Topic: FALLEN WORLD -- My LotFP Campaign

I just realized I've never posted about this game here.

A couple of years ago I started buying LotFP products, fell in love with them, and wanted to run with them.

I told some friends about a game I wanted to run, started a Meetup group to round it out, and ended up with six terrific players.

The game is set in 17th Century Europe. Not only is there Thirty Wars War raging, but there is a interplanetary war of many worlds being fought across Europe as well. (My thinking is: How do I create a setting where I can use all the modules I love? Alternate worlds and gods battling it out on earth!)

So the Duvan’Ku temple from Death Frost Doom is in the Alps. Sorcerers from Carcosa has been sending agents and spies to our world in order to take it over (to have access to more human sacrifices). And there is an otherworldly explorer they have tracked down has has the means of traveling to alternate earths with more adventures (Qelong, Castle Gargantua, and Isle of the Unknown, among others.)

We been playing as a group now for about a year -- with about six months of play under our belts. (We taken breaks for other people to run games as well, including Cyberpunk 2020 and Unknown Armies 3rd edition, as well as holiday breaks.)

I've got a blog where I recap sessions as well as talk about RPG tools and stuff in general (as well as many posts about Classic Traveller). If your'e interested, this link will take you to all the posts about Lamentations of the Flame Princess and the game I'm running.

In the most recent sessions:

Confronted by a magical tower full wall-to-wall with zombies, my players pulled out a magical item they'd found months ago in The God That Crawls and ended up with a ship that can sail between alternate earths...

So, that happened.

Last edited by CK! (2016-12-02 18:10:23)

Re: FALLEN WORLD -- My LotFP Campaign

Here is a Character Creation Pamphlet I made last year. They are formatted in A5, but can easily fit into 8.5"x11". If you have booklet printing they form a little pamphlet.

I am using the default 17th Century Europe for my setting, so there are no Elves or Dwarves in the pamphlet, but the other four classes are represented.

They walk new players through the basics of creating a character so each person can move at their own pace.

Re: FALLEN WORLD -- My LotFP Campaign

I'm always looking forward to your recaps. It's amazing how you've been able to turn all those modules into a coherent whole.
Hafta admit, I've been tempted more than once to borrow an idea or two from you. smile

Re: FALLEN WORLD -- My LotFP Campaign

The Adventures Continue!

Power Armor! A Decapitated Witch's Head! A Ship That Travels Between Worlds! And the King in Yellow pays a visit to the Thirty Years War!

Re: FALLEN WORLD -- My LotFP Campaign

My Players' characters are heading off to Qelong next week. I've made an Aakom Poison Tracker Sheet to keep track of Aakom Poison. (Those of you have read Qelong will know why I did this.)

Re: FALLEN WORLD -- My LotFP Campaign

We're still playing the campaign on and off on Monday nights! (We switch off games so I can get a break.)

So now the PCs are exploring the ruined city of Xam in the Qelong Valley.

Years ago powerful missiles fired by warring archmages battling on the other side of the mountains struck the city. The resulting magical damage lifted the city upon a hard to scale mesa and cut it off from the rest of the valley.

The magical energies unleashed on the city have formed a kind of "firestorm" of Chaos that has raged across the mesa for two decades now. Everything on the mesa is always in flux, with reality always shifting.

To help me create encounters for this kind of environment I took the runes and qualities of runes from Glorantha and built a series of random tables and slipped them into my Referee screen:

https://talestoastound.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/screen-shot-2019-11-26-at-5.57.17-pm.png

I roll on the tables and using the results as a springboard I cobble together things I could not otherwise have conceived of.

For example, the PCs had to fight and flee a giant centipede made from the flaming bodies of several hundred citizens of Xam. And later they found the ancient library of Xam wandering around on four legs. (One can seek shelter from the chaos of the ruined city by volunteering to become a book in the collection. You can then be read, your life story fixed and available for anyone to peruse.)

The PCs have traveled from 17th century Europe on the magical three masted ship they found in a lake in the Alps to an alternate earth where magic is much more prevalent in an effort to find Akkom. (The ship belonged to an Interdimensional Explorer who traveled to alternate earths. They need the Akkom because the King in Yellow has built a bridge from the world of Carcosa to their earth and is invading it with his army. He wants to use the people of earth as a terrible holocaust of sacrifice.)

Traveling through the chaotic, ever-shifting ruins of Xam they gathered rumors from survivors and heard tale of a wizard's tower to the north end of the mesa. They found the book that had once been the wizard's apprentice in the Wandering Library of Xam and discovered this tower possessed a rich supply of Xam the wizard had gathered over the years through a magical process.

This tower is, in fact, The Tower of the Stargazer. The wizard has been in communication with and studying Carcosa and the King in Yellow, helping him to attack this earth as well!

Thus I changed a few things: instead of the statue of the Medusa, it is a statue of the king in yellow. Instead of looking at the world of translucent blobs, the telescope looks upon the world of Carcosa. Instead of being ignited by gunpowder, the telescope is activated by igniting a pinch of Akkom, an so on. There are other clues I've added and altered throughout the tower tying it to my campaign and the interests of the PCs.

And yet... it is basically the same. And last night the Players found the chamber with the ghost and ended up playing a game of chess with the soul of one of the Players wagered in the game!

https://talestoastound.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/7273eae9-fdc0-4097-9f82-d8e97febc71c.jpeg

James, I want you to know that all five players sat transfixed and helping the player win the game against me! It went over great!

They have found the telescope, the library, and the treasure room and are now exploring all three. Soon they will figure out how to activate the telescope and the first of them will travel to Carcosa. The others will undoubtedly follow, carrying the powerful Akkom with them. They will then be able to see the bridge rising from beyond the horizon on its way to earth. The base of the bridge will be in the City of Carcosa.

My guess is they will carry the Akkom to the City of Carcosa and use it to create a terrible magical explosion, destroying the bridge and stopping the King in Yellow's attack.

I have no idea yet what the City of Carcosa will be like. But I can't wait to find out!

Last edited by CK! (2019-11-30 02:55:58)

Re: FALLEN WORLD -- My LotFP Campaign

I loved reading your recaps years ago, glad to see your game is still going strong. What level is the party now?

Royal Decree by the King

Re: FALLEN WORLD -- My LotFP Campaign

The characters that have been there the whole time are now up to fifth level.

A new player joined several months ago and his fighter is at 4th.

A new player arrived two weeks ago. I started his MU at 3rd.

The trip across Xam has taken a long time, treasure has been sparse, and they've had no chance to get back to "civilization."

However, I am keeping the treasure as written from Tower of the Stargazer (which seems to work with the Gold Piece as the monetary standard instead of the Silver Piece from the LotFP Rules & Magic). So they have several hundred gold pieces to haul with them if they manage to solve the treasure room. That will bump them all up a level.

I am pretty sure that Carcosa will be the last leg of the campaign. (That is if the go to Carcosa. Honestly, they keep zigging when I think they are going to zag! So we'll see!)

My guess is they will hit levels 7 or 8 or so by the time we wrap up.

The only thing I'm stuck on now is transferring the characters from the rules and setting of LotFP 17th Century Europe to Carcosa. Does the magic of the M-U stop on Carcosa? (I think so, yes... it is an utterly alien world where the Chaotic magical energies of earth do not exist or matter.) Which means we have one character with a class dependent on magic who suddenly does not have magic anymore. Is that interesting, or does that suck?

Does the MU get a shift in his consciousness and automatically become a Sorcerer. Not sure. I see pros and cons about this.

Further: Not ONE of the characters has an Attribute of 15 or greater -- so not one of them gets to make a roll for Psionic energy. This makes me sad. Should I lower the threshold to 13 and increase the odds at the higher levels? Thinking about it. But my instinct says that's a bad idea!

Other notes: I'm going to be printing out the rules from Kevin Crawford's An Echo Resounding for handling skirmishes and mass combat.

In a previous session the PCs picked up a company of mercenaries. But they never seemed to know what to do with them. And I realized I think that's because they didn't know what to do with them.

They might end up gathering an army on Carcosa -- or at least I want to offer them that choice. And I think they need a method of seeing mechanically how a large force could work to help them engage other large forces.

If anyone has any comments or ideas on this stuff I'd love to hear it!

Last edited by CK! (2019-11-30 19:31:24)

Re: FALLEN WORLD -- My LotFP Campaign

Last night they cracked the treasure room in Tower of the Stargazer. As noted above I kept the coin values the same as in the text, so they have found a haul that will bust them to the next level and right up to the boundary for the following level if they can get it back to civilization.

They spent some time building plans for how to get the haul off of the mesa and realized they could use Feather Fall. (The complication is, of course, they can only cast it on one or two people laden with gear and treasure at a time. The M-U would have to rest. So the party would be literally spilt for HOURS while carrying a King's Ransom.)

They hadn't been to the vivisection room yet. And as they contemplated their haul they came to the calm, reasoned decision that there was no more need to explore the wizard's tower and to ignore the Magus trapped in the ritual circle of salt. The general consensus was to get back to Qampong down the coast, cash in the treasure for their XP, gain their level, and figure out how to spend this fortune effectively.

That is... all but one character. His brother had been sucked into Null Space during The God That Crawls and in the mythology I have built as I've stitched all the modules together, the telescope in the wizard's tower was tied to Null Space as well as Carcosa. (One travels through Null Space to get to Carcosa, for example; and the King in Yellow's bridge from Carcosa to earth for his invasion also traverses Null Space.)

And so he Rawk was fixated on examining the telescope. The player, quite surprising me, was determined to see if he could find a clue to finding his brother and two other PCs lost to Null Space dozens of sessions ago. All this, despite the fact that everyone knew getting out while the going was good was the best plan.

So the PCs all futzed with the controls of the telescope. Rawk placed the Star Crystal in the mount before the lens.

First they activated the switches without putting anything in the ignition box at the base of the telescope. Nothing happened.

They added the coal. They got the weak beam of light.

They doused the coal in Akkom and placed it in the ignition box. Fired up the fourth switch. A brilliant beam of light shone though the crystal from the telescope. Rawk stepped up to the lens and vanished!

We paused the game.

Rawk is now hurtling through Null Space and will land, within moments on Carcosa.

If the PCs look through the telescope (after the telescope powers down) they will see a terrible Carcosan-dinosaur thing rushing for him.

I literally have no idea what the other PCs will do!

They can leave Rawk to his fate and try to make their way to Qampong with their treasure. (They only need to make it to the coast. The have a mercenary company waiting for them on their ship off the coast of the Qelong Valley.)

Or they might grab as much treasure and Akkom as they can and teleport themselves to Carcosa one time after another to aid him.

Or something else.

I really have no idea what is going to happen next at all.

I do know that I cannot wait to reveal this dramatic choice to them -- with Rawk's life literally on the line and then need to make a decision RIGHT NOW.

Last edited by CK! (2019-12-03 20:47:11)

Re: FALLEN WORLD -- My LotFP Campaign

The concept of a magical tower filled with zombies Buckshot Roulette and the discovery of a ship capable of traveling between alternate earths adds a thrilling twist to your campaign.