Topic: Refereeing weird fantasy (esp. of the historical sort)

After reading a few adventures, articles, and deciding that I really want to set up a group to play LotFP with, I am struck with a bit of, well, uncertainty. As in "okay, here's all this delightfully horrible stuff, now what am I supposed to do with it".

As Zak S. explained awesomely in an older post, the best DnD campaigns should be like a picaresque, with interesting heroes tumbling from adventure to adventure, and becoming even more interesting as a side effect, or dying in an unceremonious and sometimes funny way.

My uncertainty comes from the fact that all LotFP adventures I've read so far are extremely heavy, extremely weird (or should I say "fucked up"), and make a TPK an extremely likely occurrence. Not that I'm complaining, but if this is all the characters - and thus the players - ever see, it becomes commonplace. And I'm not sure if it should become commonplace.

However, I am at a loss about what could comprise the "filler episodes" between occurrences of major crazy.

In a DnDesque fantasy world, I'd just throw minor dungeons and semi-weird magicians in their way, some robberies, some exploration that yields strange artifacts that only hint at fucked-up things (instead of throwing them in the players' face), etc. And then drop the nuke.

In a semi-historical setting, I'm not sure how that would look. Fighting regular human robbers, and looting perfectly regular castles of regular corrupt noblemen under the veil of the night might be too unfantastic, but adding magic without the seriously weird and fucked up feels like watering down the "weird", and just getting some random historical fantasy.

How do you guys handle this?

Re: Refereeing weird fantasy (esp. of the historical sort)

I'll just throw out our trajectory as an example.  It may not be as deadly as you think, but, uh, it's definitely deadly...

First off, to everybody reading this, if you are a PLAYER, then stop reading here or you will forevermore be SPOILED!









1) All players made it through "A Stranger Storm."  They learned that sometimes you have a 50% straight up chance of dying (and live!), to dig through everybody's body for loot and sometimes you have to kill a baby to save the day.

2) All but 2 made it out of the "Tower of the Stargazer."  Here they learned that you can't save everybody.

3) Better Than Any Man: many sessions of play, few deaths until a tragic struggle that ended with only one surviving party member.  (They really wanted to keep a piece of treasure and were willing to risk all for it...)

4) The God that Crawls - no deaths and they made off with some loot.

5) The Gnomes of Levnec (not official LotFP, but by an author who has written LotFP stuff and fits quite well): they gained a contingent of gnome followers!  (The only gnomes they have ever seen and will likely ever see in any LotFP campaign I run, for the record.)

6) The Monolith from Beyond Space and Time - here's where things went wrong.  They played "Russian Roulette" with the border entering and exiting the valley until they were transported to Carcosa.  This is not a good place for a group of 17th century humans.  This ultimately ended in a TPK.

But that was almost a year of weekly play?  So not too bad.

Re: Refereeing weird fantasy (esp. of the historical sort)

Lepus wrote:

How do you guys handle this?

Howdy.  I would have all in between adventures be NON- magical, non weird, with no monsters at all.  These are there for the contrast and to show the players that they are, in fact, incredibly special in the game world since they can level up (and have) and almost everyone else is a zero level human.

I played a lot of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and we had awesome times with the few non-fantasy adventures like "with a little help from my friends" which is a straight save the kid from kidnappers set in some horrible neighborhood in some horrible WFRP city.  No skaven or the later obligatory CHAOS!!!!! at all.  This can easily be converted to Lamentations.  You'll need to give them some XP for doing stuff rather than just getting gold, but there's some stuff here and there in the Lamentations adventures that do that for reference.

Nobless Oblige is another non-monster/fantasy adventure for WFRP (just have the mutants be some non-northern european ethnicity or non catholic/protestant religion and you are gold) that you could look at for ideas for some good in between stuff.

If you intersperse with non-fantasy stuff, when they get to the weird or supernatural-- tear the shit out of them remorselessly.  No quarter.  In the adventures they have the most to gain (levels, gold, magic items) so it should have the most risk.  I've only had a TPK in the God that Crawls and that's because my players were stubborn and drunk.

Re: Refereeing weird fantasy (esp. of the historical sort)

I found given the simple yet deceptively robust systems for spending and investing money stories tend to emerge between games for me. When my players came back with 73k of silver each from an extremely successful adventure they poured over what to spend things on and I gave them a year of downtime to play with. I also wrote up a mini system to see what suitors would pursue the unmarried characters and used the family % from The god that crawls to not only work out family but work out any children and to whom they were born.

For example our cleric, Baron Von Gropecunt, married into minor royalty and had two children a boy and a girl but he also had an illegitimate child from before. His father was dead but he still had his mother and a single brother. Not only did this help the Baron's player to strengthen his backstory but it also gives a genuine sense of what the normal year is like for these people. A year of risky investments, maintaining the household and those who live in it and having to brave the unknown to keep up this wealthy lifestyle and keep boredom at bay.

So while it's not a downtime session as such (mainly as you don't need all your players in one place to sort this out) giving player this perspective through the systems in the core rules (and some cheeky hacking) allows for what you are looking for to occur naturally. Now slaughter them all.

Re: Refereeing weird fantasy (esp. of the historical sort)

littlemute wrote:

Howdy.  I would have all in between adventures be NON- magical, non weird, with no monsters at all.  These are there for the contrast and to show the players that they are, in fact, incredibly special in the game world since they can level up (and have) and almost everyone else is a zero level human.

My personal preference is more of the Bledsawian approach, with 2nd-3rd level being "average", but I see what you mean.

littlemute wrote:

If you intersperse with non-fantasy stuff, when they get to the weird or supernatural-- tear the shit out of them remorselessly.  No quarter.  In the adventures they have the most to gain (levels, gold, magic items) so it should have the most risk.  I've only had a TPK in the God that Crawls and that's because my players were stubborn and drunk.

Heh. That sounds like a good idea.