Steel vs Powder

The mid-16th century is really the tipping point between the Age of Steel and the Age of Powder. In the novel I am currently reading (Eclipse of the Crescent Moon), there is this scene where the captain defending the fortress at Eger is going through the list of weapons stored in the armoury with his lieutenants to make sure they can withstand the Turkish onslaught:

[...] Bronze and iron falconets from Prague and Csetnek, 300. Rifles, 93. German rifles, 194.

‘They’re worth nothing!’ croaked Cecey. ‘A good bow is worth more than any rifle.’

This caused a small controversy. The older ones approved of Cecey’s words. The younger ones were for the rifles.

Read/Write Skill

“On the map the fortresses were shown as tent-shaped figures,  and the forests had their trees sketched in them. These were good maps. They could easily be understood even by those who could not read. And at that time even among the titled nobility there were many who could neither read nor write. And why should they? It was the job of the clerk to write if anything needed writing, and if a letter arrived, to read it to his master.”

Géza Gárdonyi, Eclipse of the Crescent Moon

Has the Countess Been Framed?

On the 31st of December 1612, the countess Elizabeth Báthory is arrested by the men of count György Thurzó, the Palatine of Hungary, at Csejte Castle, her home in Upper Hungary. The accusation was that she had ritually tortured and murdered 650 virgin girls to steal their beauty and their youth. Thus began the infamous legend of the notorious ‘Blood Countess’.

But maybe the whole story was a conspiracy set up by the Roman catholic Habsburgs who took a dim view of the rising power of House Báthory, who were both protestant and independent-minded? Moreover, the Holy Roman Emperor Matthias owed a considerable debt to the countess, a debt that would be cancelled should she be found guilty...

The French graphic novel Báthory carries out the enquiry.

Big LotFP PDF Sale!

Yay!

James Raggi is having a big sale of all the Lamentations of the Flame Princess PDFs over at DriveThruRPG! All titles are sold at EUR 1.14, and there is even an “everything bundle” at EUR 47.70.

You don’t want to miss out on iconic titles such as Death Frost Doom, Carcosa, Vornheim, or on the more historical-oriented ones (if you’re a reader of this blog...) such as The Magnificent Joop van Ooms, Forgive Us, England Upturn’d, No Rest for the Wicked, Midvinter, Terror in the Streets... even if they are set in the 17th century rather than the 16th like the material in this blog.

Beware, the sale ends on Tuesday 16 May.

[Edit] James Raggi has just announced that there will also be a print sale starting on Monday 15 May so you can have the actual products in your grubby hands.

“Delusions are lies that tell the truth”

I went to see Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 film Suspiria* and had my mind blown away. So rich, so intense, and it resonated with many of my own fantasies and fears.

First of all, this is not a horror flick. I repeat, this is not a horror flick. At the end of the show, when the lights came back, I noticed two young guys who looked disappointed, and I could hear them mutter that it hadn’t been what they had expected. Yeah sorry tossers, Hostel part XVII was showing in the other theatre.

Suspiria is actually more like cosmic horror à la Lovecraft. Sara’s character, for instance, is a lot like most protagonists in Lovecraft short stories: they deny the evidence of bad shit happening until it’s too late.

And, just like Lovecraft short stories were deeply ingrained in their time, Guadagnino has managed to perfectly fit Suspiria in the mood of 1970s Europe, at a time when the wounds of WWII hadn’t healed yet, and European youth was rebelling.

The above doesn’t mean that Suspiria is a Lovecraftian film though. It is not. Lovecraft did not understand (and probably feared) women and female sexuality. Suspiria’s cast is 100% female** and the plot revolves around [mild spoiler] the fact that a foremost, all-female dance institute in Berlin is actually a coven of witches; the pupils live at the school and there are innuendos about Sapphic love.

For me, Suspiria is a film that explores a part of our psyche and culture that is usually overlooked in our patriarchal society: the role and place of womanhood, of female sexuality, of the three visages of Woman: the virgin, the mother, the crone. And just like “kung-fu” movies celebrate the male body, Suspiria, with its breath-taking dance scenes, celebrates the female body.

So what’s in there for the RPG buff?

The obvious answer is, inspiration for a contemporary horror RPG***. This is so obvious that I won’t expand. Depending on the maturity of your players you may emphasise the female sexuality aspect, or the political one, neither, or both.

Gloranthan fans will find food for thought aplenty:
a) First, the whole film is a great illustration of why the Dance skill is actually super useful. And, based upon the already-classic “Olga scene”, you could even devise a whole magic system based upon dancing moves. Think of the implications for matriarchal societies… How cool is that?
b) There’s also quite a lot to be salvaged in terms of dreams, how they are suggested to one’s victim, how they influence reality, etc. Great stuff for a game set in Eastern Genertela.
c) And, last but not least, there’s also a profound reflection on illusions. “Delusions are lies that tell the truth” is a phrase the Doctor says. I can see implications on Eurmali hero quests.

If Suspiria is not a horror film, it certainly is a weird one, as in: weird as a genre. So if you like Lamentations of the Flame Princess, you will find tons of gameable ideas in this film. I reckon you could actually transpose the whole film to the same milieu as Better Than Any Man, as a sister or alternate adventure, the coven of witches being allies or nemeses of the ones in Jim Raggi’s adventure.


* Luca Guadagnino says his film is not a remake of the classic 1977 giallo, but a re-telling.
** Even the only male protagonist of the film, the Doctor, is played by a female actress with prosthetics, Tilda Swinton
*** Because horror RPGs are not the same “horror” as horror films.

Constitutio Criminalis Carolina

The following will prove interesting and useful for anyone running games in a modern European setting, e.g., the one tentatively being built via this blog, or the underlying canonical setting of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, etc.

In 1530, the German estates assembled at at the Diet of Augsburg under Holy Roman Emperor Charles V agreed upon a body of criminal law known as the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina. This body of law was ratified in 1532 at the Diet in Regensburg to be used as the common civil and criminal law throughout the Holy Roman Empire — whose laws were a haphazardly mix of local and customary laws depending on the local jurisdiction a person was to be tried in.

Under the terms of the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, actions such as murder, manslaughter, robbery, arson, forgery, homosexual relations and witchcraft were henceforth defined as severe crimes. In particular, the Carolina specified that those found guilty of causing harm through witchcraft should be executed with fire, laying the foundation for the mass witch trials between 1580 and 1680. It was also the basis for the use of obtaining confessions by torture.

So what can the player characters expect if they are arrested in post-1532 Central Europe?

First of all, torture! Torture to obtain more proof is only allowed if there is at least a “half-proof” against the defendant to start with, like for instance two eyewitnesses, or one eyewitness and a partial confession.

The kind of questions the interrogators may ask is also restricted by the Carolina. Basically, no leading questions are allowed. For instance, the interrogator may ask what weapon has been used in a case of murder, but not if it was a knife.

Even the confession has to be corroborated. So if you have confessed under torture that you hid the stolen money in place X, the investigators have to recover the money from place X, or else the confession is not valid.

Also the proceedings have now to be public (contrary to earlier law), and innocent victims of justice can sue the officials.

Some excerpts of the Carolina are available in English here.

this blog entry compiled from the wikipedia and this web-site

Because Fuck You, That's Why

From James Raggi on Google+: the artwork, by Yannick Bouchard, of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess catalogue at Spiel.

Pure LotFP-ey art.

The Tale of Tales

Giambattista Basile (1566-1632) was an Italian writer. He is particularly remembered for his collection of Neapolitan-language fairy tales titled the Tale of Tales. In 2015, the Italian director  Matteo Garrone made an English-language film, titled Tale of Tales, loosely adapted from three of the tales: The Enchanted Doe, The Flea, and The Flayed Old Lady.

The film is quite LotFP-ey, especially the most grotesque scenes, and in particular the whole part with the giant flea, the betrothal of Violet to the ogre, and the ensuing mayhem. I heartily recommend it.

Anyway, I started scouring the internet for information about the Tale of Tales, and I stumbled upon a collection of illustrations by the decadent Austrian artist Franz von Bayros (1866-1924). They are quite LotFP-ey too :-)

Renaissance Magic

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) was a Romance nobleman and philosopher who studied the various occult traditions from around the Mediterranean, both within and without the True Faith, and who ordered and classified them as an organised philosophical art.

Pico della Mirandola divided Magic into two different forms: Natural Magic, and Demonic Magic.

Natural Magic is based upon the study of the forces of nature, the four elements, esotericism, etc., and is deemed compatible with the True Faith. Demonic Magic is based upon the invocation of occult forces and is not to be dabbled in.

Pico's ideas have given birth to Renaissance Magic, and to the practice for powerful noblemen to keep court magicians. Many of these court magicians write magical grimoires; the most famous one is Giambattista della Porta (1535–1615) with his book Magia Naturalis (1558).
In Northern Europe, Pico's system has been made popular by the Almain polymath Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535). Obviously, in a age of crazed witch hunts, the line between Natural and Demonic Magic is not clear-cut but often dictated by religious interests, and so the profession of magician is a most dangerous one...

NB— This post has been inspired by this article.

Better Than Any Man Prequel

I am going to run a kind of alternative prequel to Better Than Any Man, set before the death of Gabriele Bauer. The latter entrusts the player characters (all of them are female teenagers) with travelling to the War Room in Cachtice, in Voivodja, in order to figure out the exact position of Gustavus Adolphus' army [I know this is not what is written in the description of the war room, but I'm modifying that— in my version of Voivodja, the war room shows the movements of all armies in all known worlds]. Gabriele Bauer intends to use the information to organise the safe escape of Karlstadt's population before the Swedes are upon the hapless town.

Map of Europe at the Time of the Blood Countess

This is a map of Europe at the Time of the Blood Countess. It is based on the real Europe at the turn of the 17th century, with some simplifications.

Minor States
1: Most Serene Republic of Venedig
2: Patrimony of Saint Peter
3: Principality of Schwarzenberg
4: Sultanate of Maghribia

The Fair Kingdom
A: part of the Fair Kingdom under the suzerainty of the Empire of the One Faith
B: part of the Fair Kingdom occupied by the Empire of the Crescent Moon
C: Principality of Transylvania, semi-independent vassal of the Empire of the Crescent Moon

Other vassals of the Empire of the Crescent Moon
D: Bogdania
E: Herdsland

Mr Selden's Map of China

Being obsessed with the history of East Asia, and in particular with the history of China and her neighbours during the early modern times, I have bought and read Mr Selden’s Map of China: The Spice Trade, a Lost Chart and the South China Sea by renowned Sinologist Timothy Brook (Profile Books).

The book is an account of how a detailed map of the East and South China Seas came into the possession of the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, accompanied by many considerations about sea voyages in the 17th century, mapmaking in the East v mapmaking in the West, and social mobility in early modern England. In the end, I was slightly disappointed by the fact that the main focus of the book was not 17th century China, but 17th century England. The so-called Selden Map of China, which gives its title to the book, was made by a Chinese mapmaker in the East Indies (certainly not in China, where it was forbidden to give maps of the country to foreigners — under pain of death) for a factor of the British East India Company. It was later bequeathed to the English scholar John Selden, who willed it to the Bodleian Library.

As I've mentioned above, on top of dealing with maritime travel and trade in East Asia at the beginning of the 17th century, the book also provides intensive insight into English society in the early modern period, with a particular focus on the rapid social advancement of people like Samuel Purchas, John Saris, or John Selden; people born at the lower end of the social ladder but who managed to climb close to its top thanks to the patronage of various powerful people: bishops, members of Parliament, wealthy traders...

I think the book can give great input for two different but highly important aspects of a 17th century Lamentations of the Flame Princess campaign game:

1) How to introduce player characters to wealthy patrons. This can provide a (somewhat railroad-y) spark for many scenarios: “OK I buy you equipment but you go and pilfer <insert MacGuffin> from this rival of mine.” or: “Can you please escort me to this old abandoned mansion I have inherited from a childless uncle?”
It can also explain how some lowly ruffians (the player characters) can get information about important facts in the realm.

2) It gives detailed information about the inner workings of the British East India Company, which can be very useful should the referee want to set up a maritime campaign.

Raggi Interview

I am not a big fan of podcasts, but there is one which I really like, called the Good Friends of Jackson Elias, that is devoted to Lovecraft and the weird~horror genre.

The latest episode features a long interview of James Raggi, the man behind the weird fantasy role-playing game Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Enjoy!

The Horrors of Middlehelm

This is fresh in from the Google+ LotFP community. Christopher Kubasik has written an adventure that serves as a bridge between A Stranger Storm and Death Frost Doom; it is available here.

Altai

I have just read Altai, a novel by the Italian writers' collective Wu Ming. Here is the official blurb: When a fire breaks out in the Arsenal of Venice in 1569, the enigmatic Emmanuele De Zante, spy catcher and agent of the Venetian secret service, finds himself in jail accused of treason, having been betrayed by his lover. He escapes and embarks on an odyssey that takes him to the Sultan's palace in Constantinople. Spiralling through a series of deadly political games, De Zante and his companions head toward a conflict that threatens the very nature of civilisation. A historical epic spanning a continent scarred by war, Altai went straight into the best-sellers list when first published in Italy. It is a coruscating portrait of the divided world - east meets west - in the sixteenth century, where the great empires of the Republic of Venice and the Ottomans are on the verge of an epoch-making conflict. In this dramatic landscape, the authors' collective Wu Ming has created a powerful narrative of danger, identity and adventure.

What I can add is that the story is extremely LotFP-ey, what with the extremely grisly depictions of the military events and of the torture administered to the prisoners of war — except that the usual northern-European background is replaced with a slightly more mysterious and exotic Levantine one.

I can see a GM building a campaign of epic proportions, obviously not by having the PCs slavishly follow the events of the book (a novel is not an RPG scenario!), but by setting a mostly naval campaign against the backdrop of the Venetian-Ottoman rivalry in the cosmopolitan East Mediterranean, and by borrowing some key scenes from the novel like the siege of Famagusta and the battle of Lepanto.

Kronstadt

Kronstadt (sometimes also spelt Cronstadt) is a wealthy burg in the mountainous eastern half of the Fair Kingdom. Much like Clausenburg, it is firmly in the hands of the New Wayers.

A large part of the population consists of people descended from colonists from Teutonia who settled here between the 12th and the 14th century. The location of the city at the intersection of trade routes linking the Empire of the Crescent Moon and Western Europe has made it extremely rich. As a result, many guilds and traders houses of the eastern half of the Fair Kingdom are headquartered in Kronstadt.

Castles of the Fair Kingdom

If you navigate to this web-site and click on the word ‘részletek’ next to the name of each single castle, you will see a drawing of said castle. Here are some of my favourite ones:

Castle Boldogkő

Castle Zeßnegg

Castle Großwaschon

Castle Inselsburg

Slight Changes to LotFP's Skill Mechanics

James Raggi has announced on the Lamentations of the Flame Princess Google+ community that he was working on a slightly revised version of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess rules.

At the moment, he’s only "leaked" the following information:

1) There will be more elements for maritime adventures; in particular, there will be a Seamanship skill within the set of new skills (see note #3 below).

2) The Cleric character class will be moved to the appendices as an optional character class; it will be more difficult to get healing! Demi-humans (in line with the more "Early Modern Europe" look and feel of the latest adventures) are also going to be moved to the appendices.

3) The skill system will be re-worked and expanded. There will be, in particular, more skills to choose from at character generation, and the players will get to distribute a set amount of points among these skills to create their starting character rather than all have the same set of starting skills [this is a good step towards a classless D&D-ish system, he he...]. The mechanism itself will move from roll-under to rolling a D6, adding the number of skill dots, and having to get 7 or more to succeed.

All in all, these are all very welcome moves in the right direction.

Leonardo Da Vinci's War Machines

Polymath Leonardo da Vinci designed a lot of war machines during his career. Luckily, I have recently been able to visit a display of wooden models of his inventions in a Tuscan museum. The sheer amount and diversity of his inventions is simply mind-boggling. Luckily (?) it appears that none of his designs were ever actually used, but if you're a weird fantasy referee, you may safely transform your Renaissance setting into a "Renaissance-punk" one.

Leonardo da Vinci lived almost exactly 100 years before the Blood Countess, so you may consider that, by the times of the Csachticz campaign setting, whatever secret machines he had created had spread all the way to the Fair Kingdom and the surrounding warring empires.

You may have a look at this blog entry here, and at my pictures below for inspiration.

Glider (simpler design, with a rudder)

Glider (wing-like)

Vertical Parachute

Artificial Wings

Bicycle

Mechanism to counter siege ladders

Scythe Chariot

Ninja-Style Climbing Gear

Ninja-Style Water Walking Gear

LotFP Web-Store: Free Shipping Sale

Raggi is celebrating the fact that he's hit 1,000 followers on his Facebook LotFP page and on his G+ LotFP community by giving us free shipping on his web-store. Here are the exact details:

Coupon code 1000YOUNG at the LotFP web-store will get you free shipping worldwide as long as Idea from Space, Scenic Dunnsmouth, Qelong, Tower of the Stargazer, Fuck For Satan, Forgive Us, The God that Crawls, The Monolith from Beyond Space and Time, or The Doom-Cave of the Crystal-Headed Children are part of the order. You can add other items to your order and still get free shipping as long as the order includes at least one of the listed books. The coupon code will expire MONDAY 30 MARCH 2015 10:00 EET.

(When ordering, the place to enter the coupon code pops up after choosing a shipping method, ALL ORDERS USING THIS CODE WILL BE SENT ECONOMY CLASS.)