Lamentations of the Flame Princess is made of lies
lumpley:
Fruitful, fruitful lies.
Let's see. It's our first real session, after a session of character creation and a bit of fumbling. I'm GMing. Meg's playing Van Joost, a dwarf. Sam's playing Brother Leobald, a cleric. Rob's playing Leike, a halfling. And Eppy's playing Brom, a magic user.
Our heroes land at a tiny stockade colony on the shore of the New World. I take my lead from Vance and provide them with more hooks and clues than they can possibly use, and some pretty good reasons to depart and/or overthrow the place. A vampire who visits the children's bunkhouse. The cursed pelt of the Wne Gikw Wakw. The colony fathers, who insist upon a policy of good order and, in return for an honest day's grueling labor, offer a generous least-share of the colony's annual increase, plus a cot in the men's bunkhouse and twice daily meals of boiled grain-kernels and salted rabe. The Warranawankong, who gather at night up the beach, where they toast crustaceans and mollusks and drink fermented tree sap and sing. Lost Vikano-dwarfish gold. The trappers' camp. Matthew Luke and Phillip, the three Mioonkhtuck who were "elected" by their people to convert to Christianity and join the colony to see if that life has anything better to offer than their own.
Now with Phillip to lead them they've departed the compound, following Brother Leobald on his utter fool's mission to spread the Word of Our Lord to the Rechgawawanc, who share their forest home with cannibal giants. It was a toss-up between them and the Mioonkhtuck, who, in the words of Phillip, "lead peaceful though benighted lives, and only rarely eat the brains of our enemies."
So that's a world of fun.
But the lies:
Before we started, I had a whole different vision for how the game would go. I expected and wanted something weird-horror-historical, straight up, with the sort of consistent moral underpinning that'd make it horror, you know? Where it's not just the players who judge whether letting a vampire eat your children is a moral failing, it's me, and it's the game world's conceptual structure (or something, I'm just making this up). Where a vampire is by nature a creature of moral failing, like it would be in Dogs in the Vineyard. I wanted a more adult, bloodier and scarier, more perilous version of my game Storming the Wizard's Tower, for those of you who know that game.
I believed - and still believe! - that this expectation of mine was well-warranted by the game's GMing text.
But then we sat down to make characters, and ... I dunno. I remarked to Eppy toward the end of character creation that I hadn't expected all this implicit Vance. I regarded it as a big problem, a betrayal, a complete undermining of my prepped enthusiasm. Where I thought and believed that the game's GMing text had oriented me to its rules, it hadn't. It had put me in tension with them instead! They weren't going to give me what I'd hoped for, at all, and the only way for me to reconcile my expectations with the reality of the rules was to go all frickin' Vance with it. The moral underpinning has to go out the window, to be replaced by an ironic and cynical relativism antithetical to straight-up gritty weird historical horror. I was discouraged and pretty mad.
If you ask me to point to the particular betrayal in the rules, that I noticed during character creation and pegged as "implicit Vance," I won't be able to do it. I just remember that slow uncomfortable realization that I'd signed up for something I hadn't signed up for. Maybe I'd still get to have my child-eating vampire or whatever, but I sure wouldn't get my precious system-supported, setting-supported moral outrage.
Then I remembered how much I love Vance, of course, and how much I'd enjoy trying to channel him, and just how much fun his ironic, cynical relativism is. So now it's great.
Anyway, I think that's pretty interesting. When I played Moldvay D&D a few years ago, I could just fill in its spaces with what I wanted to do, but somehow the mis-orientation of Lamentation's GMing text to its actual rules left me with only the one fruitful way to go.
-Vincent
Judd:
Vincent, could you explain how the system supports moral outrage?
Its surprising that you mention being surprised by the Vance in this game because lately it has occurred to me that I enjoy dungeon crawling in a D&D style more when the Tolkien inspirations are dialed WAY down and the weirder elements of Leiber and Vance are dialed way, way up. When I've mentioned this to friends online, they've pointed me at LotFP and I was planning on picking it up when I had a few bucks.
Eero Tuovinen:
That's an interesting reaction to the text. I think it's illustrative that when I read the GMing text in LotFP, I came to it from a heavily opinionated gamist perspective, expecting the text to either fail or redeem as a treatment on how to reconsile player freedom, GM preparation and the sort of drastic consequences (party death) that D&D is known for. I was reading it in the context of D&D and my own research on refereed adventure gamism, with the outcome that I didn't get any moral underpinnings from it at all - there was some noise about horror in the arrangement, but it all seemed to me just some arbitrary aesthetics that by itself has no bearing upon the procedures of old school D&D at all. In fact, for me the most important bits of the GMing instructions were the spots where the aesthetic procedures conflict against traditional D&D materials: when Jim writes about how greenskins need to be replaced with human aboriginals and how there should be no such things as generic magic items, those are the important principles that latch onto the changes he made to the rules to produce the LotFP-style grim and true-to-life D&D.
Insofar as it matters, I agree with Jim wholeheartedly about the aesthetic direction he's attempting in there for D&D: he's creating a D&D that does not involve mechanical inflation as the systemic basis, and trying to remove the stylistic conventions from stakes and consequences encountered by the player characters, enabling a more natural flow of events without all the cruft that's built up on D&D fantasy, distancing it from its literary antecendents. The "weird fantasy" program is, I understand, primarily his way of deciphering these structural goals of setting up the game - as is often the case with roleplaying gamers, he's discussing literary style as a shorthand for actual play-impacting procedures. It's sort of the same thing you get with the various official D&D campaign settings, where it's implicitly expected that swapping orcs for vampires in Ravenloft will make the players play with more moral gravity.
The game you describe, by the way, seems to be Dread - it does that moral-center-lies-with-the-GM thing just about perfectly, I find. Looking the LotFP text over now I do see the spots you mean, stuff about imposing gravitas upon the players. I have to admit that I just about ignored all that when reading the book for my own purposes, being as how I was so deep into my own discourse upon D&D's nature at the moment - it was easy to pin-point the bits that would be irrelevant to how I understand D&D, that were only there to fulfill the traditional requirements of what you should write about when writing GMing texts. I was reading with the conviction that I had a funnily-named D&D text in my hands, so interpreted my reading in that light.
But yeah, I agree with your ultimate conclusion - there's no moral underpinning to LotFP, and the horror thing is just aesthetic color on what is essentially a brutally challenge-oriented fine-tuning of Mentzer D&D. The horror is not entirely insignificant in that it impacts the nature of the situations the player characters end up in, but that's not theme at all, it's just campaign logistics: instead of having monster-slaying be a routine occupation in the setting, it's "horror", meaning that nobody in the setting does it except the player characters, who go to the dark places and experience the horror others won't acknowledge. The horror thing has more to do with how you frame your challenge set-ups within the campaign setting than with anything thematic and personally meaningful for anybody.
I've read about other people coming to the game with the expectation that it'd be a horror game of some sort, and it is a fair assumption based on much of the marketing - the back cover text, particularly, which Jim wrote in the traditional RPG author bullshit mode, insofar as I understand, but also the illustrations and such. While people coming to the game with the expectation that it's part of the on-going D&D discussion don't seem to get confused with it, it would probably have been better overall to have the text be more clear about how all that fluff is still for the purpose of coloring an amoral universe where scruples are something your character gets the luxury of by first being a success. Old school D&D, in other words, just with an aesthetic program and a chip on its shoulder about character advancement.
--
Regarding your campaign, an unrelated question occurs to me out of curiousity: how comfortable are you with the demihuman PC races as a part of your setting? I'm asking because it's a prominent place where Jim was rather light-handed in revising Mentzer; considering his aesthetic program, I'd have scuttled the lot myself, and other people (Jim included) have said as much. It's not impossible to do the demihuman thing without being awfully cheesy, I think (see my recent favourite Anomalous Subsurface Environment for an example), but at least for me it takes some active work to visualize how my setting needs to be to handle these forehead-swap aliens walking about.
lumpley:
Hey, Judd, Eero, if I say this following, are you both with me? I expect so:
Moral questions and answers can create fun tactical texture in Step On Up play the same way that tactical questions and answers can create fun moral texture in Story Now play.
An example of the latter: does being able to seize the throne make you a better king? An example of the former: does being a good king make you better able to seize the throne?
For Lamentations of the Flame Princess, I'm all about moral questions and answers creating fun tactical texture in Step On Up play. That's unchanged, that was always my plan.
I was expecting it to go one particular way: I'd create a horror, meaning a moral outrage dressed up in gaudy gory imagery, and the PCs' righteousness, or compromise, or fear, or desperation would create fun tactical texture. Their response to the horror is would be up to them, of course, but fundamentally they'd identify it as a moral outrage, right? Because it would be one.
It turns out it's going a different way: instead, I create a system of cowardly, self-serving banalities dressed up in gaudy gory imagery, and the PCs' indifference to it or engagement with it - again, totally up to them - creates fun tactical texture. I present the child-killing vampire and they shrug and go off with Phillip and Brother Leobald, and they're not allowing a moral outrage to stand, the way the would be in the game I imagined. They're simply affirming the immutable nature of the world, which is that generally one selfish creature is able to assert itself upon another, to the detriment of the latter.
I don't know if this is making sense! I don't know if it's making sense at all.
I'll come back and answer about the demihuman races, though. That'll be more concrete.
-Vincent
Callan S.:
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where scruples are something your character gets the luxury of by first being a success.
In something like riddle of steel, you have the spiritual attributes. I imagine in LOTFP you can accumulate money, the better weapons and armour and perhaps even magic.
So it's possible to read that progression as an empowerment like spiritual attributes empower whatever character principles. To read it that the gold you took after killing is also an out of game nod of encouragement towards play that questions that killing.
But it's also possible to read it as you might read chess. I'm thinking of a player in some D&D 4E encounters I've played in who actually says he sets out to make a broken ranger (and by gosh, it outputs some high damage numbers!). Such a thing always strikes me as being like a scar upon the fictional landscape. Not so much because I give a shit whether it's just played like chess, but presumably the player is attracted by the fiction to some degree. So he's attracted to the fiction, but he makes things within it that are devoid of fiction - thus creating a scar against, apparently, his very own pursuit. I can almost imagine this scar simply traveling about the sense of bad and even good things in the game world, moral outrages, whatever, and tearing them all to dust and tinder as a set of numbers pursues the accumulation of more numbers, making one long scar through it all. Kind of an avatar of nihilism. Great damage output, though. ;)
I'd consider whether LOTFP can just as easily slip into the latter, for any given player, due to mechanical structure, and also due to mechanical structure, that'll just seem to be how you play to that player. There wont be any moral texture to it all from the perspective they are mechanically sat in by the rules, even if you try real hard as a GM or even as fellow player. Just numbers, some higher, some lower, some ambiguous.
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but at least for me it takes some active work to visualize how my setting needs to be to handle these forehead-swap aliens walking about.
Perhaps fly the idea at the game table of humans as also being demihumans themselves? No one gets to be the one, definite, true race, even though every race thinks they are.
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