesting arctic maritime theme (allowing you to use that frigate you bought) and climactic zones that make travel itself a challenge. The large continent sized hex map is keyed to forty encounter areas. Two of these encounters are fully mapped out making them stand apart from the rest. While they might be helpful to a ref short on time, I found them to be less inspiring than the briefer area descriptions and less well done than the tower of the stargazer. I recognize this is the point in a way- Weird New World is supposed to be a framework for adventures not a collection of mapped out scenarios. But this is also why I think these “micro-dungeons” seem a bit out of place to me.
Extras: The small pencil included speaks to attention to detail but marks up the box in transit and seems like a liability rolling around in there with such beautiful books. The dice are good quality and look nice but their small scale makes them more of a curio than anything I would use in regular play (they would slip too easily from my cheeto crusted sausage fingers). Still, their inclusion along with graph paper speaks to care taken in the production of the boxed set. Moreover, this set of nice extras serve as “Old School” props that set the tone for the type of play Lamentations encourages.
Summary: I think Lamentations of the Flame Princess is a shoe in for the best game Ennie of 2011. I’ve seen the game referred to as a premium product because of its price of 58 Euros, but I actually think that for what you pay you get a solid bargain. For less than the price of two hardback manuals you get everything you need to run a game and two adventures. I will likely order a second set and will take it by my FLGS and encourage them to order it as well. If you are looking for a retro game to play or if you just collect great looking games, then get this one while you can!