I, for one, look forward to Caroline Ellison's adventure based on machinations within the Chinese imperial harem.
Showing posts with label LotFP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LotFP. Show all posts
Monday, January 02, 2023
Tuesday, June 26, 2018
What Hath Raggi Wrought?
So there was some chatter on G+ recently about what it would take for another Lamentations of the Flame Princess to happen. And by LotFP was meant the publisher, not the game; there are a handful of neat second-generation OSR games out there now that are on par with LotFP as regards rules. That said…
Raggi’s main claim to fame is that he never gives us something we’ve seen a dozen times before. There is no LotFP goblins-in-a-hole-in-the-ground adventure. Instead, we get things like Death Frost Doom (horror movie that can result in a zombie plague), Blood in the Chocolate (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with all the body-horror and implied cannibalism no longer implied and turned up to 11), and Broodmother Sky Fortress (a combination of gaming manifesto and an adventure designed to blow up beloved segments of your campaign). Even when he does something we’ve seen before, he does it differently. The best example of this may be Scenic Dunnsmouth, which doesn’t just give us a cursed village with a dark secret, but a generator allowing us to produce an endless series of cursed villages.
This is one of the reasons Raggi runs towards controversy. “Fantasy fuckin’ Vietnam” was a pejorative way to describe the Old School style of play. So of course James gave us not one but two different variations on that theme and, in the process, not only gave us the amazing Qelong from Ken Hite but also completely defused the phrase as a verbal bomb. If something is controversial or otherwise scary for publishers to associate with, well, that’s low-hanging fruit for Raggi. He knows he won’t have any competition in that space, so he goes for it.
(This is one of the things I adore about Raggi. You simply can’t attack the man. Any rhetorical ordinance you lob his way will get repurposed as grist for his publishing mill. That which does not kill him literally makes his publishing house stronger.)
But it’s not just topics and themes where Raggi pushes envelopes. Damn near every aspect of his business is involved in giving us stuff we’d never seen before. The LotFP game doesn’t just take incumbrance and make it useable at the table, he weaves it into the rules. Everyone knew that boxed sets killed TSR and that nobody would publish boxed sets again, so Raggi of course published his core rules in a boxed set (twice). He publishes books that aren’t monster coffee-table books but handy little reference books designed to be used in the heat of play, with sturdy bindings and covers, satin bookmarks, and endpapers full of important bits you’ll want to find quickly during play. He read along as Kiel Chenier excoriated the poor information design of WotC’s books and then challenged the man to put his money where his mouth was. He listened as Zak ranted about dice drop tables and making every inch of surface on a book a valuable source of at-the-table utility and published Vornheim with a dust jacket that’s more than protection for covers with drop-tables on them. He’s worked with people everyone knew he couldn’t work with, published stuff everyone knew you couldn’t publish, pays what everyone knows you can’t afford to pay the creatives, and thrived doing it.
And then there’s the art. This is probably the most obvious difference: the bare-breasted snake thing on the cover of the original LotFP boxes, the gross-out horror of the interiors. But again, what Raggi’s giving us is stuff we’re not getting from anywhere else. In any other publisher’s work, the duel between a man and a woman (especially a woman who’s one of his game’s iconic characters) would naturally result in the female winning the fight, delicately skewering her foe with a modicum of blood (if any at all). Not so LotFP: Alice gets stabbed in the face, right through her eye. The eponymous Flame Princess gets her leg eaten away by some sort of horrid slime beast and goes through most illustrations hobbling about on a peg leg. The medusa isn’t just a coy coquette, she’s in the midst of a ménage à trois when she petrifies her lovers.
Now flip through the closest RPG book to hand that’s not LotFP and you’ll see art you’ve likely seen a million times elsewhere: the grip-and-grin hero just staring ahead without background, the line-up of heroes striding towards the viewer, someone fighting a skeleton, someone healing a comrade, someone hiding up in a tree, someone riding a dragon. The quality will vary, depending on the publisher, but it’s the same stuff you’ve seen over and over again since the Easley/Elmore/Parkinson days of D&D. Hell, even they were not nearly so cliché as the stuff you’re most likely to get today.
What does Raggi give us? In the first boxed set of core rules, the illustration for the cleric shows our hero using his divine magic to burn elves. The halfling in the race-as-class description for them is hidden amidst the death and slaughter of a post-battle scene, Waldo-like. Where the art isn’t setting the heavy metal/Hammer Horror tone, it’s demonstrating how the rules for LotFP are different from the games you’ve played before. Sometimes it’s doing both.
Raggi’s the guy who gave Zak carte blanche to write and illustrate Vornheim when everyone would have said Zak’s style was completely wrong for RPGs (and most especially Old School rpgs). He’s also the guy who told Kiel that his style wasn’t yet up to snuff and teamed him up with Jason Bradley Thompson for the art. Raggi has a vision and he’s not afraid to pursue it.
And none of this is secret. James is loud and proud about what he does and how he does it. So what’s it going to take for their to be another publisher like LotFP out there? Simply this: someone with James’ chutzpah, honesty, vision, and the skills to see those through into finished products. When that person appears, I suspect James will be their loudest cheerleader.
Raggi’s main claim to fame is that he never gives us something we’ve seen a dozen times before. There is no LotFP goblins-in-a-hole-in-the-ground adventure. Instead, we get things like Death Frost Doom (horror movie that can result in a zombie plague), Blood in the Chocolate (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with all the body-horror and implied cannibalism no longer implied and turned up to 11), and Broodmother Sky Fortress (a combination of gaming manifesto and an adventure designed to blow up beloved segments of your campaign). Even when he does something we’ve seen before, he does it differently. The best example of this may be Scenic Dunnsmouth, which doesn’t just give us a cursed village with a dark secret, but a generator allowing us to produce an endless series of cursed villages.
This is one of the reasons Raggi runs towards controversy. “Fantasy fuckin’ Vietnam” was a pejorative way to describe the Old School style of play. So of course James gave us not one but two different variations on that theme and, in the process, not only gave us the amazing Qelong from Ken Hite but also completely defused the phrase as a verbal bomb. If something is controversial or otherwise scary for publishers to associate with, well, that’s low-hanging fruit for Raggi. He knows he won’t have any competition in that space, so he goes for it.
(This is one of the things I adore about Raggi. You simply can’t attack the man. Any rhetorical ordinance you lob his way will get repurposed as grist for his publishing mill. That which does not kill him literally makes his publishing house stronger.)
But it’s not just topics and themes where Raggi pushes envelopes. Damn near every aspect of his business is involved in giving us stuff we’d never seen before. The LotFP game doesn’t just take incumbrance and make it useable at the table, he weaves it into the rules. Everyone knew that boxed sets killed TSR and that nobody would publish boxed sets again, so Raggi of course published his core rules in a boxed set (twice). He publishes books that aren’t monster coffee-table books but handy little reference books designed to be used in the heat of play, with sturdy bindings and covers, satin bookmarks, and endpapers full of important bits you’ll want to find quickly during play. He read along as Kiel Chenier excoriated the poor information design of WotC’s books and then challenged the man to put his money where his mouth was. He listened as Zak ranted about dice drop tables and making every inch of surface on a book a valuable source of at-the-table utility and published Vornheim with a dust jacket that’s more than protection for covers with drop-tables on them. He’s worked with people everyone knew he couldn’t work with, published stuff everyone knew you couldn’t publish, pays what everyone knows you can’t afford to pay the creatives, and thrived doing it.
And then there’s the art. This is probably the most obvious difference: the bare-breasted snake thing on the cover of the original LotFP boxes, the gross-out horror of the interiors. But again, what Raggi’s giving us is stuff we’re not getting from anywhere else. In any other publisher’s work, the duel between a man and a woman (especially a woman who’s one of his game’s iconic characters) would naturally result in the female winning the fight, delicately skewering her foe with a modicum of blood (if any at all). Not so LotFP: Alice gets stabbed in the face, right through her eye. The eponymous Flame Princess gets her leg eaten away by some sort of horrid slime beast and goes through most illustrations hobbling about on a peg leg. The medusa isn’t just a coy coquette, she’s in the midst of a ménage à trois when she petrifies her lovers.
Now flip through the closest RPG book to hand that’s not LotFP and you’ll see art you’ve likely seen a million times elsewhere: the grip-and-grin hero just staring ahead without background, the line-up of heroes striding towards the viewer, someone fighting a skeleton, someone healing a comrade, someone hiding up in a tree, someone riding a dragon. The quality will vary, depending on the publisher, but it’s the same stuff you’ve seen over and over again since the Easley/Elmore/Parkinson days of D&D. Hell, even they were not nearly so cliché as the stuff you’re most likely to get today.
What does Raggi give us? In the first boxed set of core rules, the illustration for the cleric shows our hero using his divine magic to burn elves. The halfling in the race-as-class description for them is hidden amidst the death and slaughter of a post-battle scene, Waldo-like. Where the art isn’t setting the heavy metal/Hammer Horror tone, it’s demonstrating how the rules for LotFP are different from the games you’ve played before. Sometimes it’s doing both.
Raggi’s the guy who gave Zak carte blanche to write and illustrate Vornheim when everyone would have said Zak’s style was completely wrong for RPGs (and most especially Old School rpgs). He’s also the guy who told Kiel that his style wasn’t yet up to snuff and teamed him up with Jason Bradley Thompson for the art. Raggi has a vision and he’s not afraid to pursue it.
And none of this is secret. James is loud and proud about what he does and how he does it. So what’s it going to take for their to be another publisher like LotFP out there? Simply this: someone with James’ chutzpah, honesty, vision, and the skills to see those through into finished products. When that person appears, I suspect James will be their loudest cheerleader.
Tuesday, February 14, 2017
Jeff Rients Wants to Blow Up Your Game
I never thought of Jeff as one of those black-jacket anarchist types, running about smashing things with tire-irons and crowbars, but, well, have you seen Broodmother Skyfortress?
If you haven’t, and you want to play in it, ***SPOILER ALERT***READ NO FURTHER***SPOILER ALERT***. If you haven’t and you’re just curious, there are many good reviews of it out there. I’m not going to do that here. Instead, I’d like to talk about what Mr. Rients has going on under the hood in that adventure.
First off, he thinks you need to blow stuff up. If there’s a favorite tavern the PCs enjoy hanging out in, or a particular lord they love (or love to hate) or whatever, he suggests you have the Skyfortress giants come down on it like a ton of bricks. And he’s not talking about a little raid that knocks over tables and kidnaps a few peasants. He suggests you ask yourself:
Death Frost Doom is (in)famous for the possibility that the PCs might unleash a plague of zombies on the world. Broodmother Skyfortress assumes something nearly that bad is happening already.
I love this idea when used in moderation (as Jeff himself suggests in the book). A destructible world is more real, more immediate to the players, and far more interesting. Being willing to blow up the Keep on the Borderlands (illustrated beautifully on the back cover of the book) tells players that they’re gaming in a truly dynamic world where their actions (or lack thereof) will have real consequences. That’s cool.
On the other hand, if the players never know whether or not all elves will be transformed into cat-people, or all wizard spells now result in explosive flatulence, or all the gods are simply going to vanish at the drop of a hat, it actively prevents them from investing in the setting. Doing one of those things over the course of an entire campaign might be cool. Doing one (or more) of those every time you sit down to play tells the players that nothing is trustworthy, and they’ll just avoid investing in any of it.
While that’s fascinating all by itself, Jeff’s after more than just blowing up your campaign. He wants to blow up your entire game.
There’s little more sacred in D&D than the to-hit roll: d20 + mods to reach or beat a target number. The sanctity of this mechanic has only grown over the years as it has been expanded to cover nearly every situation, from saving throws to skills to tool use. Pretty much anything a PC wants to do in 5e is accompanied by rolling a d20.
When fighting the giants, Jeff suggests you just not bother having the players roll to hit. Yep, they always automatically hit the Giants. However, they have obscene numbers of hit-points and the first five points of damage from any attack don’t count. Attacking them with mundane weapons (or even lesser enchanted ones) is barely going to scratch these monsters. Normal combat is going to lead to TPKs; the players simply can’t put enough hurt on these monsters fast enough to take them down (unless they’ve got access to some really nasty magic). And, by eschewing the sacred d20 roll, players should immediately understand that this is an unusual situation.
Jeff calls this Mechanical Alienation, and it’s a cool technique. Again, it’s probably most potent when used rarely (I’m thinking of invoking it at the end of one of my current campaigns), but it does drag into the middle of the table the central question of what your RPG is. Gygax is famously credited with saying, “The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules.” This is that idea turned up to 11. It’s not quite free-form RPGing, but rather understanding that all the rules are there to promote the fun. Rules that don’t promote the fun should be tossed aside, maybe for good, maybe for only a few moments. It would be too much fuss and bother for us DMs to create a completely original set of rules for each encounter (and if you did, you’d destroy player trust in your campaign; see above). But there is a time and a place to set the book aside and recreate the game in a more fun shape. At its heart, this is what Broodmother Skyfortress is all about.
If you haven’t, and you want to play in it, ***SPOILER ALERT***
First off, he thinks you need to blow stuff up. If there’s a favorite tavern the PCs enjoy hanging out in, or a particular lord they love (or love to hate) or whatever, he suggests you have the Skyfortress giants come down on it like a ton of bricks. And he’s not talking about a little raid that knocks over tables and kidnaps a few peasants. He suggests you ask yourself:
If the Giants attack by surprise at night, as is their wont, is there any possibility of survivors or would visitors find nothing but a collection of bloody smears?
Death Frost Doom is (in)famous for the possibility that the PCs might unleash a plague of zombies on the world. Broodmother Skyfortress assumes something nearly that bad is happening already.
I love this idea when used in moderation (as Jeff himself suggests in the book). A destructible world is more real, more immediate to the players, and far more interesting. Being willing to blow up the Keep on the Borderlands (illustrated beautifully on the back cover of the book) tells players that they’re gaming in a truly dynamic world where their actions (or lack thereof) will have real consequences. That’s cool.
On the other hand, if the players never know whether or not all elves will be transformed into cat-people, or all wizard spells now result in explosive flatulence, or all the gods are simply going to vanish at the drop of a hat, it actively prevents them from investing in the setting. Doing one of those things over the course of an entire campaign might be cool. Doing one (or more) of those every time you sit down to play tells the players that nothing is trustworthy, and they’ll just avoid investing in any of it.
While that’s fascinating all by itself, Jeff’s after more than just blowing up your campaign. He wants to blow up your entire game.
There’s little more sacred in D&D than the to-hit roll: d20 + mods to reach or beat a target number. The sanctity of this mechanic has only grown over the years as it has been expanded to cover nearly every situation, from saving throws to skills to tool use. Pretty much anything a PC wants to do in 5e is accompanied by rolling a d20.
When fighting the giants, Jeff suggests you just not bother having the players roll to hit. Yep, they always automatically hit the Giants. However, they have obscene numbers of hit-points and the first five points of damage from any attack don’t count. Attacking them with mundane weapons (or even lesser enchanted ones) is barely going to scratch these monsters. Normal combat is going to lead to TPKs; the players simply can’t put enough hurt on these monsters fast enough to take them down (unless they’ve got access to some really nasty magic). And, by eschewing the sacred d20 roll, players should immediately understand that this is an unusual situation.
Jeff calls this Mechanical Alienation, and it’s a cool technique. Again, it’s probably most potent when used rarely (I’m thinking of invoking it at the end of one of my current campaigns), but it does drag into the middle of the table the central question of what your RPG is. Gygax is famously credited with saying, “The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules.” This is that idea turned up to 11. It’s not quite free-form RPGing, but rather understanding that all the rules are there to promote the fun. Rules that don’t promote the fun should be tossed aside, maybe for good, maybe for only a few moments. It would be too much fuss and bother for us DMs to create a completely original set of rules for each encounter (and if you did, you’d destroy player trust in your campaign; see above). But there is a time and a place to set the book aside and recreate the game in a more fun shape. At its heart, this is what Broodmother Skyfortress is all about.
Friday, September 03, 2010
Tracking Down the Flame Princess
Raggi is trying to find out where his Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying box set has shown up. I've been busier than a one-armed paper-hanger this week, so I haven't even been by Tribe or Dragon's Lair this week. Any fellow Austinites been in either store recently? I'd be surprised if either had it, but I've seen Dogs in the Vineyard at Dragon's Lair and bought Savage Worlds at Tribe, so it's not entirely out of the question.
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