Helping Out, Times are Tough All Over

A few posts today on some end-of-year troubles from some of the publishers I follow. Roll for Combat is a fantastic company with incredible products, and they go through their problems with Diamond Publishing's bankruptcy in the above video. Now is the time to place orders, support their crowdfunding, and show them some appreciation for being one of the best cross-platform publishers for 5E and Pathfinder 2E.

I am on their latest crowdfunding projects, and I will do my part to help. They are amazing creators who put out top-quality, full-color books that are crowd-pleasers suitable for the whole family.

Every time they share an update on this situation, my heart goes out to them. They are too good to have this happen to them.

And the complete opposite!

James Raggi is facing some steep tax bills and put out a call for help on his store's website. Lamentations is still one of the most original horror games on the market, an OG OSR game, and I support it. If we can support movies like Terrifier, then Raggi's books are nowhere near that level and are actually quite reserved and held back. They are well-written, high-quality, imaginative books, and I would hate to see Lamentations go away.

If you see his works as horror movies punishing Age of Sail colonizers, carrying out unholy retribution for the sins of defiling and exploiting the New World, you will understand them on a deeper level. Yes, there are undertones, but many horror movies go much farther.

The hobby is full of eccentric personalities, and they help make this a crazy, wonderful, and enjoyable place. I would love to review some of these new books, but I can't get through Raggi's spam filter, and there is no way to reach out.

I can't think of two more polar opposites than this, and times are tough for many companies. Everyone is hurting, and this cross-section covers everything on the fringes and in between. If you can help pick up a few things, now is a good time.

Off the Shelf: Lamentations of the Flame Princess

The people who post public service warnings about this game are about as mature as the people who make lists on the other side. Everyone knows about this infamous game released in 2013. It is 10 years old and a niche product. And all but one or two spell descriptions are 'problematic' - and if you read Stephen King or Clive Barker horror books, they are not even close to that level of depravity.

Otherwise, this game is a 99.9% simplified B/X clone. Approach this game like reading an adult magazine, and you see 18+ on the cover? It means something. It needs to go further. Dungeon Crawl Classics did a better job making all spells chaotic and unpredictable; this does it with only one or two and sticks too close to B/X with most of the others.

The Lamentations game does not go far enough.

Honestly, today? Shadow of the Demon Lord is the game people should be upset about, and it does a far better job in the broader action-horror genre. Things can seriously mess your character up in this game, and they all have mechanical effects. The Lamentations game relies almost exclusively on GM fiat; in that sense, it is more old-school.

I get the feeling people attack GM fiat games because they feel threatened by "god GMs." You give them one problematic thing, like a spell, and they latch onto that like someone made a personal attack on them. Even though they will never play the game and will go right back to 5E after posting online attacks on the game and its community. They won't be happy until the thing they latched onto is memory-holed and disavowed by the Pope, and then they will return to their games and never play this.

The implied setting of Lamentations is fantastic. The "real Renaissance." The colonialist one.

I would rather have an original magic system based on 1800s witchcraft and religious miracles, to be honest, especially for the Renaissance and 'New World' era of this game. I would like all magic to have a chance to go sideways. I want it to be mysterious and strange rituals. A few table results from one or two spells must go farther for true horror.

The art needs to be brave and striking, challenging our assumptions.

B/X is sometimes a curse on games like this. Familiarity isn't everything. Doing your own things and creating your vibe gives you much more. ACKS 2 is doing its own thing, making new spells and changing things around, and it has a compelling, unique game and setting now.

I would love to see Lamentations go in its own direction, one based on mysticism, secret evil worship, and New World folklore, especially for this "New World" Renaissance era.

When it comes down to it, this era was one where the powerful nations of the world exploited every primitive culture around the world for wealth and riches, colonized the hell out of the world, destroyed indigenous people, enslaved populations, began the global environmental downfall, and formed today's corrupt institutions of power of the state, banking, trade, institutional education, and church.

Can you tell me another era in the world as ripe for the horror genre as this one? Renaissance colonial exploiters deserve it in the worst way possible. Like how Jason Vorhees had this strange puritanical revenge streak, the horrors here are inherently anti-colonialist. In this game, explorers and settlers go to the New World and experience insane cosmic, psychological, and bodily horror that sends them fleeing home to the king and queen. If they survive.

Lower left and middle bottom - recommended.

D&D whitewashes the Renaissance as a 'happy adventure-time land,' which is a travesty and an insult. Read some history and discover where this 'colonialist menace' came from and how this era set up the Industrial Revolution. Yes, this is fantasy and escapism, and the world has magic - but not wearing a blindfold and ignoring the seeds of the things we deal with today is essential, too.

The socially progressive types should be all over a game and genre like this, but it remains a pariah because of a few paragraphs. The genre and concept of this game far outweigh the problematic sentences in this game and, in fact, are par for the course, given the horror writers mentioned above.

Then again, the newer games in the genre remove any consequences and danger. This is, essentially, the 5E model - let people pretend they are heroes with nothing that can damage fragile egos. More and more games are like this, and they write death mechanics out of the rules to avoid upsetting people.

D&D was bought by a toy company and became a toy game.

This is the one huge problem with many horror games these days. In any classic horror movie, the characters have flaws that make them deserve divine retribution for their sins. They are flawed people, and many who "get it" often "deserve it" as punishment for their sins. You get the greedy banker, the violent criminal, the jealous boyfriend, and the envious pop star - all these are classic horror tropes for characters.

Nobody wants to play a flawed and morally bankrupt character who deserves a tragic fate.

Yet, this is horror. Punishment for our sins is the central theme.

The fun of Lamentations is playing the era's complete jerks and trying to survive. You accept that you are playing one, which gives you the internal disconnect of not investing in your character so profoundly that losing him or her would give you a mental scar. Yes, you are the bad guys. Everyone in this era and profession was a bad guy.

Again, we were repeatedly told "you are not your character" in the 1980s and 1990s, and today's 'identity brand' marketers want us to forget that and self-insert into a game you can't die in. No matter the mental health consequences, we were told about 30 years ago.

You get these perfect characters in there, streamer personalities made for fandom, and the genre makes no sense, and it becomes like a kids' show. Oh! There is Frankenstein! Hear him moan! So scary! Oh no, the Werewolf! He howls! Everyone run! That isn't horror, that is Scooby Doo without the 1960s soundtrack.

Player protection and horror do not mix very well. Certain horror games get it right. Others miss the mark so hard it is laughable.

The Lamentations game does this through its unhinged adventures. Besides, the game is a license to be like Stephen King or Clive Barker. You don't need the spell charts of Dungeon Crawl Classics; all you need is a twisted imagination. The rules are just there to be the bare minimum. Some horror games don't include certain features because the subject isn't covered in the core rulebooks. DCC does not use any adult themes. The Lamentations game does.

The door is open. You can "go there" like the other authors do. That is freedom, and freedom is good.

Some don't handle that well; I get it; there are other games for you. Ironically, this sort of game is what safety tools were designed for. Would this game be objectionable if it included safety tools in the rules and told you to use them?

I have seen worse and more horrific things mentioned in the lines and veils they use in safety tools.

Those tools enable them all. 

In the same game. 

To a degree greater than one random chart result. 

And potentially between players.

GM fiat? I am more worried about what players will do to each other.

And safety tools are one horrible viral news story away from being banned by Wall Street in mainstream games. I support them, even though I know where this is all going. You have a right to use them before they get taken away. And even after that point.

I still like the Lamentations game for everything it isn't. Some B/X implementations are overdone, with more being more. This is the bare minimum needed to play the modules. There isn't a bestiary. There aren't thousands of generic magic items. There aren't dozens of classes and ancestries.

Part of me feels that "the door is open to anything," which is why people don't like this game. It could hurt you. But that is the point. Even if I used safety tools with this game, I would just fade to black and have the same thing happen. If the situation could not be resolved, the character would vanish, fate unknown. But people are afraid of GM fiat. D&D has been moving away from that full-speed approach for the last 20 years, embracing D&D as a toy.

Part of me feels some of the adventures for Lamentations have dipped into the silly and bizarre too much. Some of them think like DCC adventures. Perhaps this genre is better done by games like Zweihänder, and Lamentations has left it behind for the ultra-strange, proto-sexual, and goofy.

But without GM fiat, there is no horror genre.

There has to be that fear. 

This is the genre we all agreed upon.

Opening this book is like pressing play on a horror movie.

Or at least, it should be.

Books for Games, The Renaissance

Okay, most of this is dark stuff. A book about colonialism and the brutality of conquering native populations, and the start of the slave trade. An art book showing architecture, clothing, and the feeling of a Renaissance setting. The Great Plague. A book about the decline of magic and witch trials. If you put any of this on your typical "roleplaying PDF store," you would get an adult content warning. Yes, even for the art book because it has artistic nudity.

No warnings on Amazon, where the grown-ups shop.

Bleh, we are way too protected from ourselves and our dark pasts. What game are we considering these for? Why can there only be one...

Yes, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and this is the signature game of fantasy horror where you know you are screwed from character creation. You are all guilty by default of being a part of the wealthy, exploitative, decadent, callously cruel, wasteful, environment destroying, slave-taking, rich, and colonial power that just messed with something they should not have, and all fall like cast members of a Friday the 13th movie.

I can't play dark horror in D&D. In Pathfinder 2e, some of these concepts are banned.

This is fantasy horror at its best.

And I love shopping for this game because I am diving through some of the most twisted and horrible history books ever written. I don't have to buy game books or adventure modules; I got tons of content just for this concept alone, reading history. Want more books?

Forcing native cultures to learn a language and to change their beliefs at the point of a sword? Taking them for slaves? Needless wars to make the rich richer? Stealing wealth from primitive cultures to enrich the wealthy back home? Books on the nature of Hell and how it changed as a tool of societal control? A history of death? Climate change? Oh, we have it all here. I might as well have "works with LotFP roleplaying game" stickers made and stick them all over these books.

I seriously think some of the history books from this era are better than the printed adventures for the game. In fact, many of them are worse and could never be published as "adventures."

And it all happened for real.

If you ever wanted to know why Renaissance society was one of the evilest and heartless this planet has ever seen, just open a book. And yet we romanticize this era with modern high fantasy and rewrite it to be more inclusive. This is like taking some of the worse genocides of the 20th Century and rewriting them to be more inclusive and family-friendly and putting them in roleplaying games.

I know, I know.

We need our escape; this world is horrible enough today to be constantly reminded of how awful it was in the past.

But to "get" LotFP, the way I play it, you need to know why the characters in that game deserve all the terrible things that happen to them. Great horror has that puritanical notion of punishment for sins, like the original Friday the 13th. And great horror has a deeper meaning to the events of the time it was created. The paranoia and mistrust of John Carpenter's The Thing can be seen as an AIDS metaphor of the early 80s. We shy away from these things because they make us uncomfortable.

But when we can experience them in a safe environment, we learn more about ourselves and our fears. And we may know why these things done at this time were so horrible.

And maybe we reflect a little and try to make up for all the awful things back then.

Or we could keep forgetting.

Hundreds of years after our rose-colored Renaissance, the default setting of all of our popular fantasy games, we are still living with the disastrous effects of that time. And yet we continue to put the time on a pedestal and rewrite it instead of facing what that moment in Earth's history did to us.

We will never make it right by ignoring it or painting it over with varied and colorful hues.

Or by banning them in stores because they upset a few people. If I were a part of a culture that was wiped off the planet by colonialism, I think I would want people to be a little upset.

When you consider this, LotFP goes from being "that silly B/X game that uses shock value to sell books" to an actual top-tier roleplaying game. There are times I see LotFP adventures doing what Dungeon Crawl Classics does better, and I feel those are a bit misguided. This is more like Mork Borg to me, but with a sense of impending doom and punishment for all characters in the game for "what they did."

Very few games inspire me to go out and educate myself like this.

And yes, I know about the referee's guide's advice about "not using the real world" as a setting. A lot had changed between when that was first written and now, and there are great B/X and OSR options that did not exist back then. But all of them are in the high fantasy genre, and where LotFP shines is in that unhinged Renaissance horror in a slightly realistic and non-fantastical world. 

I choose a semi-realistic version of the natural world, slightly fantastic with the presence of magic but still rooted in reality. I am not using elves, halflings, or dwarves since they put too much Tolkien in the setting and break the unspoken rule of the familiar that horror requires. I play overseas and the New World not-on-Earth canon, as trips to these places should be fraught with strange, unexplained, and supernatural. A coast or island could appear in the middle of a charted ocean, and the ship is off in some nether-realm nobody knew about.

And the reasons for inflicting horror on the classic colonial powers and their seven-sins wrought followers are way too tempting to resist. I do feel, at least for me, that the shock value of LotFP has worn off and it does not sell me on the game anymore. What does sell me on the game is the message of unholy retribution on the sinful colonial powers that brought so much conflict, war, and injustice to the world and the same issues we still deal with today.

And dealing with these quite modern themes is the key to a great horror story.

A massive part of it is using that "shock value" to set you up for the things you learn - which actually happened - that will be even more shocking. A genital with teeth is one thing, but wiping out an entire civilization for their gold and land is entirely different. Popes who do all sorts of horrible things when put in a position of trust are part and parcel of this era.

And all of this is much more horrible.

Lamentations, the 17th Century, and Fantasy Worldbuilding

Shout out to RaRa-Rasputin and his Youtube channel. Go subscribe and support his work. He had a great interview with James Raggi, the author of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, has this wonderful discussion about why he set his game in the 17th Century. Around the 15-minute mark we get this:

When people play medieval fantasy, they are not playing like medieval. There's so many modern assumptions still in there, and the 17th Century is when those things are starting to exist, so they make sense as far as how people play anyway.

This is a fascinating quote, and there are many in here, and one about Middle Ages settings that make me feel that a true Middle Age game is so far away from our "modern" experience that it would almost seem like playing in a sci-fi setting than anything we associate with traditional "medieval fantasy" as we know it in tabletop gaming.

You take the concept of serfs and peasants, and how they belonged to the land, could not leave or move to a new town, and were more considered property of the local lord. That isn't anything we know in traditional fantasy gaming, it is borderline controversial to even mention these days, and framed as science-fiction we are more ready to accept this as a concept. Seriously, if you did a big-budget sci-fi movie where evil Earth corporations enslaved an alien race and used them for labor, that would be something you could mentally frame and accept easier than accepting the fact we used to do this to each other on this planet.

This one statement sends me down the rabbit hole of reading history. An ACKS game, played right in a true Middle Ages setting, is not at all like a Lamentations game in the 17th Century. ACKS would feel like playing sci-fi, and I dare say the farther back you go, the more sci-fi things become.

The modern experience is a very small window in time. It is the one we are the most familiar with, and it is the framing we use to look at other people and other times with.

Modern Fantasy

When you consider the "modern fantasy" generic world, and this world is this almost "all ages sort of generic Tolkien meets MMO" world. It is built off safe fantasy art, sterilized by corporate sensitivity reviewers, double checked so it won't anger Twitter or the stockholders, and it becomes this self-sustaining force that permeates every fantasy game.

Generic fantasy has become this manner of speaking, dress, world building, and a look and style that I feel is  decidedly like a "modern world dress up" with some fantasy architecture thrown in there. Harry Potter is the great example of modern-relatable characters, very modern in outlook and manners, living in a fantasy world. All of the TV tropes in Xena and Hercules, those direct-to-video fantasy movies, animation, and those sort of modern people in fancy dress living in a world with fantasy replacements for modern conveniences.

I feel this world mixed with a set of rules even enforces a manner of acting, such as someone who behaves like they are playing a set of rules instead of playing a character in a real world. The world takes on this manner of acting, and people in the world act like they are playing one version of a fantasy game instead of acting like real people in a realistic world.

D&D 4th Edition felt like it had this problem in an acute manner. It did not feel like a real world, at least not to us, it felt like the world of a video game MMO following a specific set of rules. There was this layer of the artificial put on top of everything, how people in the world behaved, the governments, wars, conflicts, exploration, rural life, city life, and every other facet of that reality. The fact the planes are integrated into the world and a part of normal life. The gods are real and "end bosses" for the world.

My Fantasy, My Perspective

With the current edition of D&D we have a huge Magic the Gathering influence, and this high-technology magic feeling where magic can do anything for zero cost. For fans, it is great to see those worlds come alive. But it does bring in a culture, sort of nebulous reality that can be anything to anyone, and it changes the fantasy reality to a "be anything and do anything" sort of world with multiple dimensions, modern influences, and a lot of - I don't want to say baggage - but assumptions that can mean anything to anyone is the better word. It does feel more nebulous and that "the world exists from my perspective" is a modern thing and also a powerful force of marketing the game.

I feel modern fantasy is evolving from the "generic MMO fantasy setting" to more of the world is "your perception of fantasy, and every perception is valid" sort of experience. There is also this feeling of empowerment delivered with the game, almost like a Power Rangers sort of thing, but tailored for a mass audience. Because I play a powerful wizard in game I somehow have more power in the real world sort of sales pitch.

They blur fantasy with reality, which in previous editions of the game was a no-no because of the effect it had on some people's perception of reality.

Also, the zero-cost magic thing is also troubling to me, as our current world is dealing with resource shortages, pollution, worker suffrage, and great imbalances of trade from this "infinite consumerism" mentality. Infinite magic is the Amazon.com one-click anything goes mentality, and I can see why big companies don't want you questioning it. More on this later, but infinite magic I feel enables the "my reality, my fantasy" experience these companies are shipping today.

Fantasy Conveniences

I need my cell phone. I need my mass transit. I need my freedom of speech, freedom of association, and other human rights. I need my airline travel. I need my Internet. I need my speedy travel. I need my public education, schools, and universities. I need my on-call law enforcement with detectives and judicial resolution. I need my familiar governmental authorities and government programs. I need my modern outlook and assumptions. I don't want people of different heritages fighting or coming into conflict. The world must be cosmopolitan with dragon-folk, demon-bloods, and other fantastic races walking around without any differences, bad blood, mistreatment, or suspicion.

Very few of these things are in the historical record. They get Harry Pottered into a lot of these settings. The farther you go back, the more alien the world becomes in all of these regards.

The modernization of modern fantasy RPGs is this commercial force in making a product more acceptable to a mass audience. Some call it a Disney-ification of rules systems once they go mainstream, and you see that in some of the newer movie and series reboots as well.

I feel when companies add these fantasy conveniences where they create "magic parallel technology" for what are things we are used to in the modern world, something is lost. We aren't immersing ourselves in a unique world or time anymore. We don't have to be curious and figure things out. We don't have to learn the lands, peoples, and cultures. We have our traditional Western and current-day assumptions and biases preloaded into the setting and everything feels comfortable. The setting is pre-colonized with our biases and we don't need to learn to adjust to a different time and place.

We are still stuck in the modern world, the one just around us in our daily life, and never escaping it.

The OSR = Room to Explore

I feel this is why I am gravitating more towards the OSR. There is room for experiences outside of that generic fantasy core that has been overdone and I feel become a stereotype of the Western and Internet-centric experience.

How can we ever learn to understand and respect other cultures if we are constantly transposing our own reality onto everything we experience?

The OSR has a lot of room to explore, grow, and find niches that spur me to read history and understand a time outside my own. Also, to understand things from a non-Western perspective. ACKS got me deeply enthralled with the Middle Ages experience of faith, lordship, the pitiful worker experience, and the entire forging kingdoms through blood and conquest. Are there bad-controversial things in the game by today's standards such as forced-servitude? Yes. But as a player, I am free to fight them and correct that wrong, if I choose. The game doesn't erase things it doesn't want me to see.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess got me deeply into horror fiction and also the parallel horror of colonialism. Are there bad-controversial things this game? Yes, it is a horror game. But we need the terrible in here so we can confront our own fears and feelings about how Western society (and to be honest, a lot of non-Western societies) was built off the backs and blood of others. The game does not hide that truth that is integral to the horror experience.

ACKS and Lamentations have me buying and reading history. My real-world life and experience are growing, and I am educating myself as a life-long learner. Modern fantasy feels like a frozen TV dinner in comparison. It doesn't nourish me mentally, challenge me to rethink what I am told on the Internet, and give me that depth of knowledge that makes me an interesting person.

Lion & Dragon can also be mentioned here, but I am still reading that game and it looks like a fun one.

Are there less-heavy options in the OSR? We got Old School Essentials, Labyrinth Lord, Basic Fantasy, and Castles & Crusades that can fill the need. They can easily do "modern fantasy" if that is your thing, or they can do a lot of other things. The games aren't really written to enforce one world or style of play. If I want a game that doesn't challenge assumptions and delivers the modern feeling, they are all here.

We have Dungeon Crawl Classics out here too for a more Heavy Metal fantasy experience of gonzo anything goes play. And there are many others, from a Conan-style game to sci-fi, hexcrawls, gangsters, and many other options.

But most importantly, I have that choice, and I can play these grim and gritty and with any assumption I want. And I am not having modernity forced on my game because the rules include it as a requirement to make the game comfortable to a mainstream audience.

Also, the room I am finding to explore in the OSR is not only in the games I have to read and enjoy, but the room inside myself I have to grow as a person in my experience and knowledge.

The Rose-Colored Renaissance

I feel this idealized version of the Renaissance era so common in fantasy these days is becoming a bit overused. You know the trope, this quasi-theme park, everyone dressed in fancy period clothes, sort of happy and clean, everyone gets along sort of Disney Fantasyland fairy tale romanticized reality.

It works for game art, where things need to be this generic, family-friendly, happy reality of adventure and companionship. It also sells well. It is a very safe and manufactured reality designed to cause as little controversy as possible, multicultural and advertiser friendly, much like movies and art made for censorship-laden closed and repressive societies (or Western audiences).

It is "safe" in the best corporate sense, as in, no one is getting fired for shipping art, adventures, and game worlds like this.

But, History...

Contrast this with the real Renaissance? One of the largest wealth transfers in the history of the world as empires were built and other cultures around the world looted, used for slaves, made sub-servant parts of the globe-spanning conquest, natural resources taken, banking started, and the religions of Europe spread through religious conversion and missions? And all this ended in the Industrial Revolution.

Is that your happy, family-friendly fantasy model of reality? I feel it was a lie with happiness, good times, and that "ideal world" created by wealth stolen by world colonization and conquest. This was also a dark time for those under the heels of empires. Modern corporations of course idealize the conquerors and only show the smiling, happy face of the era.

Nothing is challenged, all they as is you accept that façade as reality.

And it sure wasn't a Renaissance to the conquered and subjugated peoples of the world.

The fashionable fantasy clothing you see in the art of these pictures was likely made from stolen textiles, dyes, labor, and resources from less fortunate cultures, often at the barrel of a gun or cannon.

Some fantasy worlds assume "everybody wins" and show every culture as this idealized, ideal place. The truth is having a true Renaissance comes off the backs of the oppressed. Wealth is a zero-sum game and it all comes from somewhere and someone less fortunate. For more there are a lot of courses, but I am reading this one currently:

https://www.amazon.com/Darker-Side-Renaissance-Territoriality-Colonization/dp/0472089315

So where is this going?

Lamentations of the Flame Princess

So I picked the LotFP game without the art and sort of dismissed the entire game. It was "just another" B/X game, and I had plenty of those so it did not catch my interest. It had some changes I felt broke compatibility, so I put it aside.

This was before I knew ACKS and some of the other great focused-design B/X games out there, and my opinion and world did a complete 180. Now, I love these B/X games that are designed to do one thing very well, and the generic ones are my second (but still solid) choices. My tastes are changing towards things that excite my interests, and that is cool.

With the art? The tone and feeling of LotFP changes. This is very much a B/X horror movie game, with a lot of changes made to the game to make the game less safe and a lot more tension filled. Like ACKS, the designers felt free to sacrifice sacred cows of the core B/X design, limit healing, and twist the powers and experience to match the feeling of dark horror. This is like the difference between reading the summary of a horror movie on Wikipedia versus watching it and having the experience yourself.

I feel LotFP does a much better job at horror than games like Warhammer FPRG or Zweihander, which have the grim and gritty rules and art, but don't dive into the darker psychological parts of the game. Many games can be grim and gritty, GURPS and Aftermath come to mind, but they don't communicate that on first look and they can be played in a less-deadly way by omitting a few rules.

LotFP is a unique perspective and look into a dark-horror Renaissance world.

My Interpretations Only

It is worth noting a lot of what I say here are my feelings, and what excites me to play LotFP. You may have a different inspiration, such as Lovecraftian horror or more gonzo strangeness.

For me, the idea of a decadent and self-righteous consumer society with a superiority complex trying to conquer and settle new lands - finding they are but tiny specks of nothing in a horrible universe excites me. It does have some Lovecraftian elements, but there is that Puritanical sense of cosmic retribution and horror present here. The Old World came to loot and subjugate a place they tragically misunderstood and will never, ever be able to survive in.

Yet they keep coming, and they keep trying, to horrible results. The New World is a place no one should have ever step foot upon.

One need only read the story of Roanoke Colony to understand what I am seeing.

The Blood-Spattered Renaissance

You know how in horror movies there is this Puritanical streak running through them, where "those who sin" suffer the most and die in the worst ways possible? Lamentations of the Flame Princess is that type of horror movie but for the colonial powers, their attitudes, their haughty self-important manners,  their self-righteousness, their pious slaughter-the-heathen religions, and their beliefs that they are the masters of a world and the conquerors of the same.

In short, they learn quick that the world is not what they think it is, and it takes this horrid, almost death-metal turn and one by one they fall. And in the end, no one believes they are so superior.

And often, there isn't an answer why everyone just died in the worst ways possible. The "New World" just hates you. Or even the Old World is sick of you and the dead walk again. Who knows?

Judgment is coming.

Too often I see this game played up as a "shock value" game for adults only. When you realize the tone, how they keep the basic characters and rules as close as possible to B/X, but with enough tweaks to take away that comfortable safety net of the traditional D&D style experience, and how the basic rules seem tame and lame - and then you dive into some of the classic adventures for the system and you are absolutely shocked?

Then you know, the basic rules set you up, and the adventures are your blood-curdling fall. Just like in the start of a horror movie, everything seems normal here...

And the John Carpenter's The Thing happens and your world turns into a nightmare.

Mork Borg (another great game) goes for more nihilism, the world ends when this adventure does. LotFP goes for puritanical judgement, and nails it squarely like a spike through the forehead of someone who "just stepped out of the room a moment ago."

I can't think of a game that contrasts the modern faux-corporate pre-colonial sensibilities of the romanticized rose-colored Renaissance any better than this one.

B/X Compatible

The game is B/X compatible, so it works with everything. Like ACKS redesigning the base game for conquering and kingdom management, LotFP redesigns the base game to accomplish a specific design goal, to tweak B/X for supernatural and psychological horror.

Other B/X games are more generic, such as Old School Essentials or Labyrinth Lord, though I could say the latter is more redesigned to present a mixed D&D and AD&D experience than OSE's complete rewrite of B/X as a unified game system. All of them, even some unmentioned, are great choices.

But take your LotFP characters through Barrowmaze or The Keep on the Borderlands? Perfectly doable. AC is Basic Fantasy style "roll higher" and pretty easy to convert from descending. Though here Base AC starts at 12 and goes to 18 (plate), instead of OSE base AC being 10 and going to 16 (plate). Fighters at level 1 start with a +2 attack bonus in LotFP, so it evens out for that class (and gives them a considerable buff to start). Other classes get an attack bonus of +1, and that does NOT go up.

Fighting is for fighters.

They probably made the AC changes to make fighters more attractive to play if you fight, and give the other classes another reason to avoid combat unless it is really necessary. Again, the design changes made to the game help reinforce the horror theme. Like a horror movie, there is a certain clarity to the character roles and they are the best at what they do. The doctor is a doctor. The police officer is the police officer. The science teacher is the science teacher. The classes that should not get better at combat as they level don't, but they do improve in other asymmetric ways.

This will throw balance issues into traditional B/X adventures, so hire retainers or take lots of fighters.

The Referee Book

If you are running the game, the older-version currently free referee book is worth reading for LotFP:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/148012/LotFP-Referee-Book-old-Grindhouse-Edition

There are some design notes in here worth keeping in mind, like avoiding the use of standardized monsters or magic items. There are notes on how to create worlds and how to maintain the suspense and horror. There are also suggestions on how to play horror, dealing with player preferences, and how to create mysteries and suspense.

There are also B/X conversion notes in here, and those help a great deal.

After I read this I felt the game seemed more like a generic horror game, like a Call of Cthulhu. I would really like the tone of this book to match the newer material in feeling and design, but that does not take away from the already great advice presented here.

If you have a strong feeling of how the game should be, and that inspires you, don't lose that if a module or the referee's book says otherwise. Or if this article says otherwise, for that matter. It is so easy to read supplemental material and lose that spark of inspiration that honestly makes the game yours and excites you to play and explore.

Also, the base no-art version of the game is free as well, so you can pick them both up and play for zero cost:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/115059/LotFP-Rules--Magic-Free-Version

B/X with a Design Goal

This game is a lot like ACKS, in that is it less a general-purpose B/X clone, but it can be used as one. Where the game really shines is in the design tweaks made to enhance the horror genre. Healing is limited. The roles are clarified. The base game is simple and B/X compatible.

Not all B/X games are made the same. Some are more generic systems (OSE). Others specialize in certain areas they want to focus more on (ACKS and LotFP). Some are built to emulate a feeling of a certain point in the hobby (Labyrinth Lord and Swords & Wizardry). Some start with B/X and build a new experience (Dungeon Crawl Classics and Castles & Crusades).

All of them are B/X-like systems. You may prefer one to the other, but all of them are cool.