It dawned on me the other day that W.W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw" represents the ideal example magic item for LotFP.  This little item (an enchanted, mummified ape's hand) represents almost unlimited power to the owner, but at the same time is a promise of untold calamity if used. 

In the original story, the couple who come into possession of the Paw wish for cash - resulting in their son dying in a horrible machining accident, and the family receiving a stipend equal to the amount they wished for.  They wished him back to life, and he returned -- not only horribly mangled by the machine, but with a week's worth of decay as well.  Finally, they have to wish him back into the grave, and are left only with the sorrow of his passing and the recognition that Man cannot alter his fate.

What are some other ideas for LotFP Magic Items? The only other good idea that's coming to my mind right now is an amulet that keeps monsters away...by virtue of being dangerously radioactive.

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(52 replies, posted in Crowdfunding Forum)

kelvingreen wrote:

I can tell you that mine will address the shameful omission from Appendix N of the films of John Carpenter.

I'd buy into that.

Do you find that rolling up the summoned entity slows down the flow of the game?

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(52 replies, posted in Crowdfunding Forum)

Time to grab some overtime at work...

Good question...personally, in my games I'd say no, unless the magic-user was intending to summon the same entity repeatedly.  I picture summoning circles as being at least semi-personalized, at least to the number of HD the caster is intending to summon, so summoning an 8HD entity with the same likelihood of control as a 5HD entity requires a different (more elaborate, and consequently more expensive) summoning circle. 

And if you're trying to summon the same horror over and over again, it will be more and more enraged each time, so that +40 to dominate is gonna come in handy...

Yuritau -- thanks! That helped tremendously.

JimLotFP -- Awesome.  I'm looking forward to seeing the new book.

I've been reading through the spell descriptions, and I love the concept of the Summon spell.  I love everything about it -- the chance of failure, the extreme alien-ness of what gets summoned, and I can't read the descriptions of the Special Forms without cackling like a maniac and capering around the room for a few minutes at the thought of the PCs summoning such things. 

But to an extent the mechanical end of the charts isn't quite clicking for me.  For instance, I'm just not quite getting how one determines how many appendages a summoned entity has.  Maybe I'm just not unhinged enough at the nihilistic face of the universe. 

Can someone walk me through a sample summoning and give me a better idea of how to use these glorious, glorious charts?

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(13 replies, posted in LotFP Gaming Forum)

The colors of Ulfire and Jale originate in David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus.  I've found no reference to it, but is Dolm similarly derived from a piece of source fiction?

Were the Bone Men inspired by Fritz Lieber's Lankhmar Ghouls?

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(217 replies, posted in LotFP Gaming Forum)

Hello all, I'm Bill, I'm 25 years old and I'm from Buffalo, New York, a city that once stood as a shining pinnacle of humanity's progress and which now has fallen into decay and neglect.  It should come as no surprise then that I prefer Lovecraftian and Post-Apocalyptic type settings.

I got my start gaming in 2005 with a very short-lived D&D 3.5 game being run by a fellow living down the hall from me.  I was a druid, it didn't matter, the game lasted all of two sessions because the DM got a girlfriend (who was also an pen-and-paper RPG gamer) and ceased to have time to DM.  I got involved with the gaming club on campus and dabbled in a few different games my freshman year.  My sophomore year, I got into a 3.0 game that didn't make it past the end of the spring semester as the DM flunked out.  I began experimenting with DMing myself, and began a fairly long career of running Call of Cthulhu, with four campaigns having been run to completion as of this writing.

After college, my gaming slowed down some, but I was still active with it -- fortunately, a lot of my friends from school live close enough that we can continue to game together.  We've dabbled in Space: 1889, Savage Worlds, things like that, but we keep coming back to Cthulhu and, once we tried it, Pathfinder. 

I just wrapped up a long-running Pathfinder campaign earlier this month, and I've been overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the style of gaming it represents: I don't like the gigantic rulebooks, I don't like the endless lists of feats, I don't like there being 700 different classes.  I wanted something with lower levels of crunch and a stronger encouragement of "make stuff up, and roleplay a character instead of just crunching numbers."

I discovered the OSR, began researching, and discovered that Lamentations of the Flame Princess is everything I've been pining for and tried to house-rule Pathfinder into functioning as.

I've been working from the PDFs of the Grindhouse edition, just ordered a hard copy last week or so (birthday present to myself), and my group has expressed a willingness to give it a go.

I'll vouch for Tower of the Stargazer as well, though I've not yet run it with Lamentations -- I converted it to Pathfinder for my regular group, which is still on the fence as to whether they want to try a retroclone.  It was a blast.