Developing a New Campaign Setting - Welcome to Kraken Isle

I've spent a bit of free time working out the details for my campaign setting for Dungeon Crawl Classics. It actually took a bit of debate going back and forth between that and Adventurer Conqueror King System. In the end I decided on DCC, largely due to its somewhat lighter workload for the Judge, though I definitely want to run or play a game of ACKS at some point. I've posted some previous musings on this setting and this may contradict some of them - as the game gets closer to its first session the setting is becoming more concrete as some ideas are modified or discarded.

As I mentioned previously I'm inspired by what I consider to be TSR's old "mini-sandbox" adventures. I don't foresee running a "true" sandbox game with everything wide open but I do want to incorporate a large element of player control. This is what I observed TSR doing in several of their early adventures. While the Lendore Isle series of adventures remains a big inspiration, I am going with a time period of Late Antiquity instead of the Middle Ages as the inspiration for the feel of the cultures. To me that seems more true to the "Appendix N"-ishness of DCC. It seems a setting that has barbarian tribes, decadent cities, slave markets, battles between city-states, and ancient ruins.

I've been bouncing back and forth between starting the game on an island chain off the coast of a main continent or one in a sea resembling the Aegean branch of the Mediterranean. Regardless, I've mapped out the islands themselves:

You can click on it for a bigger version of the map. I'd originally named it Chronos Isle, named after the Greek god of time (and an homage to Lendore Isle from the World of Greyhawk, named after the Suel god of time). However, one of my players got a look at the island and immediately called it "Cthulhu Island". I wasn't about to rename it that but it did get me thinking about its squid-like look which led me to renaming it "Kraken Isle". The main port is on the bay at the northwest quadrant of the island - Rel Kelenan. The naming style is inspired by the World of Greyhawk's Great Kingdom, which often prefixed Aerdy city names with "Rel". This is definitely a city, albeit a smaller sized one, possibly akin to early medieval London in size. I decided I wanted it to have a little bit of character so it is built over a lagoon and therefore resembles Venice in character, with traffic going along its canals and providing protection from ay marauders and invading armies. There are several villages and towns in its vicinity to support the city with crops and there is a another grouping of settlements on the island around Turin's Pasture, on the other side of the Central Highlands. There isn't as much trade as there might be between the two groupings given the marauding tribes that dwell in the woods and mountains of Kraken Isle.

Lets talk about the marauding tribes. If you're like me, when you read that you probably pictured orcs and goblins. (Or you came here to learn about illegal drugs of the 1970s, one of the oddest search terms to ever reach this blog...) James Raggi's The Random Esoteric Creature Generator makes a most excellent suggestion regarding humanoids (and demi-himans):

Eliminate them from the game. If it has two legs and two hands, remove it and replace it with humans. The important thing is – don’t change the cultures or characterizations involved! The ones that were “dwarves” are now mining clans, short and stocky, the “elves” are forest-dwelling hunters, “orcs” are remorseless and savage barbarians, etc. Perhaps they should even keep their special racial abilities (now labeled “cultural abilities”), although it might be difficult to justify seeing in the dark. But really, is there any reason to use an ogre when a human warrior with a few levels on him will do? Is that adding to the danger, the suspense, or the mystery of the game? Details don’t even have to be changed in doing away with non-humans. Normal unclassed humans have roughly the same stats as goblins in most of the individual systems, so there would be no real balance issues in doing this. Don’t make the converted humanoids any more cultured, either.

Raggi indicates going this far out may not be for everyone:

Such issues may not be of interest to every referee or player group. And perhaps the classic fellowship of characters as presented by Tolkien, his peers, and followers is the basic lure for fantasy gaming in the first place. Fine. Use the races, but go back to the source if you do so – Tolkien brought his races together only in the direst of circumstances. 

Assuming a humanocentric focus to the game, every other demihuman and humanoid should be very rare. This does not mean limiting your players’ character choices! Let them be as they wish, but a referee should always be sure that the players are aware that their non-human characters are unusual and never trusted by more superstitious members of the population.. The average human never came into contact with elves or dwarves.

Raggi also goes on to discuss how humanoids such as orcs and goblins appeared only rarely in Tolkien and in special areas. This is a model I want to use. I want to include the classic races (species really, but the term race is perhaps unavoidable in gaming) but I want them to be special. Where are they on my island? I don't know. If there are no PCs of the given race they might not even be there. As far as orcs and goblins go, I'm going to hold off using them at the start. That doesn't mean I won't be using the stats for such races as he suggests if I need quick stats for brigands or barbarians. But I want to save orcs and goblins to be the servant of some wicked sorcerer who may have been responsible for their creation in the first place.


So back to the island. It is nominally part of the empire on the mainland but the empire isn't likely in the best of shape and is far-off. It isn't going to be sending troops to help with marauding humanoids in all likelihood. The ruler of Rel Kelenan is in charge of the archipelago but his control is limited to the settlements - the regions between are wild. And his control of the settlements isn't incredibly powerful either, given his lack of ability to clear the island of threats. But it is a good place for adventurers, with a volcano-destroyed city in the center of the island and ruins to the north reclaimed by wetlands.

But this scope is still a little on the large size. Which brings us the island known as "Little Brother" to the south of the island. I sized it so I would be able to map it in its entirety at a small scale. The map shown here is at a scale of one mile per hex.

The hex grid is a little tough to make out unless you click on the image to see it at actual size. Little Brother is an island that is lightly settled along its southern side with a main town and several villages close to it. To the north I created contours to show a hilly forested region that surrounds a swamp. Some ruins in both the swamp and the hilly region with bad reputations. To me this felt like a starting point for low level adventurers.

However, I'm a constant tinkerer and to be honest I was less than thrilled with the way the map came out. I liked how Kraken Island came out (using Campaign Cartographer) but the map I generated for Little Brother didn't quite feel right. So I went ahead and traced an image of it into Hexographer and tried making a pure hex map, making use of contour lines to show different degrees of hilly and mountainous terrain. I liked this result a bit better:

Again it needs to be expanded to see it in detail. Interestingly, when I tried to generate the map in Hexographer initially I had little luck - my creativity wasn't sparked. However when I started with a Campaign Cartographer 3 drawing as my starting point I found I was better equipped to make the map I wanted to of Little Brother.

My plan is for the characters to begin on Little Brother and those who survive will make it to 1st level. They will in short order go adventuring on the larger Kraken Isle, allowing me to exchange a tiny sandbox for a medium sized one.


One final note. My DCC campaign is currently scheduled to start on Monday June 25 at 7 PM Eastern Time using Google Hangouts. We probably have room for another player if anyone is interested - give me a holler.

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Player vs. Character Abilities

On a recent Google+ conversation I found myself discussing what makes an "old school" D&D game. Part of the conversation involved whether throttling back character abilities is what makes something old school. For example, in AD&D your magic-user can cast a single 1st level spell once per day at first level. He might have as few as 1 hit point and can wear no armor nor master the weapons of a fighter. In the 3rd edition of D&D your 1st level wizard may have multiple spells per day with high intelligence, is guaranteed to start off with at least 4 hit points (barring low constitution), can wear armor if he wants to risk spell failure, can learn how to use fighter weapons, etc. Moving on to 4th edition this wizard at 1st level now has an unlimited amount of magic missiles available to him.

Clearly character abilities, especially at low levels, is something that has increased with newer editions of the game. I'd argue that is certainly part of what one finds in an old school game.

Another part of the equation I would venture is the difference between games that test players vs. those that test characters. In newer incarnations of D&D your character's abilities are far more spelled out. Any character can search for traps or sneak around, it is a simple matter of rolling his or her skill vs. a difficulty. In original "white box" D&D there are no general skills. With AD&D 1st edition we see the introduction of secondary skills. This was very basic - the Dungeon Masters Guide had a table of possible former professions for player characters to give an idea as to the types of things a character might be able to do outside the bounds of his class. The 1st edition Oriental Adventures book expanded on the AD&D concept of weapon proficiencies to double as a rough skill system with non-weapon proficiencies, an idea which was made a bit more formal with the Dungeoneer and Wilderness Survival Guides and made a part of the core rules with the 2nd edition of AD&D. Personally I found the non-weapon proficiency system to be rather mediocre - you received only a small number of them and improving them was something you could only do every few levels. With its 3rd edition D&D moved to a full skill system where many character abilities became linked to skills. In my opinion the skill system developed in 3rd edition is far superior to the non-weapon proficiency system introduced in later 1st edition books.

However, I'm uncertain if D&D always needs a skill system. This isn't to say skills are some newfangled idea that we must huff at with disdain. After all Chaosium's RuneQuest, introduced in 1978, and Game Designers' Workshop's Traveller, from 1977, both had skill systems. So skills are far from a new innovation, even if it did take D&D until the year 2000 to really fully integrate them.

What I've observed in my own experience is what a difference a tightly integrated skill system makes in the way D&D is played. In older versions of D&D it often seemed to me the goal was to challenge the players. There were devices, traps, dungeons, etc. whose challenges were primarily directed at players. In newer versions of D&D a large part of that challenge has been siphoned off to the characters run by the players. I don't want to give the impression that I'm saying all games of 3rd edition or later are simply exercises in dice rolling with no player creativity to be found. I've played and/or DM-ed all versions of D&D except for the original white box and I've found ample opportunity for player creativity. But what I'd see in later editions is a lot more looking at character sheets to see who will perform a given action. Bob thinks of an awesome bluff to get past the guards but Mary's character has a higher fast-talk skill so Mary's character goes to talk to the guard. Mary thinks of a way to solve a puzzle but Bob's character has a better disable device skill. I know a lot of people reading this will say "that's not a bug, that's a good thing". And I can see that point. I'm not a believer in such a thing as badwrongfun or "one true way".

However without such a strong skill system I've found players often do a lot more out of the box thinking. And to be honest, this requires game masters to also do a lot more out of the box thinking as well, which I tend to view as a good thing, despite usually being GM - the way I figure it, it's only fair if I too have to react to a changing set of circumstances. There's such a thing as taking this too far. A common argument is that a character will often have knowledge that a player won't and I tend to agree with this. If my character has lived in a medieval village all my life chances are my character has better wilderness survival skills than I do, even if he's not a ranger or druid. I think the key to handling this in an older school game is having the players leverage their character's knowledge. This often involves a give and take between the player and GM as they discuss what is reasonable for a character to know or be capable of.

There are issues that can make this model work less well for some groups - it requires the GM to adjudicate rulings on the fly very frequently, something which can be tricky to do, especially consistently. But it can make for a very different style of gaming experience and one that I feel is worth trying out.

One of the things I've enjoyed about many of the newer "old school" games is how they deal with the issue of character skill. Dungeon Crawl Classics takes a hybrid of 1st edition's secondary skill system with the 3.x skill resolutions. Adventurer Conqueror King System gives access to a very basic proficiency system which gives characters access to abilities that are somewhere between feats and skills. Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy formalizes the "x in 6" task resolution implied in the D&D Basic/Expert rules into a skill system, making its specialist character the only type who can readily improve such skills. None of these skill systems are so extensive as to preventing the give and take that I described above but they provide a basic foundation which avoids everything falling into "GM fiat".

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RPG Review: Dwellers of the Forbidden City

Earlier I examined some of TSR's earlier adventures which features what were essentially miniature campaign settings. They all had home bases for the adventurers, a wilderness, a decently sized dungeon, etc.

Dwellers of the Forbidden City shares some commonality with those but is also its own beast.

A friend in my first D&D group lent me his copy of Dwellers of the Forbidden City. There was one thing that grabbed my attention immediately. The map. It was a gorgeous map, portraying the titular Forbidden City in all of its glory. Moreover, unlike previous D&D adventures, this map was a 3D drawing. The Forbidden City itself lay at the bottom of a rift. Even without reading a single line of text one's imagination could not help but be stirred. To the best of my knowledge this was the first isometric map to appear in a D&D adventure - it might be the first such map to appear at all.

As can be seen by the low-quality image to the right, the Forbidden City lay at the bottom of some sort of rift. The city consisted of ruined buildings and a lake in the middle of a swamp.You got the impression that these ruins represented a small subset of a larger ruin, though perhaps this section was the only part to survive - perhaps some disaster caused to sink into the earth.

Technically set in The World of Greyhawk setting, this adventure would take all of a second to convert to other setting. All you really need is an unexplored jungle to plop it into.

The background for the adventure involves reports of all sorts of interesting items found by merchants that hail from the Forbidden City. None of these ever make it to market for the caravans are waylaid on their return to civilization. The characters follow rumors of the city into to the jungle and eventually a friendly chief gives them directions and gives them basic information as to what sorts of dangers they might encounter.

There are a few possible ways the characters might get into the city, from attempting to climb down the rift walls to working their way through some tunnels into the city, though of course these are infested with monsters (and for some reason, a reverse gravity region - why is it there? Who knows... That's always been part of the charm of older adventures for me.)

There is no "meta-plot" per se within the Forbidden City. Whose city its once was is fairly unspecific, though there is a suggestion that the serpent-men known as the yuan-ti are degenerate descendants of the original masters and the "mongrelmen" (hybrids of a few gazillion humanoid, human, and demi-human races) are descendants of the original masters. The yuan-ti are a neat little Lovecraftian monster which has become a classic of D&D - I believe this was their first appearance and I believe they've appeared in every AD&D/D&D 3.x/4e version since. They are degenerate men who have somehow interbred with snakes, with various stages of degeneration. One interesting tidbit is they are only encountered as wandering monsters, venturing into the city and back out again, much like the adventurers.

The city itself is full of factions - an evil wizard, bullywugs, bugbears, mongrelmen, etc. My group got a kick out of encountering bullywugs given they were the main mooks of the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon of the early 80s. The characters have an incentive to become one of the factions - wandering monsters are an extra-painful threat at night in the Forbidden City, though after the adventurers keep a camp for an extended period of time the chances of encounters decreases dramatically as their presence in the city becomes accepted, if not loved, by the other factions. This is important, as there is no "home base" for the characters within the city, though in an emergency they could presumably seek out the native village from whence they received directions.

The adventure ends with some additional suggested reasons the characters might visit the city along with possible adventures and expansions to the city. There is also a section of new monsters, for a lot of the creatures within were new at the time.


Like many early TSR adventures, this adventure can double as a campaign. In a brief booklet we've got material that could be used for a single adventure or easily stretched out for an entire campaign. As its tag of "I1" indicates it is for intermediate level characters. It could easily be adapted to many of the newer "Old School" games. Of the ones I've reviewed so far, the lost city element of it certainly seems appropriate to the "Appendix N" nature of Dungeon Crawl Classics. It has the Lovecraftian elements which make it a good fit for Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy. And in a game of Adventurer Conqueror King characters could conceivably try to set up their own domain in the city or in its vicinity or use its riches to finance their own domain.

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RPG Review: Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role-Playing

I'm not certain if Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role Playing Grindhouse Edition is the longest title for an RPG but if it isn't, it's got to be awfully close. (Henceforth I'm going to abbreviate it as LotFP - originally I was going with WFRP but that lends to confusion with Warhammer Fantasy Role Play.)

When I started my blog there were three RPGs that I knew I wanted to have for my first review - this, Adventure Conqueror King, and Dungeon Crawl Classics. When I've discussed the possibilities of doing an old-school game with my group one of the more common concerns is attempts to repeat what's been done before. That's clearly more of an issue for some than for others - for example, I know some people who'd gladly get their White Box edition of D&D out and start playing that. That said, there is something to be said for those games which put their own stamp on things. I believe this trio of games does just that. With DCC we get something very focused at the bibliography of D&D, something perhaps even more "retro" than original D&D (not in its rules but in its style). With ACKS we get a game that starts off with B/X at its core and then proceeds to make its own tweaks, large and small, while maintaining a focus on what happens to the characters as they gain higher levels and seek to be movers and shakers of their campaign worlds.

So what do we get with LotFP? As I did in my previous two reviews I'm going to cover this in two parts. First we'll give an analysis of what the game is (which will include opinions) followed by my overall thoughts.I will be referring to author James Raggi directly in this review which I've not done in the past, largely because this is clearly primarily the work of a single author and his voice most definitely shines through.

LotFP Overview

LotFP is currently in its 2nd "edition", though the differences in editions are more akin to those between versions of Call of Cthulhu than they are in D&D. Both the original edition (called the "Deluxe") and the latest (called the "Grindhouse Edition") come in boxed sets with several small booklets. I have the Deluxe edition in physical form and PDF and the Grindhouse edition as PDF only. This review is going to focus on the Grindhouse edition. LotFP is excellently presented in its PDF form. It consists of multiple files, representing the various books found in the boxed set. It takes full advantage of PDF outlining, allowing for very easy navigation. 

Let's talk a little bit about the term "grindhouse" as it really defines what James Raggi was aiming for in the tone of LotFP. Since this is not an academic paper I'm going to feel safe using Wikipedia as a reverence for the definition of grindhouse. What we see is this:

In the film Lady of Burlesque (1943) one of the characters refers to the burlesque theatre on 42nd Street, where they are performing stripteases and bump and grind dances, as a "grindhouse".

The introduction of television greatly eroded the audience for local and single-screen movie theatres, many of which were built during the cinema boom of the 1930s. In combination with urban decay after white flight out of older city areas in the mid to late 1960s, changing economics forced these theatres to either close or offer something that television could not. In the 1970s these theatres were put to new use as venues for exploitation films,either adult pornography and sleaze, or slasher horror and dubbed martial arts films from Hong Kong.
Grindhouse films characteristically contain large amounts of sex, violence or bizarre subject matter. Quality varied, but low budget production values and poor print quality were common. 

Critical opinions varied regarding typical grindhouse fare, but many films acquired cult following and critical praise. Double, triple, and "all night" bills on a single admission charge often encouraged patrons to spend long periods of time in the theaters. The milieu was largely and faithfully captured at the time by the magazine Sleazoid Express.

This term definitely informs the artwork found within LotFP. There are extreme amounts of violence. There are lots of scenes of women adventurers getting maimed. There's a scene of a medusa who seems to enjoy collecting statues of her lovers frozen mid-coitus, complete with horrified/confused faces and erect penises. So what you are getting is exactly what it says on the tin - you cannot say you were not warned. If the artwork is too offensive (or if you just want a copy of the rules) a no-art version of the rules and magic sections (which is what a player needs to play) can be found at the products website. To be honest, one of the reasons I stuck with PDF-only is the "creepy snake-lady" on the cover scared my daughters (soon to be 7 and 10).

Book One - Tutorial

The first book is designed to serve as an introduction to role-playing games. It is far more detailed than what you find in your typical "what is role-playing' sections of most RPG books - it is more akin to the old "red box' version of the D&D Basic game in the amount of detail it provides. Indeed it has a walkthroughs that slowly introduce various concepts to the reader, much as the old D&D Basic did. The first is a fairly straight walkthrough with no real choices (much like Basic D&D, albeit no Bargle to kill cute clerics) and the second is a more traditional solo adventure.

After this we have a discussion about gaming in general - talk about preparation, where to play, snacks, the way people play, mapping, the likelihood your character will meet a horrible fate, mapping symbols, rules, house-rules.

Next we have an example of play. It's an interesting example as it is fairly long and includes some of the banter you'll often find at the table (or virtual table as the case may be). I remember in Basic D&D the example of play had poor Black Dougal dying. Well this example of play ends in a total party kill, something I don't think I've ever seen in such an example. 

Next up is our Recommended Reading section. I'm very pleased that LotFP does not simply provide a list but rather discusses the authors recommended. Each of his main authors gets a lengthy discussion as to why he is included. It gives a very good view towards the feel that Raggi was aiming for. I'm familiar with most of the prime authors he refers to and I do think LotFP captures the feel of them well.  They are:

• Clive Barker (oddly never read anything by him)
• Robert E Howard (some familiarity with his works)
• Fritz Leiber (familiar with his works and one of my favorite writers)
• HP Lovecraft (another I'm pretty familiar with)
• Edgar Allan Poe (another of my all-time favorites)
• Clark Ashton Smith (an embarrassing hole in my reading and one I plan on remedying shortly)
• JRR Tolkien (I'm familiar with his core works and Raggi makes a good argument towards his inclusion, given some might see him as out of place in a "Weird Fantasy" game with a strong dose of horror. Raggi reminds us just how influential Tolkien is and also some real horrors along with a lack of a true happy ending.)
• Jack Vance (familiar with a decent amount of his works)
• Jules Verne (one of my favorite authors, albeit one for whom it is vital to get a good translation - if it is dirt-cheap or a free e-book it is almost certainly a poor translation)
• HG Wells (while I'm more a Verne fan I've read most of Wells famous works and War of the Worlds is a definite favorite of mine)

Book Two - Rules and Magic

Character Creation

LotFP characters have the same basic ability scores that most D&D-type games use and it uses the same bonus and penalty system that D&D B/X uses (discussed in my ACKS review). Like most older style games the assumed generation system is roll 3d6 for each ability in order.

There are four human classes and three demi-human ones. For the most part, each class gets to excel at one thing at the expense of most other game-related items. For example, fighters are the only characters who get better at hitting in combat over time - all other characters keep the same attack bonus throughout their careers. The classes are:

• Cleric - Able to cast cleric spells (which includes turning undead).
• Fighter - Only character whose attack bonus increases.
• Magic-User - Able to cast Magic-User spells.
• Specialist - Only character whose skills increase (all characters have a base chance, usually 1 or 2 in 6 chance of succeeding at a "skill check"), specialists get to increase these. Depending on how built this type of character can be a ranger, assassin, or thief.
• Dwarf - Best hit points and saving throws.
• Elf - Able to cast magic-user spells, has better hit points than a magic-user but advances slower and seems to have slightly worse saving throws.
• Halfling - Sneaky and stealthy, hard to hit and have good saving throws

No character has weapon or armor restrictions, though with encumbrance rules weaker characters are likely to have problems with the heaviest armors. For various types of armor and amounts of gear a character gains encumbrance points which limit movement ability. Dwarfs are able to ignore encumbrance better than other characters.

Rules

A lot of the rules will seem familiar to players of B/X D&D. For most non-combat tasks a character will have an x in 6 chance of succeeding. For example, searching for secret doors usually has a 1 in 6 chance, though if a character has a better Search skill the chances go up. However, usually only Specialists can increase skills, though some races start of with certain improved success chances (like a Halfling's outdoor stealth).

There are rules for traveling, various dungeon activities, maritime adventures, henchmen,etc. - pretty much the same sorts of topics you'd find in the B/X rules.There's also rules for handling characters who invest in things like property for those lucky high level characters with more money than they know what to do with.

Encounters

Rules for Encounters cover most combat activities. There's nothing here that will shock players experienced with the B/X rules but like many games there are some interesting twists. For example, there are options to parry if a character chooses not to attack, gaining a small bonus to Armor Class, with Fighters, Dwarfs, and Elves getting a larger bonus.

Magic

The rules for magic discuss how to handle clerics and magic-users/elves. 

Clerics need to pray for their spells daily and must choose their spells in advance. They can turn undead, but unlike traditional D&D this is handled as a spell. Clerics can create spell and protection scrolls and can also create holy water and research new spells. There abilities are not restricted by level but do require time, components, and money.

Magic-users (which includes elves for all purposes here) must also choose their spells in advance but are limited to the spells in their spellbook. With access to other spellbooks or scrolls they can gain access to new spells. They can brew potions (including healing potions with the help of clerics), create spell scrolls, transcribe spells from a scroll or spellbook, and research new spells, all at 1st level, albeit with the same limits a cleric has - time, components, and money. They can also create wands or staves to hold multiple "charges" of spells but this requires access to the higher level permanency spell.

The spell list is pretty much what you'd expect though the spells have their own little "weird fantasy" twists to them which I found rather appealing.

Book Three - Referee Book

The Referee Book is largely a book of focused advice for LotFP referees. However, covering every bit of advice would be both cumbersome and bordering on plagiarism so let us rather investigate the types o things discusses, with a few specifics here and there.

Overall I really like the tone of this book. James Raggi has made the unusual choice of providing a lot of guidance on a game clearly aimed at "mature gamers". However I find his guidance good and far more realistic than most pieces of GM/Judge/Referee guidance. He talks about how you will screw up. "Your first attempts will hopefully be enjoyable but they won't be good." Looking back to my earliest games I can't help but agree. I have fond memories of visiting the Village of Hommlet and pretty much going on a massacre...  No, not of the nearby Moathouse or Temple of Elemental Evil - the village itself.

The book does delve into a nice discussion of how to capture the "weird" part of fantasy - the sorts of elements you will find in such literature and how to replicate it in game.

We also discuss the nitty gritty of adventure creation and the importance of player choice with a maxim for Judges to repeat:

My adventures and campaigns will have no pre-set endings. Characters are not required as I wish them to act during the course of the game. It is natural player behavior to trash scenarios and take the game to places unforeseen.

A similar section deals with the establishment of your campaign setting, with an eye towards making it a place full of adventure.

The section on NPCs and monsters is well worth reading, foregoing the normal list of standardized monsters. It discusses how to build monsters, different types of monsters, etc. but really emphasizes the importance of making every monster unique. A sample version of a vampire is provided, though it is clear other types of vampires could be built.

One thing Raggi suggests is where you would normally use orcs or similar humanoids, replace them with humans. Feel free to keep the orc stats if you want, but to make them humans, taking full advantages of the prejudices the locals will have against these outsiders. This is something I've seen done well in George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire and HBO's adaptation in A Game of Thrones.

Similar advice applies to magic items, where Raggi advises that aside from items like potions and scrolls (which mimic spells), all magic items be unique. There are no "+1 swords", all magic items are unique. Guidance is given on building these magic items along with a trio of magic items detailed to show examples.

LotFP closes with some final practical advice on getting your group together and playing and closes with an overview of other similar games out there (i.e. Swords & Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord, etc). with guidelines on how to adapt materials from those types of systems to LotFP. Lastly, the book closes with a sample adventure which makes use of many of the concepts discussed in the referee book.

Overall Impression

Previously I spoke about how ACKS went with a fairly subdued writing style (not a bad style at all, just not in your face) while DCC was a bit more aggressive. LotFP is an interesting artifact. It is part introduction to RPGs and part manifesto of Raggi's style of play. That may sound like a bad thing but I don't think it is. First of all, I do think it is a good introduction to the hobby. If I were to have a friend that decided to join my game for a session or two to see what it was like and wanted a rulebook as an introduction to the hobby, assuming he or she wouldn't be offended by the art this is something I'd definitely recommend. And also, I think it is sometimes a good exercise to look a things anew as if we see them for the first time and reading through the Tutorial Book gives an experience at sitting at another group's table and seeing how they play. As far as the "manifesto voice" goes, it works for me. It allows Raggi to clearly illustrate the way he feels the game is best played and is definitely his own style, not trying to imitate "High Gygaxian" prose reminiscent of the style of early D&D and AD&D.. Even if you don't view gaming the same way Raggi does (and to be honest his style is certainly different from mine and I'm not really a fan of grindhouse works) there is just so much to take away from LotFP that I absolutely recommend it. Even if I never make use of any of the rules, his sections on monsters, treasures, and recommended readings are worth the price of admission.

For the most part I like his tweaks to what we normally find in D&D rules. The limiting of each class to a narrow focus won't appeal to all ("what do you mean my magic-user can never get better at climbing?") but it is something I'm curious to see how it would work.

LotFP is a bold work but I think it is a boldness that is largely justified. I admire those games that take our well-loved D&D game to different places and LotFP certainly does just that. You really can't read this game without getting your brain thinking of different ways of doing things you'd always done the same way.

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