Reading 'Something Stinks in Stilton'

The year is still young, but I'm confident in saying that Something Stinks in Stilton will be the best dairy-based D&D adventure of 2016. It may also be one of the best adventures for any systems with any subject that I read this year.

Officially published as the eighth issue of The Undercroft, Something Stinks in Stilton is written and illustrated by Oli Palmer with editing and layout by Daniel Sell. Anxious P delivers a cover that perfectly captures the grotesque weirdness of the adventure. Designed for low level player characters and set in the early 18th century, Stilton fits very well into the LotFP family of products, and I would even go as far as to say that it is a quintessential adventure for the game, encapsulating everything that makes LotFP different than other versions of D&D.

Something Stinks in Stilton is an investigative adventure and it excels at guiding the player characters forward without removing any sense of agency. There are many little moving parts and characters for the players to interact with, each gently adding more depth to the mystery. There isn't so much detail that the referee will be overwhelmed or that the players will feel railroaded. I think that this investigative mode is what makes LotFP different than any other D&D clone, and this is something that the game has tried to get right from the beginning with adventures such as No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides, but I haven't seen it so well realized until this publication.

Daniel Sell's layout should be commended for adding a significant degree of functionality to the adventure. He has printed key words and phrases in red and bold text, making it pop from the page. Although this isn't a new practice in the world of RPGs, he did do a remarkable job of picking the perfect words to highlight. They draw the referee's eyes to the specific place on the page to get more key information on the fly, rather than needing to pause to scan the entire page.

The content of the adventure is weird and fucked up and really quite funny. I don't want to spoil anything here but I do think that any player who experiences this adventure will forever be leary of any food or livestock they encounter for then on.

For 2016 one of my resolutions is to not run any published adventures, but rather make them up on my own. Reading Something Stinks in Stilton makes me question this decision because it has all the things I was missing from published adventures: a functional layout, a cast of fun and strange NPCs, and a great plot hook. This will likely be the first game I run in 2017.

You can buy a print copy of Something Stinks in Stilton at Daniel Sell's store. You can also get the PDF at RPGNow.com. I got my copy as part of my subscription to The Undercroft, something I highly recommend getting.

Review: Mead & Mayhem

Mead & Mayhem is a small supplement for OSR roleplaying games (although it could easily work for any medieval fantasy game) that sets out to power raucous and unruly tavern brawls. The biggest chunk of the supplement is a big d30 table that keeps escalating the chaos of the bar fight to catastrophic levels. The table actually has 40 results, the highest of which can only possibly be reached after the brawl has been going on for a while and the accumulative bonuses to the rolls has escalated things out of control.

Here is a sample of how one such fight goes down:

Things kick off when some rowdy dwarves smash up a barrel of beer to fill their flagons, resulting in the floor becoming slippery. Punches begin the fly as people slide into each other. Suddenly, a group of adventurers burst out of the wine cellar (which I guess is attached to a dungeon). They enter the melee, already in murderhobo-mode.  As the brawl gets more and more out of control, someone begins shouting out accusations of theft and assault at the tavern's owner, adding paranoia to the mix of heated emotions. Seizing on the opportunity, members of the local thieves' guild begin to nick the coin purses of anyone distracted by the bar fight. And finally, as if summoned by the drunken brawl, a coven of witches dance nude on the tavern's roof, drawing a crowd to the building.

At this point I think I would stop, because a coven of naked witches seems like an excellent set of antagonists, but I could continue rolling on the table, which will likely result in the complete destruction of the tavern itself.

Also included in Mead & Mayhem are guidelines for combat in a bar fight and a playlist of recommended fight songs.

Although it is a small supplements at only five pages, Mead & Mayhem does its job well in making the tavern fight an actual interesting prospect for the DM. Before reading this I would have problem run any bar fight my players instigated as a straight-forward combat encounter or simply have their opponent lay them out because fighting yokels in a bar is boring and a waste of time. Not any more.

Pair Mead & Mayhem with the Brewhouses of Vornpathium and you can run an entire session around one crazy night at the bar.

One thing that should be noted is that, as far I know, English is not the native language of either of the authors. As a result there are many grammatical errors and awkward wording. While pervasive, these errors do not get in the way of the functionality of the supplement. I have already sent a list of suggested edits to the authors and they have said that an update will be uploaded eventually.

Mead & Mayhem is currently Pay-What-You-Want on RPGNow. Grab it now and toss a few bucks to the authors.

Reading No Salvation For Witches

Anyone who passed up on the Pay-What-You-Want campaign for this book is going to feel bad.

No Salvation for Witches (henceforth referred to as NSFW) bursts from the twisted mind of Rafael Chandler like a hungry botfly larva, bringing forth blood and pain that is sure to infest any campaign it touches. It may be the quintessential Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventure, at least after the publisher settled on its historical, anti-Tolkien setting. Everything is terrifying and wants to kill you. Don't touch anything because it's probably not worth the sanity-shattering effects. And if you happen to make it out alive, the entire world will be thrown into chaos. It's a beautiful adventure.

It's hard to talk about the content of the adventure without risking spoilers, so I will tread very lightly. The main hook is that the player characters will find themselves stuck in a magical dome that is centered on a small priory. A sect of revolutionary witches have taken over and have begun to perform a ritual that will change the entire world, but it is already having dire effects on the locals. Horror is everywhere. With it's terrifying monsters and horrible visions, NSFW is an excellent choice for a Halloween game session.

NSFW is probably the first of LotFP's adventures that I actually want to run in the pseudo-historical setting rather than converting it to some sort of weird fantasy world. The paranoia, feudalism and misogyny of 17th century England is pretty important to the tone of NSFW. I suppose it could fit in a backwards, isolated community in a high-fantasy world, but it will be hard to justify a dragonborn or tiefling character when a woman's literacy or choice in fabric is enough to label her a witch.

The book itself is 64 pages long, but that is not to say that it is a massive, epic adventure that will take up multiple sessions. The page count largely is due to the formatting and design of the pages, which means larger text and a helpful amount of white space. Unlike many adventures, I could see running much of NSFW right out of the book rather than notes. That is not so say that NSFW is a low-prep module. It isn't, as plainly stated in the author's introduction. There are many NPCs, creatures and items in the small area around the priory, and it would serve the GM to be ready for anything.

Reading Sailors on the Starless Sea

This weekend I will be running my first RPG in almost 8 months. I've selected Dungeon Crawl Classics to be the game to get me out of my dry spell and will be running Harley Stroh's Sailors on the Starless Sea, which I picked up at last GenCon along with the DCCRPG book.

(What follows are my thoughts on having read the adventure. I will be sure to post my thoughts on playing the adventure later.)

What really strikes me about Sailors, and the rest of the DCC modules I've glanced through, is how slim it is. Unlike old TSR modules like In Search of the Unknown, there isn't a room or area that doesn't have something interesting in it. The last time I ran an old TSR module, I ended up redesigning the entire map, cutting out all of the boring room and adding locations from other sources. I won't need to do this for Sailors. The design is almost minimalist in nature, trimming away everything but the parts essential for fun.

I've seen many people commenting that Sailors is too lethal and that it's a miracle that any PCs survive, let alone one per player. While I've yet to see the encounters in actual play, I suspect that the main cause of PC death in Sailors call comes down to players not thinking in the "old-school way." Being careful, taking in the details of the locations and sneaking around all go a long way in this adventure. Even when there are three dozen beastmen to contend with.

Sailors on the Starless Sea on RPGNow.

Reading A Single Small Cut

A Single Small Cut by Michael Curtis is a short but effective encounter that is perfect for when the party inevitably needs to get to a church for healing or curse removal. It's a very simple and straight forward adventure based around a sinister magical item and the eldritch horror it summons. Because most of the adventure revolves around the artifact and the monster, there is almost no prep needed to run A Single Small Cut, making it a good choice for impromptu games or GMs with busy schedules.

One thing to note is that unlike many Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventures, this is not designed for level 1 characters or "characters of any level." A Single Small Cut is for characters of at least third level and for good reason. Sending characters of any lower levels into this church would basically just be sending them to their doom. And while doom should always be a possibility in these kinds of adventures, certain doom can take a lot of fun out of things.

Much like Death Frost Doom, the adventure ends by tossing out several adventure hooks, making it especially effective for jump-starting a lagging campaign.

A Single Small Cut on RPGNow.

Reading 'Horus Rising'

I'm only 20% through Dan Abnett's Horus Rising but I'm stuck with two thoughts about the novel.

First, this novel is so character-driven that it doesn't even seem like the Warhammer 40k universe, let alone a story about the ultra-macho space marines. There is a lengthy battle sequence in the first chapter, but it's written in a very dreamlike style that puts more emphasis on how the battle felt than how it actually was. This brings Horus Rising into sharp contrast with the one other W40k novel I've read, Assault on Black Reach. Designed to provide lore for a box of space marines and orks, Black Reach is nothing but non-stop violence and hero worship. The plot is slaughtered along with the countless orks. It's honestly jarring to read space marines as multifaceted characters after that novel.

Secondly, Horus Rising was either written with a thesaurus in one hand or as SAT prep. The word choice is absurd in this book and it would be essentially unreadable without the dictionary built into my Kindle. I'd like to think of space marines as medieval knights in space, so I normally don't mind the archaic vocabulary, but it's going a bit far when the dictionary makes a point of saying that a word is only used in flowery language.