Another high-quality nightmare from Lamentations of the Flame Princess.
As a Referee, you'll enjoy running this. This is a very well designed module, on all fronts: the presentation & layout are excellent information design, the story itself has great historical-fantasy verisimilitude, and it's filled to the brim with some highly creative weirdness from the mind of Kiel Chenier. I felt ready to run it after only a quick skim, something I can't say about most modules at all.
There's minimal prep needed, if any is needed at all. There's a solid and simple "hook" to get a party involved, and although it takes place in a "real enough" historical Europe you could drop this into any Fantasy campaign just by changing a few names. There's even a thoughtful "Conclusions" portion, in case anyone survives. The superb "cheat sheet" style reference pages in the back of this should also become an industry standard.
It all involves exploring one fully-mapped and very well described location, and interacting with the people and things inside: an infamous chocolate factory. The factory itself is a funhouse of horrors, with plenty of opportunites for unforgettable death, destruction, and mayhem throughout. The fact that players will catch that this is all a riff on Charlie and the Choclate Factory right from the start means that the ensuing madness will be even more memorable, and a few elements of the adventure very directly play with this.
The bonus "illustration map" is wonderful, and depicts a step by step journey through the factory by a group of Adventuers, along with the numerous misfortunes that befall them. They have a 25% survival rate (give or take, depending on how you look at it). If your group is comfortable with grotesque candy-infused violence and hideous character death they'll have a great time playing this, and if you're looking for a one-shot that players will never forget this is absolutely a must-buy.
The rampant body horror and morbid black comedy is clearly the main attraction here, so make sure you're interested in that sort of thing before you dive in. There's a couple bits sexual content as well, but if you think you or your players might find that too objectionable it's all easily modified into something else, or simply left out entirely (You could actually replace all the "orgy" stuff with some kind of variation on a performance of the oompa loompa song, come to think of it. You'll see what I mean.)
Overall, a great module. If it's your kind of thing it simply begs to be played.
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