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A Thousand Dead Babies
Publisher: Zzarchov Kowolski
by Pa T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 10/08/2015 13:04:09

This is an introductory adventure for both Neoclassical Geek Revival and OSR retroclones. Everything in this adventure is dual-statted for both games.

I cannot comment on the NGR part of the book, but the OSR stats have a minimalistic elegance to them that actually makes this easy to run with pretty much any game. One of the enemy stats is listed simply as “3 hit dice, AC as leather, Attack as weapon, gore for 1d6.” While that may cause a beginning DM to feel confused and need to flip through books, those two lines give enough information that anyone who has memorized the basics of their game instantly fills in the blanks. It even works with non-D&D based games simply because of how stripped down the stats are.

The basic setting for A Thousand Dead Babies is an Earth-like town that recently converted to Christianity and the surrounding woods and fields. Lately, the town's priest has become scared of demon worshipers and witchcraft in the surrounding areas, and hires adventurers to investigate/eradicate.

There are a few different factions at work in the adventure. The townsfolk (mostly) follow the Holy Church, and want to see the old paganism driven from the land, a select few still follow the old pagan ways and want to see the new faith driven from the town, and there are evil demon worshipers who just want to watch the world burn. Depending on who lives, dies, or is skipped, it all spells out a different ending for the town. I like the sandbox-y nature of the adventure.

There is a small, totally optional, dungeon to explore as well. It is a mere six rooms, but contains interesting traps and dangers that change the outcome of the town and lands around it. There is one magic item that has almost no mechanical use, but will really affect the flavor of the adventure, and any to come after it. It would easily fit into a Lamentations of the Flame Princess module.

Zzarchov Kowolski adds in quite a bit of humor, and knows how to use tropes to his advantage. There are god-fearing townsfolk who want to drive all the other religions out and burn witches at the stake. You've got nature loving pagans who just want to protect their groves in the woods. There is a satanic cult that dances naked, sacrifices babies, with a stoic black knight and black goat presiding over it all. There is a threat of an inquisition incoming, and both the town and priest are rotten enough to be worried about it. There are a lot of cool things here, barely detailed, and just begging you to take them off in your own directions.

The art and layout for this book is gorgeous. Jez Gordon does the maps and a few interior illustrations, but even the page headers and the back cover's image imprinted as a watermark on the pages gives this an incredible sense of style. The stock art cover is the only color piece. While I normally do not really care much for stock art, it really fits the adventure in this case.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
A Thousand Dead Babies
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Lacuna Part I. (second attempt)
Publisher: Memento Mori Theatricks
by Pa T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 09/24/2015 18:14:30

Lacuna is a wonderful rules-lite rpg of surreal horror/mystery. It is a little difficult to classify as the game is only about half-done in terms of rules, and the rest is all left up to the GM to complete. No two games of Lacuna are ever played alike between different groups.

The game's setting is Blue City, a manifestation of Jung's collective unconscious, though most people will just think of it as the dream world of Inception or the digital world of The Matrix. Sometimes it gets as freaky as InterZone from the movie Naked Lunch, it all depends on your game. Players are agents for The Company and dive into Blue City to extract hostile personalities from within the dream world. Settings are generally the first thing I change when playing a new game, but this setting is vague enough that any changes you make are still as canon as any changes anyone else has made.

At its core, the main mechanic for Lacuna is your heart rate. This is a fantastic system that paces the game very, very well. Everytime you make a roll in Blue City, your heart rate increases. The more stress you undergo while in Blue City, the higher your bpm gets, and the more risky your further actions become. Once you reach your maximum threshold, you must eject from Blue City or suffer a heart attack and die. Instead of taking damage to health from risky activities, you take damage to your abilities. It is worth noting that since every roll you make is added to your bpm, rolling high is actually unfavorable in this game. You want to get as close to your target number (11) as possible without going too much over.

While the vagueness of the setting is a positive in my eyes, the incompleteness of the rest of the rules can be seen as a negative. The book only really gives rules for things the player characters can do. While it includes hints of the "bad guys" (see the spiderman in the Soviet uniform on the cover), it never details how a combat would turn out or how to resolve such things. Some see this as a positive. I have personally seen two GMs play it very different ways, one required multiple successes to accomplish difficult tasks to take down the "boss" of the scenario, and the second concluded that one success was enough, preferring to emphasis surrealism and investigation over conflict and dice-rolling. Under the rules as written, both are equally right and wrong, as it is never written in the first place.

On the nature of the pdf as a product, it is underwhelming. The front cover is missing, and the first page of the pdf opens onto the copyright page. I really like the cover image and was disappointed when it was missing from the pdf. There is no table of contents, so while the pdf is only 62 pages, if you want to quickly get to the npc mentor page quickly, you have to scroll through until you find it. Since the book is short, it is more an annoyance than a pain, but a ToC would be nice to have.

One final note: the character sheet is one of the most unique and creative examples I have seen. The combination of scantron and medical document really set the stage of being a faceless employee of a shadowy corporation/government agency. I've seen other players' eyes go wide when they see it for the first time.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
Lacuna Part I. (second attempt)
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The Pale Lady
Publisher: Lamentations of the Flame Princess
by Pa T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 09/24/2015 15:22:23

This short adventure differs from some of the more recent LotFP modules in that it is not set in a specific place on Earth, though it does start in a generalized abbey that can be dropped anywhere. The bulk of the adventure actually takes place in a small fairy domain. The adventure kicks off with a raving man in an abbey and a story of coming back from the Pale Lady's hall, along with strange artifacts kept inside the hall.

The inhabitants of this pocket area are the Pale Lady and a race of creepy rabbit-men, along with their kidnapped human slaves. The hall and surrounding area are mapped and keyed, but this adventure is not really a dungeon crawl. There are no gruesome traps as are expected in many other LotFP adventures, and the emphasis is more placed on stealth (or combat?) and social interactions with the strange inhabitants.

There is a strange artifact at the center of the hall, and its general weirdness is alike to the time cube from another Zzarchov Kowolski book, Scenic Dunnsmouth. It breaks the fundamental rules of physics and will affect future games for everyone affected. It even suggests letting the players take time to dwell on the philosophy of what these changes mean for their characters after the event occurs, which is what really helps to sink the other-worldliness of the artifact in.

One of the problems I have with the adventure is that without interacting with the artifact in the hall, nothing else really happens. If the players somehow manage to murder hobo their way through the Pale Lady's domain, they end up missing the best parts (first time I saw this run, the players merely fought some rabbit-men and escaped with a handful of freed slaves). If the players do meet with the Pale Lady and fail at socializing, they end up missing the good stuff again. Even if they succeed at winning her over, they may miss the artifact and accept a different boon from her.

It feels a little bit like a one-trick pony adventure; either you get it or you don't, but if the pieces fall into place, it does make for quite a creepy adventure with far-reaching consequences and even a few morality questions.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
The Pale Lady
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Fuck For Satan
Publisher: Lamentations of the Flame Princess
by Pa T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 05/28/2015 22:50:59

This is one of the dumbest adventures I have ever read.

The "plot" of the adventure is to find some missing children. The adventure starts off with a three page long read-aloud text of an old coot rambling about children and marital sanctity. It continues with 15 pages of a dungeon that have no relevance to the adventure, yet the "plot" cannot advance until you return from it. There is a complete meta-game effect that happens at the beginning that does not influence this adventure, but the next one you run. Monsters inside the dungeon include an animated stick figure, a centipede that farts, and your own feces and urine (yes, you have to fight your own waste materials if you travel down a hallway). There is also no reward for "finishing" the dungeon, it is pure filler.

The "plot" later takes you to encounter a penis-monster that is turning straight men gay as they Fuck for Satan. After the encounter, you will still not have finished what you set out to do, nor have you advanced the search at all yet. It is another red herring. To finish off what you set out to do, you must rely on a random wandering monster roll to encounter the creature stealing the children. This means there is a 10% chance you "solve" the mystery before you even set foot in the dungeon area. Meaning every page and hour that passes before is pure filler waiting for one roll to come up positive.

As a piece of shock literature, this would be at least passable as a short story. It would bring out the inner Beavis and Butthead in the reader more than actually shock anyone. As an adventure module, this is just downright awful.



Rating:
[1 of 5 Stars!]
Fuck For Satan
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