Topic: LotFP Session Reports

I recently acquired LotFP, and began running it for my group.  I'm using the official adventure modules, and I thought I would post my thoughts about them.  This is going to contain many, many spoilers.  You've been warned.

But before I get to individual adventure commentary, I wanted to discuss the system briefly.  LotFP is very similar to the B/X edition I learned to play as a child, which made it quick and pretty nostalgic to learn.  The magic is very flavorful, which is something I really like, and the encumbrance/chase rules are simply brilliant.  Easily the best encumbrance rules I've ever seen, and the chase mechanic is quick, simple, and has seen use in every session.  I couldn't ask for better on those fronts.

All in all, a fine OSR game, and one my group is more than happy to play.  It's also the first Old School game some of my players have ever been a part of, but they've all gotten the hang of it quickly.

Re: LotFP Session Reports

Lamentations of the Gingerbread Princess

I decided to start with this one, because the last game I had run was an indie fairy tale game, and I was still in that mood.  At the time I hadn't been sure if I would run more of it or if it would just be a one off.  This scenario won me and my group over.

Our group consisted of a magic-user, a fighter, and a specialist.

The module wasn't without its faults.  The maps were too basic to be really useful, and the editing was mediocre at best.  The author also included a large amount of sarcastic asides, some of which made me smirk, some of which were slightly annoying.  Those problems didn't detract from the fun we had at the table, however.

The beginning of the adventure included a lengthy random encounter table for the forest they passed through, but with little guidance for how to actually navigate the forest, and how long they should spend (and thus how often the table should be rolled on) I just decided to skip over it.  Some of the entries were very interesting, but for a possible one-shot adventure I wanted to get to the meat of the scenario and not accidentally TPK via a random encounter, which probably would've ended LotFP at our table.

Before long the party crawled under a hedge one after another and found themselves in a strange candy land.  The group was obviously bewildered by this, and I had a lot of fun watching them explore the area.  By the time they found the cute teddy bears and tiny cupids guarding the halflings in the gingerbread village we were all having a very good time.

They interrogated a halfling and read between the lines to figure out what was going on.  When a halfling broke down and began screaming about hating what was happening and the 'mandatory maypole dance' began, well...

That was a surreal scene, and I really got into playing the halfling.  I waved my arms, screamed for help, and used emphatic gestures to demonstrate his impaling and disembowelment, as well as the really creepy maypole dance with his intestines.  Short, but one of the most fun scenes I've run in an RPG in a while.  Definitely one my players won't forget any time soon.

The party then went to the tower and fought off Buttons the giant teddy bear.  It was a tough fight, but once the specialist realized that it was flammable it was soon over.  He used its own stuffing (liberated via the fighter's efforts) as kindling to set it ablaze and the party proceeded upstairs.

The best moment for my players was the wish.  Once they understood everything that was happening they huddled and used scrap paper to plan out about a half dozen wishes to try and 'fix' the situation.  It didn't work (I managed to make the wish pointless through the mandatory 'modification' of the wish by the wish granting statue) and so they moved onto plan two.  Specifically, murdering an 8 year old halfling girl in her sleep to end the wish and save the other halflings.

It was a good table moment, as I watched my players struggle with the moral choice, but in the end they set her bed on fire and ran to try and escape the guardian toys.  Unfortunately the fairy princess caught up to them and with a flash of rainbow light burst the specialist (who did badly on his chase roll and so was at the back of the party) into candy.  That player loved his death, and still talks about it all the time.

All in all, it was a highly successful session, and a good introduction to the game.  It proved popular enough that when we voted for our next game I received no opposition and have been given six more sessions of LotFP to run.

Re: LotFP Session Reports

A Stranger Storm

My copy of the game is the Grindhouse Edition, so I have A Stranger Storm and decided to run it next.  A Stranger Storm is basically an invasion of the body snatchers/doppelgänger scenario, but specifically designed to prevent all of the 'standard' methods of telling doubles from working.  The duplicates knew everything the originals knew, had no fear of death, were perfect in every way (down to every penny stuck in their boot), and if you observed the shift, you wouldn't be able to remember who was where, meaning that you could be standing next to the real one and not remember that for sure.

This time we had the magic-user, the fighter, a new specialist, and a priest.

This scenario was much less popular in my group than the first had been.  The biggest reason was that they found it to be very frustrating.  As a group of mostly 1st level characters they had few spells or other abilities at their disposal, and after trying all other methods they eventually gave up on figuring out who were the doppelgängers.

I've never had a session that included burning down the adventure site and then riding until 'they were at least a hundred miles away!'  While the paranoid atmosphere was good for a few minutes, my players were mostly angry and frustrated, made even more so by the deaths of two PCs.  The mechanic of having the player not know if they were a doppelgänger or not and simply determining that with a random die roll wasn't very popular with my group.

A Stranger Storm was a frustrating scenario, costing the group half the party and earning less than 100xp each (they never went to the village to talk to the priest, and didn't find the gems on their own, so they gained no treausre whatsoever).  Not a bad scenario, but it didn't go over well with my group, and I don't think I would recommend it.  I can see how it could work out well, but for us it simply didn't.

Re: LotFP Session Reports

Tower of the Star Gazer

I decided to run the other introductory scenario next.  The group (once again including the magic-user and priest, along with a new fighter and specialist) had some fun with this one, although it wasn't really anything special, just an off beat take on a typical dungeon crawl.  Basically, they explored a tower, got a ton of loot (they managed to solve all of the puzzles within seconds, including the final one, and had to go back to town to get a wagon to haul their piles of loot back with).

My favorite moment was playing the mad wizard trapped in the spell circle.  I was standing up at the table, my players sitting around it, and I started playing the nice, friendly old doddering wizard.  When the party magic-user said she was going to loot the tower I went off.  Slammed my fists on the table, ranted and raved, waved my arms, etc.  I made all of my players jump several times and really sold it.  Between that rant and the body parts they found in storage, they really hated that wizard.

In addition to getting all of the loot, they managed to figure out what the telescope did, and I made a small mistake that made the scenario much more fun.  I forgot that upon activating the teleporter the crystal was destroyed, and after they turned it on without anyone getting sent through and managed to test it by sending an object to the other planet, the fighter had a great idea.  Using the crystal discs from the treasure room, they wanted to set up a series of lenses to send the red light down to the wizard and teleport him to the other planet.  How could I say no to that kind of ingenuity?

The wizard knew what the score was when the light appeared on his chest, and he offered to tell them anything if they didn't do it.  Since they'd already found all of the loot and missed the fake lab and treasure room I had him send them there mostly out of spite.  They then teleported him to the other planet, and watched him get eaten by the moss/amoeba things.  Great fun.

So they had cleared the tower without taking any real damage, and only the specialist had been negatively effected by anything.  Specifically, he looked in a mirror and failed his save, becoming withered and losing three charisma.  When they explored the fake lab, he and the priest became locked in, and they couldn't get the portcullis to lift.  Eventually they hit upon the idea of using the acid from the 'fish' pool to melt the bars, and I told them it would take an hour to transport enough using lab glassware to do the job.

The specialist got bored quickly and decided to drink the emerald green potion.  This made him incontinent, and would cause him to spontaneously relieve himself every d3 hours... forever.  You have to feel bad for the priest stuck with him for an hour in that small lab.  Yuck.

He then decided to try the other green potion, hoping it was a cure.  It caused his teeth and nails to fall out.  So he was now withered, tooth and nailless, and incontinent.  When he went into the fake treasure room and got killed by the poison needle trap on a chest we all pretty much considered it a mercy killing.  That also made that player have a perfect 3/3 record for killing his character in every session so far.  Although his favorite death is still bursting into candy.

This Thursday I'm running The god that Crawls, and I'm really looking forward to it.  Unlike Stargazer, this scenario looks very different, and hopefully it will live up to how good it looks on paper.

Re: LotFP Session Reports

The god that Crawls
This scenario was very neat to read through, with some truly insane items included (that chariot... wow).  Playing it was better than the last two adventures, although it wasn't a perfect experience.  Part of that, unfortunately, was that my party is just too good at this...

To start, I had no trouble getting them down into the pit -- they know a good plot wagon when they see it, and are always happy to hop aboard.  We had our cleric and magic-user back, a new specialist, and our fighter's player had to quit the game, but we got a different player in to be a fighter.  The cleric knew about a supposed vault of stuff under a church from the priestly grapevine, and away they went.  They were suspicious about how helpful the townsfolk were about getting them into the pit once they mentioned wanting to go down, but beyond that they willing to go straight into the hole.

Cue removal of ropes, ringing of the gong, and singing of hymns.  Also, a little smirking by the referee.

They immediately clued into the idea that the villagers were trying to summon something, probably to eat them, and so ran for a bit until they found a different room.  After a little bit of exploring they found both sets of letters on the wall, and after reading them, in less than a minute deduced that it was a map.  Before they could follow it, they ran into the god for the first time.

The fight involved some bad luck on my dice rolls, but they managed to knock it down to half health without taking any real wounds despite the regeneration.  It then failed its morale check and retreated to heal, taking with it any menace the god had for the party.  While they spent the rest of the adventure avoiding it religiously, running when they found it once they realized it healed completely from what they had done to it the god was never again an object of fear.

This was compounded by following the short map immediately, with the result being the discovery of the hidden exit before the first torch had even burned out.  With access to the exit, and the church supply room for food, no fear of the god, and plenty of time to methodically search, they soon became quite wealthy liberating treasure caches.

The most interesting thing they did was, upon finding the animal sounds paper, they used it to rig a trap with the collapsing ceiling for the god.  They then went straight to the coin upgrade room and went to work until the god caught up to them again, quite a bit richer (50 sp to gp after all).

The specialist managed to finally break his death streak, this time only being affected by the toad in the jar.  He wanted to know the meaning of life.  Now he knows that and looks like a toad.  Otherwise the party simply collected everything that wasn't nailed down (including the vast majority of the magic items and books), a heap of treasure, and simply left once it got late and the priest was asleep.  Well, they left after setting the building on fire.

No real threat, tension or worry, but it was certainly different, and the pile of 'magic items' could make for some... interesting future sessions.  After all, they haven't experimented with most of them yet...  ::insert evil cackle::

All in all, I would recommend this one, although smart and lucky players may find it pretty easy.  Mine certainly did.  Next week I'll be running as many parts of the Three Brides as I can cram into one session for my (now) level 3 party.  See you then!