Jahr zu Ende, noch Kleingeld übrig? Dann gib es doch für die neuesten OSR-Juwelen aus:
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Die 17. Ausgabe des legendären Fanzines Fight on! enthält auf seinen stolzen 166 Seiten eine wilde Mischung an OSR-Bausteinen aus einer Vielzahl von Federn. Wer in der OSR-Szene Rang und Namen hat publiziert in Fight on!
Wenn es extravagant sein darf, so gönne man sich das prächtige Nebulith (Rezension hier verfügbar) von LotFP. Wer vor Jahresende bestellt (bevor das wieder einmal drohende Damokles-Schwert der Insolvenz über den Herausgeber niedergeht), erhält zusätzlich ein mysteriöses, brandneues 64-Seiten-Hardcover-Modul von James Edward Raggi IV (weitere Info hier).
The OSE rules, on which Wind Wraith is based, comprise a list of ships provided with stats and price tags. None of these matter, as Wind Wraith comes with its own ship types and rules. Judging from the illustrations, sailing technology of this campaign setting seems to be rudimentary, the finer art of rigging lost in the cataclysm that shattered the world. While some ship types are named so as to imply a certain type of rigging, like „sloop“ or „brig“, these names appear to relate to one-masted and two-masted ships, respectively, in general. The three-masted ship is called „tall ship“ accordingly. There are also several types of boats and exotic ships, like the puny coffin-pod, the shellmarine (a shell-submarine) or the tyrant’s war galleon powered by arcane engines.
The ships are provided with stats like a player character, with AC and ThAC0 (which is fine), and the six ability scores. Where have I seen this before? And why would anyone want to describe a ship in terms of strength, wisdom, charisma etc., instead of thinking about rigging, points of sail, hull structure and the like? To keep it simple for very dull players? Or is it because Lazy Litch is an Irishman? Ireland as a well-known fact being landlocked between the Celtic and Irish Steppes and the Atlantic Wastelands, we really shouldn’t blame him for having no interest in naval matters …
Now in all fairness, let us look at his ship character rules, starting with non-combat related stats.
A ship’s Charisma is defined as a measure of how comfortable life is aboard the ship. Awesome, I like this very much! The only other RPG I know which has a cosiness stat is the French system HOMEKA. Charisme here has immediate effect on the game as you can only hire crew, even without special naval skills, if you provide a ship having a Charisma score of 11 or higher. The requirements for hiring expert crew, which provide a range of benefits, are even higher. In practice, this means we can only hire simple crew for a tall ship (Cha 11) or a tyrant’s war galleon (Cha 12). For all other types of basic ships, we would first have to raise the Charisma by hiring certain experts (which is obviously not possible) or by providing upgrades to the ship (which requires naval adventuring in the first place). What? It would make much more sense to lower the hiring bar to 8 Charisma. Then, the only ships which would trouble our recruitment efforts would be the bare raft (Cha 6) and the claustrophobic shellmarine (Cha 7).
A further use of ship’s Charisma is that mutiny points accumulate against it before the crew will resort to drastic measures. A nice mechanic, for once!
Next, a ship’s Intelligence represents the crew’s navigational skill. The crew’s, not the ship’s, actually! Alright, the ship has an intrinsic base vale for INT, that probably means better ships stay on course more reliable. We will have to roll a 10 on a d20, modifed by the OSE INT modifier, when moving on the sea map in order enter the intended hex. The standard ships have INT scores ranging from 7 to 13, which corresponds to OSE language modifiers (the only modifier linked to INT) of mostly 0, or +1 for INT 13. So without expert navigators on board or navigational add-ons we have a 45% chance of getting lost / blown off-course each time we try attempt to enter a new hex (decent ships having speed values of 3 to 6 hexes/day or what I would identify as knots). This is another hint that knowledge of the but the most basic sailing technologies have been lost. Do sailors in this world measure speed using knotted lines? Do they navigate by measuring time and the position of the sun in its apex, or by observing stars? We don’t know that, but according to the rules, it will be a rather awkward journey to reach an intended destination within a 1-day sailing distance.
Then, a ship’s Wisdom measures the crew’s (!) collective experience. It is required to navigate through a storm. There is a weather table for percentages ranging from 0 to 100 (Are we supposed to roll a d101 minus 1?), wherein storms of different severities appear on 75 and above. Weather is checked in every hex and does not take into account previous results, so it is wild and unpredictable. D20 checks need to result in equal to or less than 3 to 11 depending on the strength of the storm, modified by the OSE WIS modifier. Which is a neglectable 0 or +1 for most ships the player character personae will want to take. Doing some simple math and approximations, we discover that ship-wreck will occur about every 8 hexes, in average, or once every two days of travel for most of the ships. While this certainly makes for exciting adventures, exploration will be frustrating. I wonder how merchants survive. At least, as the ships do not have a price listed, and there are no rules for building ships, the narrator (we cannot in good conscience call them referee or dungeon master in this context) has to hand them out for free, and our investment into acquiring ships does not weigh too heavy upon us each time we loose a vessel …
It is obvious that the author artistically penned down the navigation rules without ever playtesting any of them.
Alas, the awful naval combat
It should come as no surprise that naval combat shuns all notion of spacial scale, as did the maps. Instead of a proper tactical OSR combat system, we get a sophisticated narrative naval combat system, centered on the narrator and forgetting the players.
We will use the ship’s speed, initiative, DEX, STR, CON, ThAC0, AC, hit points – so all investment in the form of add-ons or crew will pay out. However, the only decisions the players can make at this point are: fleeing (possible only having the faster ship or winning initiative in the encounter), approaching for boarding combat, or not. If no party flees the scenery, and at least one party decides to approach for boarding, there will occur three rounds of ranged combat. There is no consideration of speed differences between ships, rigging and points of sail. Spells are taken account of in ranged combat and boarding melee, and there are some creative ideas like casting web to slow projectiles or wizard eye to gain a tactical bonus. However, some standard spells like fireball, which would have a devastating effect under OSE or similar rules, become ridiculously inefficient.
One crew member will die for every 3 points of hull hp damage – good rule! The players are supposed to „weave narratives of how the death unfolded“ for their crew – not so good, storygamer!
In melee, a certain number of d4 will be rolled for damage. The author has some notion stirring in the back of his mind that the players may be bored, as they are denied proper tactical decision making and must endure the narrator’s never-ending prose, so he has solution: Distribute the damage dice equally among the players so that everyone gets to roll dice! No kidding. This is a real instruction on page 94! Had the author playtested his rules, he would have seen where his players would have stuck the damage d4s.
OD&D Book III contains naval combat rules (though somewhat cumbersome and flawed in the points of sail), the AD&D 1E DMG expands and streamlines them, even OSE has some rules elements for naval combat. It is very well possible to create working naval combat rules relying on those rules building blocks.
Example of how Wind Wraith is NOT playedExample of how Wind Wraith is NOT playednot Wind Wraith eitherExample of how Wind Wraith is NOT played
Ship upgrades
We get a double page of exciting ship upgrades, listed with their name, benefits and required building material. For instance, an ice cannon requires a frost giant heart and a sapphire to build. Can anyone build it? Or only a magic-user of say 9th level and above? Or is that exclusive to some NPC guild? At least the weapon is given a range (400′) – which doesn’t matter in naval combat, see above.
Or let’s get a wind orb to increase our ship’s speed! We need a crystal orb and a wind mage „of high level“. What is „high level“, Lazy Litch? Are we supposed to MAKE IT UP as we need for our narration? Perhaps it would be easier to go for rune sails instead. We need magical kraken ink and a rune mage. What is magical about kraken ink and what is a rune mage? The latter is neither a Wind Wraith class nor (as far as I know) an OSE class. So many great ideas, entirely undevelopped.
Ship encounters
A 4-page generator table titled „crew generation“ will actually provide us with ship to be encountered. The first page is a list of 20 ships, the following pages seem to be true generators, the columns to be rolled for independently.
A sample ship and its random crew: The Everwind, flag: circle with an island, is of collosal size and carries 3 windmills, gardens and grazing grounds. Reputation: 5 – barely known (why?). Secret weapon: a set mirrors of mirrors that portal cannon balls. Ship culture: A psychic mastermind captain controls the crew, their individuality is only an illusion. Ship type: crystalline (this column on the 3rd page is often at odds with the description column on the 1st page). Captain: a human fused to the ship! Crew: infected with arcane parasites (these are selected from their own table). Ship upgrades: Acidic cannon balls. Cargo: 10 sheep. Mission: smuggling. Specialist on board: the best navigator on the sea!
We get strange and inspiring results. Not all combinations fit easily, but we can adapt them and build on the ideas we are confronted with. Great! However, rarely the ships correspond to the standard ship templates we saw earlier. It would be nice to have a generator for ordinary ships beside the weird ones.
Also, there is no encounter table for the sea. How often do we encounter ships? What are the chances in dense seas and in sparsely populated areas? Whom will I meet in the trade network areas and whom far-off any island? MAKE. IT. UP. Encounter tables would have been such a reliable and well-known OSR tool, alien only to adherents of narrative games.
Constructs, Monsters, Parasites
The construct generator is accompanied by information on where they are created, how they are repaired and how to program them. Yes, player characters could learn how to program an arcane construct to their use! Strangely, some constructs have armour class above 10 and some below – is it an ascending or a descending AC system? The use of ThAC0 indicates descending class, i.e. Armour class values between 10 and -10. I am truly at loss here.
Sample construct: HP 35, (ascending type?) AC 18, ThAC0 20; fuel type: ground flesh; Attack: Psionic Mind Control Ray; build: silver-coated branches and vines form a large humanoid; programmed function: Capture & Research; deactivation: complete darkness; core: a cursed painting; special functionality: shrink to hand-size.
Monsters are determined either according to the depth layer of the sea or according to landscape type when they inhabit an island. The generator is interesting, except that I would not randomly determine stats like armour class, ThAC0, hit dice, morale and saves randomly. The general description should dictate armour class and hit dice, the HD being linked to a ThAC0 and saves.
Sample bathypelagic (i.e. 3rd sea level) monster: Urchin soldiers, HD 3, AC 9, morale 5; weakness: gold; attack: ray of distortion; fears: the possibility that it is inherently evil; wants: to collect skulls; colour/texture: green exoskeleton; saves: D16 W8 P14 B5 S9; attack style: berserker; ThAC0: 11; personality: manipulative, daring, dramatic, inventive; magical abilities: attack in your dreams once it has learned your name.
You can further variate the monster by adding mutations, variations, behaviours.
One type of monster, the Seaweed Dragon, has its own template. This mutated bastard will use its breath weapon against your ship’s hull to infect it with anaerobic bacteria. Unfortunately, there are no rules for how long it takes the bacteria to immobilise the ship, grow a membrane over it and suffocate the crew.
Arcane parasites, strange spell energy that seeped into this dimension and keeps multiplying, are detailed in a list of 16 entries. You really don’t want to become infected with any of these!
Miscellaneous bits and tools
Underwater locations: a list of 20 ideas for things to discover in the depths.
The People of the Deep: Their description is extremely poetic and I promise you will be shaken by the nature of their disturbing souls. Is this an expression of the artists self-perception? Or a well-aimed jibe at critics unfairly pointing their ghoulish fingers to the flaws in his masterpiece?
Kêtoskrill and the Capillary City: A floating island and the society toiling to keep it afloat. What is capillary about it? For sure, the author seems very fond of the word „capillary“.
Potion recipes (closely guarded secrets).
Random treasure: basic, advanced and rare. Some have a g.p. value, others don’t.
Lots of art.
Conclusion
This ghoul, in a rough and relentless manner, has drawn its readers‘ attention to many flaws and oversights in the design of this setting generator. Did you count how often I wrote MAKE IT UP? Wind Wraith is not the maritime Yoon-Suin it wishes to be. However, the author-artist is gifted, he is creative in a way I could not emulate. Are his visions redeeming his lack of understanding of OSR gaming culture?
If you are a collector of coffee table books, this beautiful piece of art will do greatly beside your Whitehack,Black Hack, Knave, Cairn, Shadowdark, Mörk Borg collection. You could also use it to create a joint artpunk security area between your Zak books and your Pat books (Only, what to do with The Maze of the Blue Medusa? I hid my copy behind a painting). This book is for you!
One Piece manga fans, you too will rejoice, this book is exactly for you!
This book is also for you, if you are a veteran referee who likes to tinker with your own rules and tables anyway, and you just want to find a weird inspirational setting with plenty of brilliant ideas to trigger your follow-up ideas. Yes, this game is definitely for me.
This book is not for you, if you are even slightly afflicted with artpunk intolerance.
I tried very hard to rate this beautiful book 3 out of 5 for inspiration and creativity, but. The design flaws are more than just a few oversights by an inexperienced „aspiring OSR content creator“, instead I detect an utter disregard for rules and a case of sterile non-player authorship. Although I do like the Wind Wraith setting, and I am considering running a campaign, based on gameability considerations, my final verdict on this never playtested gaming supplement can only be:
2 out of 5 tiny undead druids running in a hamster wheel to power an arcane construct.
Another artpunk auteur appears, an adorer of alliterations and achiever of angst-ridden art! Lazy Litch crowdfunded and delivered this exquisite grimdark wavecrawl setting generator in a beautiful gold-colour imprinted hardcover, spelling gloom, doom and hexploration. 144 pages provide us with evocative black-and-white illustrations depicting a strange and grim world, with tables and rules for generating this OSR campaign setting, and plentiful of deranging, fascinating and most entertaining ideas of how to populate this shattered world.
We enter an apocalyptic world, flooded and imbued with weirdness. The gods are dead, reality itself is broken, strange constructs and arcane parasites scourge what is left. Isolated communities cling to islands trapped in geomatrically shaped micro-climates in fragmented seas. Some dare to trade across the sea, fewer dare to explore. Tyrants rise to shape the world according to their will, yet their quests for renewal and glory will bring the world only faster to its inevitable end.
Player characters will fight for their survival, where resources like metal, wood, food and sweet water are rare. They will want to acquire a ship and to explore unknown shores, find riches on nearly inaccessible magical islands, and perhaps come to some understanding of their weird surroundings, learn how to use unique crafts and constructs. They even might explore the abyssal depths of the seas. Perhaps they even will find out about the origin of the great catastrophe, and about the doom this broken world awaits.
Introductionary adventure
The player characters start their adventure ship-wrecked on the icy island of Enceladus. Their tasks are to find warmth and shelter, food and water, and to build a raft in order to leave. Their stay on the island is complicated by the presence of a weird construct hunting intruders and by a mysterious, inaccessible tower. The adventure comes with what the author and artist thinks is a map. However, it lacks a scale. Distances between locations on the island are given only by walking time. This is not a map, it’s a point crawl! For narrative game masters this may be sufficient, for an OSR referee it’s not. Keep in mind that the players will want to return regularly to this island, which is relatively easy to access once the construct has been dealt with, as the island shelters an immense treasure: a large lake fed by hot springs! As we learned from the foreword, fresh water has replaced gold pieces as the standard currency. Later in the book, we will learn that 1 daily ration of water equals 1 gp in worth (I will comment on the implications of such an economy further down).
The adventure is structured as a puzzle: There is only one specific way to overcome the obstacles to find wood and rope required for building the raft. No other way to assemble this puzzle will work. This is a poor way to design an adventure. Skip it, DMs, and MAKE UP your own.
Creating player character personae
First, we receive some teaching concerning running an OSR game and character death – the kind of advice a narrative gamer would give after reading some OSR primers. Also, we receive a list of defined XP awards for specific achievements, like discovering a new island, building a large ship (yet there are no rules for ship-building in this book!) or toppling a tyrant. This is great, as these are well-definded feats to be accomplished (unlike story XP in 2E, for instance, or milestones in 5E, which subjugate players to the DM’s tyrannic rule and deprive players off reedom and adventureous spirit).
Then, you can roll up your character’s background, which will be linked to some useful skill or item. As this is the first table in the book, I will point out a minor recurring design flaw here: On some tables, you roll only once, and you read all the entries in the entire line (as in this table here). Other times, you are supposed to roll once per column and combine the results (this is the generator principle from Yoon-Suin that inspired the author). The reader has no way of knowing in which way to use a table, except by reading several entries to come to an interpretation of which type of table that is. Not a big problem, but two types of graphic design for the tables could easily have solved it.
Next, you pick a character class from OSE (or similar OSR system) and create the character as usual, or you choose one of the following Wind Wraith specific classes:
Sea-Elves: In analogy to the elf class, but has the best survival skills in a sea-based setting.
Entomologist: Sort of a magic-user mutated by self-experiments, has power to control large insects (similar to familiars). Entomologist advance like elves on the XP tables, and probably have spells-per-day as a magic-user (this part is missing from the class table). A large list of arcane insects is provided. I like these insect-mutants very much, this class is a great idea!
Wind mages: An integral part of the setting, often to be met on the generator tables in the book. These are magic-users specialised in wind spells, obviously. The rules for this class are hidden far to the rear of the book (p. 129), for some reason.
World generation
This world is shattered and its seas are separated by boundaries (e.g. arcane webs, invisible walls, walls of fog) which are difficult to cross. The „World Map“ consists of mere 4 by 5 hexagonal spaces, on which we are to define, depending on our campaign needs, one to seven seas, each consisting of 1 to 5 world map hexes. No scale is provided!
The author suggests that different DMs could run each one their own neighbouring sea. Excellent! This is some Advanced OSR advice here, in compliance with the spirit of the 1E DMG!
Next, for each sea, we will have to draw 2 trade winds and 2 ocean currents. These don’t need to satisfy any real-world plausibility, as we are in weird reality-shattered world here. However, in an example we see that the ocean currents are meant to intersect. They don’t unite and separate, they literally cross each other. No thought is given to what turbulent phenomena happen at this intersection, this is just two naval trade roads crossing, and that’s it. And no, a current should not double a ship’s speed, it should add or subtract a fixed value to the ship’s speed. Well ….
Then, we move on to the „Sea Map“, which consists of 12 by 18 hexes to be filled. Again, no explicit scale is given for the map, and here our problems start. How does a hex on the world map translate into hexes on the sea map? No teaching what-so-ever is provided by the lazy Lazy Litch. Luckily, St. Gygax has illuminated us by providing his holy scripture, the DMG. Basically, we can fit as many sea map hexes as we wish into the (unscaled) world map hex. For instance, we could define a world map hex to contain six sea map hexes along a border and 11 hexes across, which would nicely fit onto the double page sea map. Or we could have smaller seas, e.g. 5 hexes per border, 9 hexes across a sea hex. MAKE IT UP! But how big is a sea of one to 5 world map hexes? How big is one sea map hex? The author provides us with the information that a ship can cross a number of hexes per day equal to its speed value, modified by wind and currents. We can work with that! Ships (later in the book) have speed values between 1 and 10, most player ships will have a speed between 2 and 6. Though the author, in true narrative gamer fashion, refuses to define time and space, we can assume the speeds to be given in knots, i.e. nautical miles per hour. Thus, a sea map hex would measure 24 nautical miles across. You can easily do the math for your world map hex now. However, we may ask why the world map consists of hexes at all? Is this some fetishised OSR thing, everything has to be a hex map (except when it’s an artisitic point-crawl island depiction). It would have been so much easier to have Traveller-style subsector tiles arranged on the world map. The rectangular sea map would then correspond to a sea subsector nice and neat, no hex conversion required.
Traveller subsectorAD&D sub-hexes in a hex
Before we finally fill the sea hexes, we determine general features of the sea: Its archetypical name („The Solitary Singularity Sea“), its Leviathan (a giant hermit crab), its impending cataclysm (everything gets sucked into the singularity and crushed). We won’t hear about the cataclysm again, because each sea will spawn a tyrant who brings his own cataclysm. So we have two world-affecting cataclysms waiting per sea. That’s life! This is a per-line-table on page 22, comprising 9 sea archetypes, but we are going to customize our seas by using the next table (seven pages later, consisting of 20 lines or results, so we could generate a variety of 180 seas in total).
We generate it’s name, again(?!), („The Riptide Rift“, so we get the Singularity Rift Sea or something like that), the leviathan („The Murderous Mud Mutant“, so we know now it’s a Mud Mutant Crab) and nature (frequent earthquakes and tsunamis).
Now, we are going to fill the sea map!
First, as an option, we may mark sea depths per hex. A nice overview table defines the sea depth zones, surprisingly even stating the depth in feet, how to access them and what can be encountered, down to the Hadopelagic aka. the Chilling Underworld, where, somewhere, the Wind Wraith slumbers!
Island distribution: We are told to distribute either 15, 25 or 35 islands on a sea, depending on whether we want islands distribution to be sparse, medium or dense. Now a sea spans 1-5 world map hexes, so I guess density is per world map hex, not per sea. Yet, as discussed above, we don’t know how many sea map hexes per world map hex the author-artist had in mind. Artists and mathematics! In the end, we can only MAKE UP how many islands we want to distribute.
We know that there has to be a trade hub island and its trade network to further islands, following the trade winds and currents. Also, there will be another, unconnected trade network belonging to the tyrant. The tyrant will control his home base island, a prison island and some subjugated islands forming his network. When we have established all trading islands, we can just mark unknown islands for exploration on our map. There may even be some floating islands!
The tyrant
There is a 8-line table for the type of soldiers (e.g. „Algae Assassins“) the tyrant will align under his banner, and their stats (Nice! Stats!). This is followed by a a true generator-type table for a d30 and 3 columns to combine to parts of a tyrant title („The Geometric Steward“) and to find out his agenda (e.g. enslave people to work on connecting all islands to one big continent).
What follows are examples of fully fleshed out tyrants, and we will see that there is much more about them than the generator-table told us so far. The first one is the Wind Wraith himself, an additional hidden tyrant to be placed in one of the seas. I am not going to spoil his secret in this review, but his background is crucial for understanding the setting. Then, we have descriptions of the Static Empress, the Trident Queen and the Carrion King. I totally love them! The Static Queen experiments in order to understand and transcend reality, while her Volt Knights conquer the sea. The Trident Queen is a mad benevolent sea-elven ruler, micro-controlling and missmanaging her expanding realm into starvation – imaging Mao’s China or present-day North Korea under a beloved Queen caring for her people and protecting them from harmful malcontents! The Carrion King wants to save the world by raising a dead god. All his efforts are directed to finding and assembling the huge divine body parts.
For each fleshed-out tyrant there is a „timeline of events“ in eight stages, detailing their advance in quest and conquering, their growing army, and the general effects on the population. The timelines lack a proper time scale, except for the Carrion King who will conquer one island every 1d4+1 weeks. So the stages are just narrative guidelines for telling the advancing agenda (luckily not in „clock“ form). Or we could wargame the tyrant’s advance, but there is not much supportive material in the book for that. No problem, referee, MAKE IT UP!
It would be hard to come up with some better tyrant by using the generator. I would definitely use the pre-made tyrants in my campaign milieu, they are brilliantly conceived!
There is also a 20-line table (or is it a generator?) for describing the tyrant’s stronghold.
Island generation
As stated above, there is a number of key islands linked to the trading networks, to resources, but also bases for rival crews. The other islands will be weird!
Now we get to plenty of pages for generating these islands: morphology, geology, unique weather patterns (each island being enclosed in a geometrical membrane, e.g. d20-formed, containing the local weather), types of artificial islands, magical geology, resources, enchantments, structures on the island and their state of repair, traps and enchantments, and their seclusive or freakish population. These tables so far seem to be intended for unconnected islands to be explored, and the results will be strange, the islands hard to access, and the inhabitants hostile or otherwise problematic. Not all entries on the tables will easily combine, so just ignore results which don’t combine – or make the combination extra-weird.
Sample random island: Morphology and Geology: huge (18 square miles), spiral shape, tall volcanic peak & volcanic island, pink shell sand, tropical rainforest. Weather, common: endless drizzle; uncommon: drought; rare: sickly necrotic mist. Magical geology: lava river, spawns 1 fire elemental per month. Resources, common: fresh fruit; uncommon: giant beehives; rare: healing berry bush (for healing potions). Enchantment: The island is invisible until you make physical contact with it.
You can also create levitating or moving islands and deep sea dwellings.
Then we have a table titled „Traders, Guilds & Shops“ – they could be on islands connected to the trade hub. Moving islands – 10 entries. A fish table detailing what fish one can catch („Purple Ghoul Herring“) and how much rations to get per day – this number is rather low. Is this table for player characters fishing? Per fisherman? Otherwise fishing could not sustain an island population. Anyway, we don’t know the population number of our trading hub or of associated islands. Numbers are only provided for the more outlandish island dwellers.
Trade hubs, their goods and services, ruler, guardian, current crisis are detailed in the follwing tables. Even taverns and some NPC realtions are explored. Faction and NPC generators are provided. There is a sheet for penning down a NPC relation net.
Sample random faction: The Cult of Gunpowder. Hideout: The Tower of Salt. Goal: ideologically opposed to healing magic, will sabotage its use. Rich in knowledge, in need of lifestock. Secret weapon: a bard whose song causes mutiny and discord. State: in decline, can’t find new members. Structure: monarchic (royal bloodline). Leader: Horrified about wrong path, has left and founded a new, more extreme organisation.
However, the D&D tradition of providing population sizes and militia numbers, crucial for any OSR game leaning onto its wargaming roots, are missing. We must MAKE THEM UP!
The economy
There are no price lists for goods, so you need to rely on other game publications to shop our items. 1 g.p. in other settings equals one daily ration of food or water, the latter also being the preferred currency. So instead of carrying a purse with coins (which are really cumbersome in 1e), we now have to roll huge water barrels before us when we go to the market. Probably the trade hubs will introduce a certificate of ownership inscribed on a sea shell, while the inhabitants will store their water reserves in a well-protected communal storage facility. However, no such considerations are to be found in this book.
Also, by not including price lists, some good opportunities to describe the setting have been wasted. In the class descriptions we can read which materials the class will rely on. Sea elves for instance use armour made of coral, shell, cartilage, bone or driftwood. What types of armour are then available to sea elves, are there drawbacks with certain materials, does it affect the price?
Further, there are no trading rules. As soon as the player characters are in possession of a ship, there are basically three things they can decide to do: exploration (we have rules for that in this book), warfare and piracy (see naval combat, below) and trade. How does availability affect the price for goods bought in bulk? Classic Traveller has trading rules, many other RPG systems have trading rules, even 2E Al-Qadim has trading rules. Wind Wraith doesn’t. Sigh. We will have to MAKE THEM UP as this setting cannot be run without.
Now let us shift our attention to the ships (which come without a price, of course). The ship templates do have a cargo capacity value (yay!) ranging from 1 to 6. What does this number mean? We have to MAKE IT UP (nay!), as there is no explanation in the book. Cargo capacity could be the number of weekly food and water rations for a maximum crew, for instance. Thus, a brig having a cargo value of 3 and a crew maximum of 40 men (they/them) would be able to carry 840 daily rations of food and an equal amount of water, which amounts to a value of 1680 g.p. Loading food and water for 1 week for an ideal crew of 20 men would take 280 „g.p.“ of available space and leave you free to load 1400 water rations as loot or trade currency.
No religion
So, the gods are dead. There may be some weird sects, but we can be certain that no greater temple will be offering services like Raise Dead or Remove Curse. That will make adventuring extremely perilous, massively affecting game balance. Healing magic is mentioned, though.
What about player character clerics, how are they affected by the lack of gods? Can they only access to spells up to 2nd level, for instance? Again, we need to MAKE UP a lot of world building content ourselves.
Let’s take a step back first and speculate a bit about the purpose of fantasy adventure games:
Basic OSR gamers wish to explore dungeons, hack’n’slash style, for rules-light amusement or for intellectual challenge.
Advanced OSR gamers are invested into the unpredictable evolution of the game world (or milieu), driven by player character personae and non-player characters alike – the word „campaign“ is used in analogy to the grand old wargaming campaigns.
Modern mainstream gamers (AD&D2 and thereafter) tend to focus on the story of their character persona evolution, and they call that a „campaign“.
LotFP, by contrast, neither cares about the evolution of the game world (which regularly is destroyed anyway) nor about the character persona development (ok, yes, mutation of player characters is a frequent thing). Breaking of the fourth wall is common in LotFP – the players themselves shall be impacted! This is achieved by intensity, mental shock and awe, the sheer uniqueness of experiences.
[Spoiler alarm] Don’t Fuck the Priest comes in a boxed set containing a conspicuous hardcover book and a set of playing cards for generating a special type of dungeon (totally unsuitable for vanilla dungeons in general) as well as a special set of 4-sided dice. The latter will be regularly rolled when running a Don’t Fuck session. These components make the product costly – luckily the available assortment of LotFP modules provides something for every purse (0, 300).
So this is what happens: The player characters have stumbled into a corridor made of rotting corpses and mold. There is no way back. How that came about is left to the DM – perhaps the PCs just fell through a crumbling floor somewhere. As from now, they will venture into a world of cadavers and rot, infection and evolution. To escape, you must explore. You may even need to come to a deeper understanding of this parasitic circle of life and death, voraciously tearing itself apart between collective and individuality. This will become very physical, all kinds of flesh and juices included. Will this body horror be the path into oblivion or will it lead to salvation and resurrection? Or do you perhaps prefer to die and dissolve instead of escaping from this literally living hell? No player will be able to both answer these questions and leave the gaming table unscarred.
This module really challenges the DM in terms of book-keeping during play. Notes must regularly be taken of changes concerning the player characters, their followers and henchmen (the number of whom even may increase), their equipment (there are some special item to retrieve) and the rules for generating the environment. Does this sound confusing? It is.
Luckily I am in a position to testify that the author did run his module at Cauldron Con 2023 – thus it lies within the realm of the possible to do so! The book provides excellent orientation when running the adventure while using the cards. It is also not impossible for player characters to escape. The Cauldron group was within reach of making it, don’t blame poor James for their fatal lack of judgement.
Naive or simple-minded DMs might be tempted to temper with luck in order to make some specific places appear or to rush their very own escape from this gaming nightmare. James Edward Raggi IV prohibits any such wish-thinking and tinkering. I wholeheartedly agree: There is no room for fudging at a gaming table!
Also consider this: A genuine Raggi module can never be polished retroactively, as is habitually done with other commercial dungeoneering products. Where would you start and where would you stop at module like this? Swallow it whole or die trying, shall be the whole of the law.
A final bit of ghoulish advice: It really might be unwise to carnally interact with a cleric. But what choice will you have?
Treten wir aber erst einmal einen Schritt zurück und philosophieren wir darüber, worum es im Fantasy-Rollenspiel eigentlich geht:
Basic-OSR-Spielern geht es häufig primär um ein kurzweiliges Erkunden von Dungeons, im tödlichen Hack’n’Slash-Stil, gerne auf den unteren Stufen, zur Unterhaltung oder als intellektuelle Herausforderung.
Advanced-OSR-Spielern geht es um die unvorhersehbare Entwicklung der Spielwelt durch Aktionen von Spieler- und Nicht-Spieler-Personnagen, das nennen sie „Kampagne“ analog zu den großen Wargaming-Kampagnen.
Moderne Mainstream-Spiele (AD&D2 und spätere) drehen sich dagegen in den meisten Fällen um die Entwicklung der Spieler-Personnagen (was verwirrenderweise auch als „Kampagne“ bezeichnet wird).
Bei LotFP geht es auf tieferer Ebene weder um die Veränderung der Welt (die geht sowieso ständig unter in den Modulen) noch der Spieler-Personnagen (vordergründig schon – es ist normal bei LotFP, dass Personnagen mutieren). Meta-Effekte auf Teilnehmer-Ebene sind bei LotFP eingepreist – Verändert werden sollen die Spieler selbst durch abgründige Erfahrungen, die intensiv, erschreckend und einmalig sind! Zu diesem Zweck werden LotFP-Module konzipiert.
[Spoiler-Alarm] Don’t Fuck the Priest kommt als Box und enthält neben einem auffällig designten Hardcover-Buch ein Set Karten zur Gestaltung eines sehr speziellen Dungeons (für generische Dungeons sind sie nicht gedacht) und ein Set spezieller W4, die im Verlauf des Don’t-Fuck-Spiels immer wieder benötigt werden. All dies treibt den Preis dieses Moduls in die Höhe, aber es gibt ja LotFP-Module für unterschiedlichste Spendierhosenkonfektionsgrößen (0, 300).
Und das passiert: Die Spieler-Personnagen befinden sich in einem Gang aus Leichen und Moder und es gibt kein zurück. Warum, das muss der Dungeon Master wissen, vielleicht sind sie ja durch einen vermoderten Boden nach unten gestürzt. Von nun an geht es nur tiefer hinein in eine Welt aus Kadavern und Verfall, Verseuchung und Veränderung. Um zu entkommen, werden die Spieler erkunden müssen, und vielleicht herausfinden, was es auf sich hat mit diesem parasitären Kreislauf von Tod und Leben, und einem Zwist zwischen Kollektiv und Individualität. Es wird sehr körperlich werden, mit allerlei Fleisch und Säften! Bedeutet der Body Horror den Untergang und das Vergessen oder Macht und Erleuchtung? Ist es gar besser, zu sterben und zu verwesen, als zu entkommen? Kein Spieler wird dies herausfinden können, ohne von dem Schrecken jener Welt unversehrt zu bleiben.
Das Modul fordert dem Dungeon Master einiges an Verwaltungsaufwand während des Spiels ab. Es muss Buch geführt werden über Veränderungen der Spieler-Personnagen, ihrer Begleiter (deren Anzahl wachsen wird), ihrer Ausrüstung (besondere Gegenstände können erbeutet werden) und der sich verändernden Regeln zur Veränderung der Umgebung. Klingt das verwirrend? Glücklicherweise kann ich bezeugen, dass der Autor sein Modul auf der Cauldron 2023 persönlich geleitet hat – es ist also möglich dieses Modul zu leiten. Das Buch ist zum Glück übersichtlich aufgebaut und leicht in Kombination mit den beiliegenden Karten nutzbar. Es ist auch nicht vollkommen unmöglich, dass die Spieler-Personnagen entkommen. Die Cauldron-Gruppe hatte die Rettung vor Augen, ihre fatale Fehlentscheidung kann dem armen James nicht angelastet werden.
Naive oder unbedarfte Spielleiter könnten natürlich versucht sein, am Zufallsprinzip herumzupfuschen, vielleicht, um besondere Orte schneller auftauchen zu lassen und für sich selbst das Entrinnen aus diesem Horror zu beschleunigen. James Edward Raggi verbietet dies ausdrücklich! Und mit seinen Argumenten spricht er mir aus der Seele – Schummelei hat am Spieltisch nichts zu suchen.
Auch gilt zu bedenken: Ein Raggi-Modul kann nicht nachträglich glattgeschliffen werden! An anderen Kaufabenteuern mag die Spielleitung herumpfuschen wie sie will und es ihren Bedürfnissen anpassen. Doch wo würde man bei James Raggis Werken beginnen und wo enden wollen? Man nehme sie als ganzes oder lasse die Finger davon, so lautet das Gesetz.
Das Abenteuer beginnt, die Spieler-Personnagen sitzen in der Falle und sind so gut wie tot. Es darf als allgemeiner Konsens angesehen werden, dass ein solcher Abenteueranfang, SC verzaubert, vergiftet oder nackt an einen Baum gefesselt, grob gegen alle Regeln guter Abenteuerautorenschaft verstößt, den Straftatbestand des Schummel-Erzählspiels erfüllt und gefälligst in Kiesows Grab seine ungestörte Ruhe zu finden hat. Kelvin Green darf, er muss sogar sein Abenteuer auf diese billige, hinterhältige und absolut gemeine Art beginnen lassen, denn er schreibt für Lamentations of the Flame Princess!
Strict Time Records dürfte sogar den Höhepunkt seines munteren Schaffens für LotFP darstellen – so genüsslich sadistisch, durchtrieben, hinterhältig und unbarmherzig, gleichzeitig aber spielbar, ist dieses Modul. Spieler stehen Schlange, um sich im OSR-Studio von ihrer Dungeon Mistress (DM, m/w/d) auf dieser Apparatur Kelvin Greens malträtieren zu lassen!
Die DM hat bereits beim Vorbereiten ein lustvolles Vergnügen, den jede Raumbeschreibung enthält mindestens eine Anspielung, einen raffinierten Witz oder einen billigen Kalauer (Der Doktor!), ein Feuerwerk des bösen Humors!
Löblich sind auch die Karten und Kartenausschnitte, die nahe an den entsprechenden Raumbeschreibungen wiedergegeben werden, eine große Hilfe beim Leiten!
Es gibt viele Daumenschrauben, an denen die DM vor Beginn das Modul unfairer oder überlebbarer regeln kann: eine Restlebenszeit der Personnagen zwischen 8 und 24 Stunden (12h werden empfohlen) und eine Anzahl bereits hergestellter Heilmittel zwischen 0 und der Anzahl Spieler-Personnagen.
Zu Beginn muss die DM ihre Spieler nach allen Regeln der Kunst einzwängen, damit sie den Köder schlucken (Frau Ghoul so: „Was, wir sind bei komischen Leuten zum Dinner eingeladen? Ich zaubere ‚Gift entdecken‘!“), später haben die Spieler so viel Freiheit, wie sie nutzen möchten: Sie können das Anwesen verlassen, um woanders Hilfe zu suchen. Sie können den Gastgeber verhören oder erschlagen. Sie können NSC-Gäste bekämpfen oder sich mit ihnen verbünden. Sie können alles. Nur haben sie eben begrenzt Zeit.
Eine versteckte Eskalationsstufe des Moduls ergibt sich, wenn man es nicht mit LotFP-Regeln, sondern mit AD&D (1e) leitet. Wie der Titel ein bewusst gewähltes Zitat aus dem DMG darstellt, so ist dem Autoren ebenfalls klar, was es bedeutet, Räume mit Namensplaketten von Höllenfürsten zu versehen! Das Modul schweigt sich dazu aus, doch Kenner des AD&D Monster Manual der ersten Edition wissen, dass die Höllenfürsten des öfteren durch den Äther oder die Astralebene reisen und daher ein 5%-Chance besteht, dass sie erscheinen, wenn sie ihren unbedacht ausgesprochenen Namen vernehmen. Meine Spieler haben es gleich zweimal geschafft, Mammon zu beschwören! Sie haben es bedauert.
Überlebt haben beeindruckende 3 von 4 Personnagen meiner Spieler dieses Body-Horror-Modul, doch sie sind für immer gezeichnet (die Personnagen – bei den Spieler weiß ich es nicht).
Ich vergebe randvolle 5 von 5 Phiolen mit stinkenden Körpersäften.
Das LotFP-Szenario (ich sage diesmal bewusst nicht Modul) Wight Power von Alex Mayo (bekannt als Co-Autor und Illustrator für Harlem Unbound) spielt auf der namensgebenden Insel Wight, wo seltsame bewusstseinsverändernde Kräfte von einer Klosterruine ausgehen. Mönche und Landsknechte haben einen Bereich der Krypta abgesperrt – graben sie, bauen sie etwas? Jedenfalls brauchen sie die Hilfe der Spieler-Personnagen, denn die beiden Gruppierungen sind argwöhnisch und verdächtigen sich gegenseitig des Mordes. Nicht eine, zwei unabhängige Katastrophen bahnen sich an, wenn die Spieler nicht eingreifen! [Spoiler-Warnung ab hier!]
Wie gut ist Wight Power nach AD&D-Kriterien (dem höchsten Standard für jedes OSR-Produkt)? Es verwundert vor dem Hintergrund des Autors nicht, dass dieses Abenteuer strukturell eher einem Cthulhu-Szenario ähnelt (Geheimnis, Erforschung, Finale) als einem AD&D-Modul (offene Erkundung). Auch die unterirdischen Räumlichkeiten kann man nicht als Dungeon im strengen AD&D-Sinn bezeichnen. Der eine Bereich ist im Grunde ein Raum voller Untoter, mit Nischen ohne relevanten Inhalt. Der andere Bereich ist, was relevante Räume betrifft, beinahe linear. Aber zur Ehrenrettung: Der Cthulhu-Mayo hat sich Mühe gegeben, auf die Bedürfnisse von AD&D-Spielern einzugehen und Schätze zu platzieren! Das ist nicht in allen LotFP-Modulen der Fall, darum muss man es loben. Die Schätze sind zwar leicht zu finden, allerdings ist es unrechtmäßig, sie zu bergen, und wird die Mönchsfraktion zu Feinden machen. Es gibt zwei Fraktionen, die man womöglich gegeneinander ausspielen kann, es gibt mehr Gegner als einem auf niedrigen Stufen lieb sein kann, das ist gut. Allerdings gibt es auch einen Gegner, einen ganz speziellen Wight, der nicht nur sehr schwer zu entdecken, sondern auch fast unmöglich zu bekämpfen ist. Mit ihm kann man die Spieler piesacken und frustrieren. Das hätte nicht in diesem Extrem sein müssen.
Und wie gut ist Wight Power nach LotFP-Kriterien (um fair zu bleiben)? Es ist zwar kein Raggi-Dungeon, aber es hält eine doppelte Katastrophe bereit (eine einfache Eskalation erwarten LotFP-Spieler schließlich). Weirdness ist auch ordentlich dabei, wirkt allerdings aufgesetzt, um mit anderen LotFP-Modulen mitzuhalten: modern anmutende Laborausstattung, biomechanische Maschinen … es überzeugt leider nicht so ganz. Das wunderbar starke Thema der Heiligen Vorhaut finde ich nicht ausgereizt, man hat nur indirekt mit dieser Reliquie aller Reliquien zu tun, die NSCs haben sich in der Vorgeschichte bereits um alles gekümmert. Schade. An den Wahnsinn und die Originalität der besseren Module wie Big Puppet oder Strict Time Records Must Be Kept gereicht Wight Power bei weitem nicht heran.
Weitere, wenn auch kleine Mängel: In der Beschreibung wiederholen sich viele Informationen, bei den Räumlichkeiten hapert es. Wie viele Treppen führen nun hinab in die Krypta? Der Text erwähnt Treppen an zwei Stellen, die Karte zeigt nur eine Treppe. Warum soll nur eine der beiden Treppen eine verschlossene Tür haben? Verriegelt von Innen oder Außen? Wo sind auf der Karte Türen? Man erkennt leider keine einzige verschlossene Tür, man erahnt ihre Platzierung nur aus der Beschreibung. Auch sind es übertrieben viele Hindernisse (Stahltür, Schlösser, Wachen). Die Anzahl der Landsknechte und Mönche, jeweils ein Dutzend, haut auch nicht hin, wenn rund um die Uhr so viele in der Landschaft unterwegs, bzw. in der Krypta beschäftigt sind. Alles nicht schlimm, aber nervig für die Spielleitung.
Ist der Titel des Abenteuers ein provokativer Witz auf Kosten übereifriger Politischkorrekter oder eine Verballhornung zur Lächerlichmachung von Rechtsradikalen? Das entscheide jeder für sich. Alex Mayo stellt zumindest im Nachwort klar: „Fuck Nazis!“
Fazit: 2 von 5 authentifizierten Vorhäuten Jesu. Mit etwas eigener Überarbeitung lassen sich aus der Idee 3, bei einem guten Dungeon vielleicht auch 4 herausholen.
In a Deadly Fashion ist ein Whodunit im Lamentations-Gewand von Courtney Campbell. Eine Mordserie und ein gestohlenes Brautkleid verunsichern einen erfolgreichen sevillanischen Promi-Schneider, der die Abenteurer anheuert, um seinen Namen reinzuwaschen. Der Text ist knapp gehalten und schnell gelesen, es ist also kein romangleicher Textirrgarten im Deutsch-Cthulhu-Stil. Opulenten Illustrationen füllen dafür das Buch. Manchmal hätte ich mir mehr Informationen und Erklärungen gewünscht. Da der Spielleiter aber nicht mit Informationen erschlagen wird, sondern interpretieren und extrapolieren muss, ist es leicht, das Abenteuer in ein anderes Setting zu verfrachten.
Der Schwierigkeitsgrad der Ermittlungen ist nicht hoch. Trotz einiger toter Enden deuten doch recht viele Hinweise in die richtige Richtung, so dass die Spieler das Geheimnis in abendlichen 2-3 Spielsitzungen locker lüften können – dies ist kein Szenario, das an einem übersehenen Hinweis scheitern kann.
Da es sich um ein Modul für Lamentations of the Flame Princess handelt, muss natürlich auch obszöner Inhalt vorkommen. Dieser wirkt allerdings recht unnötig und aufgesetzt (weil LotFP eben!), das ist schade. Im Rahmen der Uminterpretation für ADDKON-Kampagne hat sich das Modul glücklicherweise so schön eingefügt, dass sämtliche kleinen Unzulänglichkeiten Sinn ergaben.
Das Abenteuer ist kein Spielerfoltermodul wie Fuck for Satan oder Strict Time Records must be Kept. Es ist strukturell nett, also eigentlich nichts besonderes, und weniger eigentlich originell als bspw. die Megadungeon-Heftchen des selben Autors – wird aber getragen von einem starken Thema, der „Macaroni-Mode“ und den Schnöseln, die sie tragen, was dann doch zu einem lustigen Spielerlebnis für alle Beteiligten führte.
Drei von fünf Knopfaugen. Brautkleid bleibt Brautkleid.
Wenn die Zenobiten aus Hellraiser eine Bibliothek bauen würden, wie sähe sie aus? Welche Art von Büchern befände sich darin, und welches Wissen wäre darin enthalten?
Autor Jeff Rients, der mit seinem Gameblog die OSR mitverursacht hat, und Herausgeber James Edward Raggi IV, der mit Lamentations of the Flame Princess die OSR als erster erfolgreich monetarisierte, präsentierten 2016 das spektakuläre LotFP-Modul Broodmother SkyFortress.
Da ist es höchste Zeit, zum RSP-Blogs-Karneval Dezember 2019 mit dem Thema Höllenbrut endlich jenes teuflische Buch zu besprechen. Tatsächlich handelt es sich nicht einfach um ein OSR-Abenteuer-Modul, sondern auch um eine Spielleiter-Fibel.
Ghoultunnel 