Menagerie of Exiles is an adventure booklet for the Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying Game. It was one of the 2019 GenCon exclusives, and I have a fully Bookmarked PDF version which you can purchase here. It comes in at 32 pages and was written by J. Brian Murphy and Tabby L. Rose, art by Teresa Guido, cover by Yannick Bouchard, layout/cartography by Alex Mayo, and edited by Matthew Pook. It is written to take place in the Early Modern Era near the Barbary Coast of Africa, but you can easily change names and whatever else you need to match your own preferred setting.

The crux of the adventure is that the player characters are picked up (willingly or otherwise, up to them and the Referee I suppose) by a group of pirates. In my first playthrough last night we went with the PCs being survivors from a Venetian merchant vessel that had recently been obliterated by some overzealous pirate hunter. To quote the back of the booklet, “The pirates speak of a rich treasure hidden in an ancient and ruined temple guarded by some fell beast.” What are a group of adventurers to do? Insult the captain of the ship that just pulled their collective asses out of the fire? Of course the PCs have the freedom to do as they please, but the Berber slaves in the cargo hold, the only survivors from the last village these pirates “visited”, may serve as a forewarning that Captain Reis is not to be trifled with.

The scenario is excellently put together in my opinion, because here it lays out things that could happen should the party choose to pursue or interact with certain elements, but it doesn’t railroad you into liking/disliking the pirates aboard the Sultan’s Pleasure or even force you to pursue the treasure mentioned above. There are some great little random charts for tales you may hear from the helmsman, daily activities aboard the Main Deck, and even daily progress and encounters if you want to simulate everything. There’s no set distance to the ruined temple (or even location, for that matter… you can set it off the North African coast as the writers did or even move it to another sea entirely to suit your campaign), so you can spend as much time as you like simulating the day-to-day life aboard a sailing vessel and really get into RPing the pirates and their prisoners. Hell, I could probably kick off a campaign and get the first several sessions just out of this little 32 page booklet!

That didn’t happen though, because I was running a single-session one shot. If you also want to do this as a one shot I would advise getting the party to the treasure location within a couple days of game time. You’re still going to easily get 3-4 hours of play that way, and shouldn’t have to resort to scheduling a second session.

I can hear you now going “so wait, this is just a bunch of pirates looking for treasure beneath an old ruin? That doesn’t sound very weird at all…”, and you’d be right if I wasn’t holding back all the major spoilers! There is a mystery that the players can try to solve aboard the ship (and even later in the village) regarding a mysterious illness that has been effecting some of the crew, but none of the prisoners. Is it a disease? A curse? Are the ancestors that these Berber slaves worship haunting the very pirates that sacked their village, killing and enslaving their descendants? Whatever it is, it surely couldn’t have anything to do with the village you are approaching… you know, the one with the ancient ruined temple that is the X marking the spot on the Captain’s very secret map… could it? Nahhhh!

Overall, Menagerie of Exiles is very well written with only a few noticeable editing mistakes within. These were simple typographical and grammatical errors which I won’t bore you with the minutia and pedantry of, and you may not even notice them when you read the book. I did, but I almost always do because I’m a pedantic prick!

The artwork is mostly simple, but very effective at portraying the people and things within the covers. Speaking of covers, Yannick’s artwork is excellent as always and he is probably the first artist I think of when I think of great LotFP cover art.

The layout didn’t blow me away, but there’s nothing wrong with it either… I’d call it serviceable, and the maps were pretty good as well. My biggest gripe though would be that the maps don’t match very well to the text of the adventure. When I read the descriptions of the temple and the tunnels below, I had a hard time at first figuring out where the entrance to the lower levels should be as it isn’t shown on the map of the temple grounds. A minor complaint, especially given how good the maps actually look, but those who know me know I’m a real bastard when it comes to maps in books. Ironic, because I can’t draw a hangman to save my life, but it is what it is!

This booklet has a lot of useful charts and NPCs and even a section with bullet-points on Pirate Life in the time period in case you’ve never researched for a pirate game before and want to get right into it! That and the daily “What happens?” chart are worth their weight in gold-pressed latinum! The only other booklet that I’ve gotten this much use and potential game time out of is The Magnificent Joop van Ooms which I easily got at least a session per page out of!

Scores (my first time trying this):

1 – Awful
2 – Bad
3 – OK
4 – Good
5 – Great

Writing – 4
Art – 4
Layout – 3
Usability – 5

Total – 4

To see more from Lamentations of the Flame Princess check out the official website at http://www.lotfp.com/RPG/ for books, merch, free rules and scenarios, and more.