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Lamentations of the Flame Princess » Posts by JimLotFP
You could give a Man from Outer Space class AMAZING saving throws against magic and magical devices (maybe 11) but a save has to be made to be affected by beneficial magic (including potions and other non-screwy items), with the idea that his rationalism and skepticism is so strong it disrupts magic.
Or perhaps his "class ability" is a high tech item or three with great effects but quite limited charges.
Ooh, so there was supposed to be a tiny d20 in with all the rest, haha. Ended up with two little d12s instead. I'd wondered about that. Oh well, no skin off my back.
Email me if you want a replacement d20 to match the rest.
I think you should call it: "False Dawn."
It's set in the late renaissance/early enlightenment, which was a time when light returned to the world after the dark ages and science and reason began to take over. Except in your game there are still things out there that go bump in the night. There are eldritch horrors that wont be silenced by reason and monsters that can't be categorized by the fledgling science of man. The temptations and dangers of arcane knowledge still tempt men into casting spells. So the renaissance of your world of Shot and Sorcery is not a true renaissance but a False Dawn.
I really like this.
This is just my idle flapping of gums but if the problem is wanting to do two books but one book is cost effective.
How about printing the DM section upside down starting from the back so DM's cover is the players books back cover, you flip the book around and you are holding the DM's book. Total idiocy or could it work?
There's still the problem of always having a hell of a lot more book in hand than is necessary (the actual rules are going to be the smallest part of the whole thing). Also, if the front and back both have covers, where to put a barcode and ISBN and all that jazz?
So I'm discussing things with the wife today because once she goes to work I've scheduled this as "Make some outlines day" for this project. See if I can get something done.
She cuts me off.
"Why are you making a new game anyway?"
BY GOD, I HAD ANSWERS!
The arguments:
That's what RPG people do. They tinker and piddle and screw around with stuff. What big-name game designer has ever made one system and then said "Fuck it, that's all!" (and what do I aspire to be, hmm?) People don't tend to just play one game forever exclusively, and people who write for games don't just write for one game forever exclusively.
Some of these creative impulses clash horribly with the design paradigm of LotFP Weird Fantasy, and instead of trying to squeeze everything together, maybe I should let the strengths of one game alone and everything that doesn't suit those strengths go somewhere else.
Examples: The Dancing Queen in Yellow concept really doesn't engage with the OSR base rules or mode of play. Insect Shrine has been in limbo because I consider it "too D&D" as it's written right now - I want everything I do to be DIFFERENT dammit - but can't figure out how to make it "not D&D enough" without gutting its core. Maybe I should just do Insect Shrine as originally planned, it fits wonderfully with how people perceive Weird Fantasy (even if that perception isn't how I run my campaign), and then put The Dancing Queen in Yellow with another project altogether. Less hand-wringing all around, and hopefully better final results.
Yes, the atmosphere of the new game is similar to the game I've already put out, but so what? Game ideas have already had multiple systems in RPGland: World of Darkness had material published for the Storyteller system, GURPS, and d20. Chaosium's take on the Lovecraft mythos has been used with BRP, Gumshoe, and d20. The Marvel universe had FASERIP, SAGA, that stones thing, and now a new game coming out. Dungeons & Dragons has gone through multiple rules changes.
(my wife's eyes glazed over as I presented this part of the argument...)
I think adapting existing ideas to new systems changes the flavor and implementation of those systems - I don't think the Marvel iterations are interchangeable as games, I certainly don't think D&D 1e is the same game as D&D 4e, even if you're using the same setting, like the Forgotten Realms.
I think my new project's explicitly historical focus is enough of a change from Weird Fantasy's "includes demi-humans and the Vancian spell system" way of doing things to stand on its own.
The OSR scene is getting crowded. Before Weird Fantasy there were the more faithful clones, and now there are a lot of more focused and flavored ones coming out with big pushes and publicity and changing things even more. ASS&H, ACKS, DCC... LotFP isn't going to be the freaky outlier of old school games anymore.
And who knows what D&D 5e is going to do to the scene.
Hopefully LotFP Weird Fantasy will still have a place and continue to sell, but businesswise I'm skeptical about all my eggs being in this one basket.
I'm still liking the idea of "no advancement," but I do see the "there should be some sort of mechanical reward for playing."
How's this: Participation in, and completion of, sessions gains rerolls for the next character made. "Die in this adventure, add a reroll, survive, gain two." So having a character survive a few sessions means more control over what the next character is like, but because the rerolls then reset, there's no danger of this resulting in supercharacters.
And what about shipping to France ?
It will cost a few euros more for French shipping due to whatever is going on with the postal service there. The exact amount will vary by the weight of the order.
I don't like singling out one country like that, but there seems to regularly be problems there that happen nowhere else, so I can't really ignore it. Hell, even with the tracking numbers there are cases where it says "delivery attempted" but no notification of this was left with the customer so they had no idea - without that tracking we'd have no idea what was going on.
My favorite of the bunch was purestrainhuman's entry. Very evil and very unlikely to end well for anyone. This entry was tied for second place with misterguignol's entry in the popular vote.
The top vote getter from the readers was, in a blowout, Trippo's entry.
Congrats to the winners, and hopefully we do this again sometime soon. 
Just got the shipping bill for December, some other administrative expenses have gone up for 2012, and adjustments are needed if you want me to continue to bring you absolutely top notch RPG material.
Free EU shipping in the LotFP store ends 1pm Helsinki time Thursday January 12. If you're in the EU and want to still take advantage of no shipping charges, order before then.
When I first opened the LotFP store, I only had smaller books and I didn't have many European customers at all, and it was no problem to offer free shipping to try to help interest along over on this side of the ocean.
Now that the releases are sometimes bigger (talking about the LotFP box and Carcosa) and European orders account for a full third of my business now. Shipping costs are adding up in terms of both actual euros and as a percentage of a book's cost.
It's not just my bottom line I'm worried about. I started releasing works by others last year on a profit-sharing basis, so when 1/3rd of the price of a book disappears in shipping, Geoffrey and Zak and whoever else will see release through LotFP are eating that cost too if it's their books being ordered.
However, I have made a decision that larger orders will have free shipping (tracking number included). The threshold for free orders will be 140€ for non-European orders and 125€ (pre-VAT) for orders to Europe. If you order that much stuff, then we can afford to eat the cost between however many releases there are in the order.
I will still offer free shipping to Finnish addresses, just because I live here and it's awesome and if you have a problem with that, move to Finland so you can take advantage of the free shipping too.
Questions? Comments?
Conqueror Worm is out because the US title was tacked on by the studio to falsely associate the movie with Price's previous Poe-related movies. Poe is in the mix as an influence on the game but not majorly so, so I think it wouldn't fit.
Tormenting or being a tormentor is not a core element of game play, but being tormented is since the focus is more on the horror than on "adventure" or such things. The game itself is the Tormentor.
Haven't been working concepts for the game so much, but used a Christmas gift Amazon gift certificate to order some more academic press books on the Early Modern age, so I can say I'm continuing to do research. To me getting the historical feel correct is important (and communicating that in a way that gets people using it at the table will be an important measure of the "artistic" success of the project).
But it needs a name. I've decided that no matter what happens it won't be Weird Fantasy Role-Playing 3rd Edition, as that would be crappy to assign a whole new system to an existing "brand." And "Shot & Sorcery" sounds too "RPG Formula" to be a real game name I think, not to mention that magic really isn't going to be a heavy player-side element so it might be misleading to put it so front and center. So...
How about "Tormentor" with the subtitle "The Role-Playing Game of Historical Terror."
(whatever the cover art would be, it would make it clear there is a supernatural element to the whole thing and it's not just a straight historical game).
Would there be any sort of "Saving" mechanic? I'm thinking of an object or creature that, when looked at, fixates the viewer's sight on it and begins darken their peripherals, creating a tunnel vision state. The thing then seems to move farther and farther away, until it can no longer be percieved, leaving the observer in a still, black void.
Now, what would the roll be for someone to be able to look away?
"Make a Scooby Doo roll!"
"Scooby Doo roll? I don't have anything on my sheet relating to Scooby Doo."
"Then you need a 9 or more on 2d6."
"Damn! I do have a Scooby Dee +1 skill. Does that count?"
"Nope. And if you mention Scrappy Doo I'm going to give you penalties to the roll."
After the original edition came out I had this idea:
The PCs are going about their business in the regular campaign world, then BLINK
They are suddenly in a cave lit by candles. A dead boy lies at the feet of a man who has obviously just done something very very very very bad.
The PCs are the forces "from beyond" that the sorcerer has just summoned. But he doesn't control them.
(cruel version: He did control them, the PCs wake up all having had the same strange dream of wiping out a village or strangely-colored people. They look around... IT WASN'T A DREAM!!!!! What now?)
So now the PCs are in Carcosa. And everyone there will treat them as if they were cthuloid monsters because they don't look like "real humans." So the Chaotic cultist nutsos will try to befriend them and the Lawful types will try to kill them.
The PCs have to figure out where they are, what happened, find the banishing ritual for themselves, and then find a sorcerer to perform it. In the meantime, they're in this incredibly hostile, strange environment.
Rather than adding bubbles, why not raise the lower bound, allowing them to shrug off small hits. Like so:
o = 10
oo = 8-9
ooo = 5-7
Hmm. That's an idea. I guess I need to decide whether really big things can suffer "death of a thousand cuts" or not.
Or maybe different types of things use different rules...!
So, would an 11 damage here (or 7 for a human) be instant death? Is the toughness roll adjusted by damage?
I'd want to say "DEATH!!!!" but I'll probably wimp out and say "just KOd if a Toughness roll is made." The Toughness roll would not be adjusted by damage.
So, will your skills be fairly narrow like Traveller? Broad like PDQ? A mixture, e.g. broad profession level and specific supporting skills a la Issaries's HeroQuest system?
hmmm. Probably a mix of both, depending on the situation. Combat skills will be broken down into specifics because that's one way of differentiating cultures and time periods, whereas you can have a skill called Athletics that covers a very wide range of activities that are more or less universal.
The entries are in. Read them here!
Now it's YOUR turn to vote!
Send an email to lotfp@lotfp.com with THING as the subject line and the thread's post number of the entry you liked best in the body of the email. Vote for just one entry!
Contest ends Sunday 11:59pm Helsinki time.
The author of the entry with the most votes will get a 5€ coupon code for the LotFP store, and one random voter will also get a 5€ coupon code for the store.
(I'll announce my own pick for the 10€ coupon code winning entry on Monday along with the winners here. I wouldn't want to influence the voting by revealing my pick now. Or maybe I got Elder Sign over the weekend and I've been playing with myself too much to have taken more than a quick glance at the entries as of yet.)
And we're closed. I'll pick my winner and open up voting on Monday!
Then there will some information about how to cast the spell, perhaps some variant ways to cast the spell. I don't want to get into Carcosa-like depravity (that's what the results are for depending on the spell!) or questing in order to cast spells, but I don't want D&D spell-slinger action going on either.
Coast to Coast AM had a show a few days ago talking about how mushrooms and other mind-altering substances have been used in religious rituals in the past.
Hmmm, I had the junkie wizard in the Grindhouse Edition and established that learning spells involves entering a "dreamlike state," so maybe to cast a spell one has to be enter into an "altered" state... and how you get there (drugs, self-harm, etc) affecting the power of the cast spell.
JimLotFP wrote:Another book in the "save for later" pile. I think I have 112 books now on that list...
In that case, you might want to read just the Wikipedia article about it.
I'm familiar with the general gist of it (most books covering the time period seem to mention it in passing) but a whole book on the subject would be cool. 
JimLotFP wrote:Earth, between 1589 - 1640
If you don't already know about how the Little Ice Age affected the history of that period, especially around the North Atlantic, you might want to check out this book:
Another book in the "save for later" pile. I think I have 112 books now on that list...
. . . or a miscasting that has been codified as the actual spell by a misunderstanding in translation? i.e., Doofus the Unwise, sorcerer extraordinaire, translated an old Byzantine manuscript many years ago into his now-famous "Codex of Cotex," claiming that "The original intent of this spell was to cause profuse bleeding in another being, but I have found in my research that it has exactly the opposite effect! This is a healing spell." Then, during an adventure, Bones the Ill-Advised finds an earlier manuscript of the "healing spell" and, thinking that the original *must* be better than Doffus' version, applies it to his liege, who instantly becomes a puddle of bloody capillaries. Hilarity ensues.
This sort of thing is also why it might be a good idea not to have a character advancement scheme.
Losing a character that's accumulated tons of in-game mechanical benefits might be seen as a real loss, and in a system where horrible death is right around the corner, might result in over-cautious behavior. (also happens in OSR-type play but then there's a lot of magic and monsters designed to be safely used and reasonably expected to be overcome so that's a balance... here where such things are inherently more risky if there's more to lose players won't go near them)
If a character with a lot of in-game history dies, well, the player doesn't lose those stories and those memories. And the next character could very well be more awesome than the one that just died.
There's the risk of play becoming a farce if the players don't take the risks seriously ("Let's see how badly we can mangle our characters! OOOHHH, Bob, you've been turned inside out! AHAHAHAHAH!") but far be it from me to stop people from turning a Serious Business Horror Situation into an early Peter Jackson style farce.
Question: why no advancement? I can understand getting rid of levels and the like, but without so advancement, a lot of people would be turned off from a campaign, and while short sessions are common, there are some of us who enjoy the campaign aspects of games.
1- The mechanical advancement scheme often drives player decisions in the game. It's fun to play with sometimes, is an easy way to lay down adventure hooks, but... sometimes it just drives me nuts.
2- Preparing adventures seems easier if there's a fairly static range of character capability. Advancement's got to either really count, or not, I think, and GMs should be worrying more about the adventure itself than how the PCs will fit in power-wise.
3- "Stop worrying about your character stats, it's out of your control, just play the damn game." ;P
How you considered the 'skills' as being character 'traits' instead? One-word or short phrases, that give a bonus to the dice roll if the trait is applicable to the action being attempted? For example: a character who was part of the Gunpowder plot might have a trait of "Handled Gunpowder" and could come into play when dealing with any action involving gunpowder, from carrying it, to loading a gun, to making explosives.
That's pretty much how I'm creating skills. "What things can this profession do?" *note note note* OK, there's the beginning of a skill list. Repeat for every profession...
So by "KOd" do you mean killed outright?
Knocked out.
Is there a mechanism for critical hits?
Yes. 12+ on the attack roll, but no Warhammer/Rolemaster type descriptive criticals. You get that good a hit with a weapon, opponent's dead, move on.
I like the concept. Been messing about with something similar myself. For the weapons: how you considered most weapons using just 1d6, but some roll 2d6 and take the highest result, giving them more of a chance of dealing a deadly wound?
That's already in the notes, yes. Some roll 2d6 and take the lower result, and some do d6+1 (if you get shot, chances are small that it's a minor wound, right?).
Artillery would roll multiple dice straight.
Lamentations of the Flame Princess » Posts by JimLotFP
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