Rub It Review: Lamentations of the Flame Princess

I scored a copy of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess Rules & Magic book a few years ago.

This is a good game. It's deliciously good. I know from listening to +James Raggi in an interview that he created the game merely as a tool or a means to an end. He wanted to publish awesome, evil looking RPG books and he just felt like having a rule set of his own to link them to would be best. And he was right about that.

I have to talk about this game as both a game and a book.

The book is about 166 pages in A5 format. It's a hardback. It has color illustrations and black and white illustrations, all of which are quite good and evocative of the sort of post-medieval horror that LotFP game books shoot for.

This is a beautiful, evil, lovely book. The cover by Cynthia Sheppard is pitch perfect. The binding is incredibly good and the whole god damn thing just feels right in the hand. I'm a guy who prefers full size books, mostly due to a combination of nostalgia and due to my 47 year old eyesight. But this is perfect. The layout by Mattias Wilkström really delivers the goods. When you open the cover, you get blood red endpapers on which are printed in white text a list of equipment and costs (in silver). The red papers at the back of the book print various useful tables, such as saving throws. Very nice.

Raggi does not waste words. There is no introduction, no forward, and indeed no comment whatsoever about what you are getting ready to read. After the table of contents, you are instructed on how to roll ability scores. And you're off to the races.

Like most OSR core games, this one has no explicit setting. The setting is merely implied. It is fantasy. It is D&D. It is also post-Medieval, and there is a section of the book where a few pages describe early firearms to help set that tone.

The system is core OSR. It has ascending AC, five categories of saves, XP tables, hit dice, and so forth. Unlike most clones or quasi-clones, this one has a skill system. It is a very simple one. You have nine skills, including bushcraft and stealth. Everyone has a 1 in 6 chance of success. Some characters, such as the Specialist (thief), can allocate points to improve their skills.

There are some clever bits to this game that I love, including the Specialist. But also, I love that really only Fighters get better at fighting. Everyone else doesn't. So go suck an egg, Cleric. Famously, this game creates the only first level Magic-User spell I know of that requires 9 pages to describe: Summon. What a great spell. It feels like a super compressed summary of Raggi's famous Random Esoteric Creature Generator. I bet having this spell makes games... weirder.

All in all, the core book delivers a tightly packed and concise RPG system you can use to run any D&D module or other OSR style adventure in a sharp little package. Although I find Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells to be preferable for sword & sorcery gaming (at least by impression, I haven't played it yet), LotFP is hands down a winner for S&S gaming as well.

Get it. And then get some of those delicious adventure books/sandboxes to go with it, such as +Zak Sabbath's A Red and Pleasant Land (another lovely damn book).

Rub It Review: B/X Essentials

+Gavin Norman has given us a lot of awesome stuff over the years. I know I've used Theorems & Thaumaturgy in past campaigns to great effect.

Now we get B/X Essentials. And the name on the tin is what you get. This is the classic B/X game in all its wonder, re-organized into a set of comprehensive volumes. And man do they hit the mark.

These books are gems. The layout is superb. The font choice is dead on the money for pinging that B/X nostalgia. The tables are perfectly presented. All the rules of the classic game are teased out and written in concise packets for maximum clarity and usefulness. The art is deliciously perfect.

All of that and the books are dished out in deliberate modules... that is, you can use one, two, three, or all of them as you choose. Want a B/X campaign that is all neanderthal? Just use the core rules and monster books and add your neanderthal stuff. Want 1e spells? Just ignore the spellbook and use the rest. It's a brilliant move to publish these in volumes instead of a single volume, despite the utility of a single volume RPG. There is utility in modules.

Lovely, reverent modules.

Nicely done, Gavin. And I tip my hat to +Andrew Walter, +Sean Poppe, +Luka Rejec, +Michael Clarke, +Alex Mayo, and all the other artists who brought wonderful visuals to this project.

Now the quandary is set in my mind... do I make stuff with an eye toward Labyrinth Lord... or B/X Essentials? Oh what a terrible decision to make! Pity me. I guess I'll do both.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/220726/B-X-Essentials-Core-Rules?src=hottest_filtered

Rub It Review: BEAN! the d2 RPG

BEAN!

I stumbled across this gem back in 2011 or 2012. I can't remember exactly. But thank the dark gods J. Freels decided to create such a fabaceaen masterpiece.

This game has it all. Swords, spells, monsters, and BEANS. This is basically all the fun of D&D with far simpler rules and you're playing the role of a talking bean. So there.

You take some beans. You mark one side of each with a "+" or something to represent a hit. You toss your beans. The other guy tosses beans. Whoever gets the most hits wins that contest. The difference between the beans is your damage or whatever.

It's GREAT. And I have stolen that basic mechanic for my own stuff many times. In fact, that mechanic was the core of the Rabbits & Rangers game before I went with Labyrinth Lord as the engine.

So anyway... Bean is a core fantasy RPG without a setting. Like D&D, there's an implied setting... a mix of elements common to bean worlds. You might flight a b'nork or get a magic sword from a b'nelf.

The game is supported by an array of adventures and a setting book describing the World of Bean, a Guide to Terrafavus! Hell... there's even a Beans in Space book. You CANNOT GO WRONG HERE.

Five beans.

http://jeffwerx.com/BEANpage.htm

http://www.rpgnow.com/product/89574/BEAN-The-D2-RPG-Second-Edition?manufacturers_id=2927

Rub It Review: Barrowmaze

I picked up Greg Gillespie's Barrowmaze Complete a couple of years ago. I was instantly hooked. I ran a short campaign as soon as I could. It included a luchador and a necromancer and ended with a 50% TPK (in the town of Ironguard Motte, not the actual Barrowmaze). Very satisfying.

Barrowmaze is a megadungeon, which means it is mainly a big fat huge collection of rooms designed to kill you. But it's more. It's a sketched out, robust setting that actually works. It gives you all the essential information you need in order to get a game going very quickly. It doesn't include a lot of flair and additional information about the setting that isn't immediately useful. It's quite lean in that sense... but not spartan. It's got some style.

What I love about this book is how easy it is to use. If you are going to run a short adventure for a one night gig you can just flip through the various barrow mounds and find one with a few rooms. Then just concoct a reason for the PCs to be there. They are hired by a wizard to go to the mounds and uncover a specific tomb. Start the game right there at the tomb. Bob's your uncle. The fact that the mounds are not all connected to the bigger maze means you can do in and out adventures, exploring the mounds as quickly or slowly as you like. Eventually, the PCs will find the maze and you can sink your teeth into that monster for the long haul.

(The third time I used Barrowmaze the PCs managed to navigate directly to the primary maze entrance on the first session. I wanted them to poke around in some mounds first... but that's not what happened...)

This is written for Labyrinth Lord and feels exactly like a first edition boxed campaign with a strong Fiend Folio vibe. The art is incredibly good. The cover is by the legendary Erol Otus! And check out this list of interior illustrators: Zhu Bajie, Alexander Cook, Ndege Diamond, Cory Hamel, Trevor Hammond, Jim Holloway, John Larrey, Scott LeMien, Peter Pagano, Stefan Poag, Tim Truman, Jason Sholtis, Stephen Thompson, and Tara Williamson.

The writing is tight and lean, allowing you to run the maze or the mounds on-the-fly without actually reading too much of it in advance.

This book costs a lot of dough. If you don't know Barrowmaze, you might see the price tag and say "nope". I totally understand. But the book is well worth the investment.

Oh, and if you like undead this will be like Disneyland for you. If you don't like undead and don't want to pay that much for a PDF or print book, maybe not so much.

Rub It Review: The Rad Hack

The Rad-Hack is a Black Hack hack by +Karl Stjernberg, whose killer maps are killer. Like most hacks, this hack is short, sweet, and straight to the point. You get pretty much the entire game system on one page and by the second page you're into character classes. Classes include human (wearing a bunny mask, lol), mutants, robots, and psionics.

It's a cool little 36 page book packed with flavor and badassery. I wanna be a mutated monkey with acid spit!

So the reason I wanted to call out this game is because Karl's work is just dripping with attitude. His style reminds me of many alternative comics icons such as Charles Burns (a little bit) and of the many counter culture or car culture/tattoo culture artists who draw wild shit all the time. I likey.

Favorite Rub: The Rad World map.

https://www.rpgnow.com/product/187874/The-RadHack

Rub It Review: Quack Keep

Quack Keep

The legendary Jennell Jaquays along with Darcy Perry deliver the goods with this 56 page adventure setting. Ducks are PCs. 'Nuff said.

The book is quite lovely with full color on the inside. The art by Jaquays and Perry is deliciously evocative (check out pages 5, 16, and 18 in particular). There are lots of NPCs with which to interact, such as Bigus Duckus, Coduck the Barbarian, Daisy Ladyhawke, and The Grey Moulter.

The entire region of Reedy Bend seems to live in fear of the duck-like dragon Daffyd Platypyros, a horrifying monster to be sure.

This book is FULL of playful language and puns. When I was writing Rabbits & Rangers I was dipping my toes into the "funny animal" genre. But truly Quack Keep dives in head first and I absolutely adore it for that reason. In fact, the first thing I realized upon flipping through it was that this book, being system agnostic, is PERFECT for use with Rabbits & Rangers! And I have it on my bucket list to run a little Reedy Bend campaign for R&R.

There's a lot more to this than I have touched upon. There are maps, lots of encounters and magic items, story hooks, and all kinds of fun and funny gems about roleplaying the Fowl Folk.

Get it.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/247210/Quack-Keep

BLACK PUDDING HEAVY HELPING VOL. ONE

Glorptastic! It is Black Pudding Heavy Helping Vol. One, collecting the first four issues of Black Pudding into a single nasty mess arranged by category.

Get it now or face the oozes.

Black Pudding #5

Gelatinized madness! Black Pudding #5 is alive and out in the world. Get it now, get dice, play games.

In this issue:

2 adventures
2 spellbooks
8 montsers
3 character classes
23 hirelings
a character sheet
random tables
part 1 of a multi part adventure setting

Ninja Character Class

For Black Pudding #5, it's a ninja class. I wanted them to be fast and stealthy, not combat machines. They are assassins with a particular shtick.

Like all classes in Black Pudding, this one assumes old school rules such as Labyrinth Lord will be used. The classes that appeared in the OSR Playbook in issue #4 are self-contained to those rules, they are not meant to be used with Labyrinth Lord. I might not have been clear about that up front but I kinda figured the context would be enough. Clever readers of BP are smart people, so I don't do much hand holding.

Also, this zine is all about whatever in the actual fuck I want to do at that moment. So that's why some pages are all hand written, other pages are all font-based, and other pages are a mix. It really is driven by the Muses and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Smoke bomb! I'm gone.

The Boatmen

The boatmen fiddle with the oar on choppy waters. They skitter and crank at one another. It's not really a language so much as a necessity. They are going somewhere and they aren't really good at it.