1

(4 replies, posted in LotFP Gaming Forum)

The old example of play in the tutorial book had a group of five players (minus one who had the flu or something).

Jason Thompson's illustrated walkthrough of the God that Crawls had eight adventuring-class characters, a linkboy and a teamster.

Bigger is better, obviously. You might start out with just one character per player, let's say four adventurers for a smaller table, but you should be ballooning out into a small army as you get a few levels' worth of money to spend on retainers.

Monsters in the +5 range are pretty manageable with a bit of luck. PC armor class skyrockets surprisingly soon in my experience, especially if you're running with high DEX or, god forbid, a halfling.

Monsters that are much higher than that would probably be big and scary enough that closing into melee range would never really be a sensible option anyway.

3

(4 replies, posted in LotFP Gaming Forum)

A lot of Carcosa feels pretty just-because in design. So, yeah, I assume the dice rules are there mostly for the first scratch novelty and heck of it.

So far, on our grand tour of LotFP adventures, we've gone through:

The Monolith from Beyond Space and Time (no survivors)
Hammers of the God (well, sort of peeked inside and ran away with a decent profit but it counts)
Forgive Us (this is even more theoretical but I'm still counting it)
Qelong
Death Frost Doom
Tower of the Stargazer
No Salvation for Witches
and pieces of content powered by Weird New World and the Seclusium of Orphone.

The highest level character is level 5. The rest are a level or two behind. We allow a new character to enter play with half their predecessor's XP.

Even at this level I feel like we're definitely playing a high-level campaign. Retainers, crazy boons and items gathered from each adventure and players learning to exploit the summoning rules mean that they made a pretty decisive mockery of most encounters in the last session or two we had before going on a bit of a break.

They also kind of broke the world, but that's been going on for a while now.

5

(4 replies, posted in LotFP Gaming Forum)

The NPCs awaiting deeper in the dungeon are what made this new version so much better than the already great original. Definitely get to know them and the way they act. Also think about how they might react to each other, since things can get a bit complicated depending on the order in which the players encounter them.

On the other hand, the players might never get that far. That's okay, too. Plenty of cool things for them to find elsewhere in the dungeon. I had a lot of fun with the glass globes, in particular.

Oh, I also found that the locked door in the great chapel was surprisingly challenging for the players to figure out. That's what the hanging skulls are for, a bit of a push by entities that definitely know about the pit deeper within will speed the players along whether they like it or not.

6

(7 replies, posted in LotFP Gaming Forum)

The vast majority of LotFP adventures seem to be aimed at a party of first level characters. Any extra levels you bring into the mix is just a bonus. Levels basically give you an edge to survive if things go wrong and, especially if you're a spellcaster, a number of ways to get creative and potentially bypass challenges entirely.

Would be nice to see adventures that are designed for high level play, though I don't know if the system scales meaningfully enough to warrant that.

7

(5 replies, posted in LotFP Gaming Forum)

I had no idea this was even a thing!

And it's by Kowolski.

And it sound decisively fairytale-y, which is exactly what I need to bridge a gap in our current campaign.

Severely tempted.

I'm not on G+ so this is as good a place as any to state how pleased I am with what the mailman dragged in this morning.

I already read NSFW in PDF a while ago. Solid fun with a videogame-y premise and an opportunity for the players to change the world.

Tower of the Stargazer. Never read this before because I've been waiting to get my hands on a physical copy. Was not disappointed. Some of the Referee tips are surprisingly useful even for someone with a bit of experience. Definitely a good little book to ground me in the olden tymes LotFP way of gaming even in the middle of this storm of authors and styles that is Raggi's current business.

Death Frost Doom is, well, Death Frost Doom. A classic made even better. And oh man that illustration work.

And then there's A Red and Pleasant Land. Still trying to work out how to integrate the world itself into our ongoing campaign. In the meantime, there are a lot of cool little rules and tables that are definitely going to be used as soon as possible. Vornheim was a bit too specific for me to use at the table, but a lot of the stuff in RPL is pretty easy to tweak to reflect any quirky, war-torn land. Plus the physical book itself is amazing. It's like a Carcosa that I can actually find use for at the table.

Didn't get The Idea from Space. Should I regret this?

9

(2 replies, posted in LotFP Gaming Forum)

Seems like everyone's talking about Isle of the Unknown again. I don't own that book, so I've started re-reading my copy of Carcosa instead, with an eye towards using it as a complete package rather than just cherry picking some elements here and there (I already decided to adopt the psi-mechanics earlier, for example, though I upped the percentages and removed the daily rolling).

The sandbox is a bit problematic, though. Sure, there are plenty of cool hexes here and there, but for the most part its just different slimes and funny-coloured dudes that can and will murder you over and over again. I can see this working for a Carcosa-specific campaign, but the world seems like too much danger for too little reward for any (relatively) mundane LotFP-group.

Nothing that can't be fixed, of course. With that in mind, share your story:
Have you used Carcosa as a part of an ongoing LotFP campaign? Was it an alien planet, a strange island, a trippy dreamworld or something else? How did the group get there and did they get out? What did they find and how did the experience change the characters and the campaign?

10

(2 replies, posted in LotFP Gaming Forum)

Also investments.

So, the good book says that any investment will be resolved in a year and that managing your property and hirelings happens on a month-to-month basis.

This seems to suggest that playing a campaign out day by day or even week by week is not going to be very satisfying for anyone involved since the players would get to engage with these financial systems very rarely. Adventures and other exciting stuff are a thing of their own, of course, but should there be a substantial amount of fast-forwarded time between those adventures?

A week between adventures (sessions)? A month? A year? How fast does the time fly by in your games and how often do your players get to fiddle with investments and property management?

11

(10 replies, posted in LotFP Gaming Forum)

Agreed on the product feeling padded and lacking in some key ways. Then again, the writing is pretty solid and the Vancian-romantic-mysterious-plasmic style of it all presents, in my mind, the first truly distinct approach to weird fantasy that has been presented under the LotFP label.

Raggi's adventures and settings are what they are. The other big name books, like Qelong (amazing) and Carcosa (neat but shallow) feel like extensions of this central theme of "the Weird is going to kill you and it's not going to be pretty". Vornheim too, though I haven't read it all the way through so don't take my word on it.

Orphone, though, feels properly different. The magic items examples, though cursed, don't kill. The dungeons are filled with butlers and quests and hostages, not monsters. Instead of fearing for your life you're going to be wandering around, having absurd conversations with hunchbacks and making note of the shiny magic sparkle that's gotten all over the place.

So I think it was worth the money. Got a number of good ideas out of it and it reminded me of how good a change of pace every once in a while can be.

12

(3 replies, posted in LotFP Gaming Forum)

Definitely not Poison. Paralysis is an okay-ish way to go as far as I can see.

On the other hand, I would probably just tell the players that they have been punched in the face and let them decide on their own whether or not that is enough to shut them up. Unless you specifically want to use this scene as a safe way for beginning players to test out saving throws.

A recent game called Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons gave me a good sense of how powerless adventuring can make you feel. You crawl, sneak and run for your life across gargantuan mines, biting frost and impossible battlefields and run into ancient evils that keep on slapping you around like the little child that you are. Don't want to spoil too much, since the rapid-fire weirdness is definitely the best part of the game.

14

(5 replies, posted in LotFP Gaming Forum)

I'm not at my books at the moment, so sorry if some of this stuff is really unspecific. That said:

Are you supposed to use the firearms index armour and the regular armour all mixed together? The pricing suggestion (x1.5?) seems to suggest that you are. If so, do the fiddly bits like helmets and tassets and buff coats mix with old-fashioned armour as well as Pikeman's Plate? Can you combine leather armour with a buff coat or slap tassets on chain mail?

If you can do all that, I see no reason why anyone would ever use the Full Armour/ Plate Mail provided. You can hit that 18 ac with chain mail, helmet and tassets and suffer a fraction of the cost and encumbrance.

I'm going back and forth on whether to just:
1) Use only early modern armour. Would lower average AC somewhat maybe?
2) Use all the armours but limit the +1 items to early modern setups
3) Throw it all together and watch the players figure it out

15

(3 replies, posted in LotFP Gaming Forum)

What alignment means for the players at our table is pretty simple:

Lawful types are chosen by the gods, who act as mankind's shepherds on behalf of the Great Will, to usher in a predetermined future of blissful harmony. In effect this means that players who play lawful characters can expect to run into oddly specific omens, symbols and foreboding occurences where the other types of characters might not. On occasion such characters may even find themselves being stalked, aided or hindered by invisible or seemingly mundane entities who are there just to push them towards their fates, good or ill.

Chaotic characters are touched by the raging tempest that is bleeding into mankind's world through cracks in the Great Will's plan. Wrong attracts wrong and these characters find themselves face to face with surreal sensations and dangerous, mad or even supernatural occurences even in places that other characters consider safe and civilized.

Fancy wording aside: Lawful characters get vague or painfully specific omens and/or NPCs that may or may not be supernatural but who are definitely there just to treat the character in question like a toy. Chaotic characters, on the other hand, get to experience the weirder side of everything with additional, properly random encounters and weird descriptions of seemingly mundane situations wherever they go.
Clerics and magicians get hit extra hard with the effects while neutral characters, as long as they are smart enough to move on their own, remain in a world where gods are just powerful words and weird things only hide in your grandma's cupboard on rare occasions.

I'm still not quite happy enough with how this has gone down in practice, but I think I'm getting there. The law/chaos section in the Grindhouse rulebook was for some reason one the most enjoyable for me to read and ended up deciding the focus of the entire campaign. I really liked the idea of alignment actually affecting how the character experiences the world so that's what I've been trying to do so far.