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

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 :-)

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.

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.

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.

LotFP Magic Item Contest – The Shrink Bullets

James Raggi has unveiled the results of his LotFP Magic Item Contest and I was not amongst the finalists. As a result, I am publishing my entry on the blog. Enjoy.

The Shrink Bullets
This magic item assumes you're playing in a Renaissance campaign, which anyway seems to be the focus of the latest LotFP supplements.
The Shrink Bullets are created by black powder-inclined magicians only. Their creation requires assistance by an alchemist that has undergone training in modern chemistry, and who shall hence be paid the double wage normally expected by an alchemist. Each Shrink Bullet requires 1D6 days of laboratory work and 1D12×50sp worth of materials.

Each Shrink Bullet is worth 5,000sp (because of its magical properties; the materials themselves are worth as per above). The Shrink Bullets can only be used in a perfectly hand-crafted gun, worth at least ×10 the price of a standard gun.
Each Shrink Bullet ignores up to 5 points of armour protection, but does 1D4 of damage only. If the result is a natural '1', the bullet doesn't inflict any actual damage but releases its dweomercraft. The target must save vs Magical Device or be "shrunk" and captured within the non-exploded bullet.

Later on, the magician may use the non-exploded bullet containing the captured victim against another target. This time, upon impact, the bullet won't inflict any damage but will release the 'captured' victim, full-size, right next to the intended target. The 'captured' victim will fight on behalf of the magician, at his full strength and capacity at the time of capture, for a duration of 1D12 rounds. At the expiration of the last round of bondage, the victim will have no recollection of what happened to him after the bullet impact that captured him in the first place.

A magician is limited by his level in the number of captured victims that he possesses in his Shrink Bullets at any given time.

Captured victims are constantly and unconsciously trying to regain their freedom. Every day, there is a cumulative 1% chance that a captured victim is spontaneously released from its Shrink Bullet. When this happens, the freed victim attacks the closest creature for 1D12 rounds as per above.

Creatures only hit by magic weapons have a +4 bonus when saving against a Shrink Bullet.

A Red & Pleasant Land: Playing Cards & Suits

Central European cards

When people think about a deck of playing cards, they usually think of the following four suits: Spades (♠), Hearts (♥), Diamonds (♦), and Clubs (♣).

In A Red & Pleasant Land, Zak S. has obviously used the four aforementioned suits, what with the Alice in Wonderland connection. The four suits feature prominently in Chapter III, Beasts & People, because of the various Orders named after the suits in the employ of the Heart Queen.

However, given the prevalent Mitteleuropean milieu of the setting, I think it would have been nice to introduce Central European suits, and also to expand upon their possible use with the game. This is what I am going to attempt here.

First, a word about playing cards— They were introduced from Mamluk Egypt to Europe via Italy in the 14th century. Italian playing cards (used to this day) have retained the original Mamluk suits of swords, cups, coins, and staves. In the mid-15th century, in Central Europe, these suits became leaves, hearts, bells, and acorns. At the end of the 15th century, the French derived the presently-known suits from the Central European ones.

Playing cards have, since the very beginning, piqued the interest of occultists and diviners, who have devised all manners of correspondences between the suits and various elements of European life, e.g.:

Suit	Social Class	Season	Element	Divination
Leaves	Burghers	Autumn	Air	Hope
Hearts	Clergy	Spring	Water	Love
Bells	Nobility	Summer	Earth	Money
Acorns	Peasants	Winter	Fire	Trouble

You will notice that Acorns correspond to both 'winter' and 'fire'... So much for consistency!

Another difference between French playing cards and Central European decks is in the area of face cards. Whereas French cards sport the well-known Jack, Queen, and King, Central European cards have three male face cards per suit: Unter (a lower-class knave), Ober (an upper-class knave), and König (King). Aces are also slightly different, as each ace in a Central European deck depicts one of the seasons of the year.

Bells, Acorns, and Leaves cards.

So how would the use of Central European cards impact A Red & Pleasant Land?

First of all, both French and Central European cards use Hearts as one of the suits, so at least there wouldn't be any change in this respect, and the Heart Queen would remain the Heart Queen (but see below).

The orders would be modified as follows:
✠ The Order of Clubs (soldiers) becomes the Order of Acorns
✠ The Order of Diamonds (courtiers) becomes the Order of Bells
✠ The Order of Spades (commoners) becomes the Order of Leaves

Another impact would be a reduced number in monarchs: instead of six decapitated lords, 3 kings and 3 queens, there are only three– the three Kings of Bells, Acorns, and Leaves.

As for Hearts, instead of having a timid king and a queen, the use of Central European playing cards would imply:
✠ The Queen of Hearts, female counterpart to the King of Hearts (works as the Heart Queen described in A Red & Pleasant Land) except that she's naturally the top ruler of Hearts
✠ The Ober of Hearts — use the King of Hearts described in the book in his role as the general of the Hearts' army
✠ The Unter of Hearts — use the Knave of Hearts as described in the book

Should you be able to get hold of a Central European deck of cards, you could use them along with the 'correspondences' table above to ad-lib the effects of spells (via the elements or the divination column), to randomly generate NPCs, etc. You may also add the following (even though I prefer not to use demi-humans in a faux European setting):

Suit	Class	Race
Leaves	Magic-User	Elf
Hearts	Cleric	Human
Bells	Fighter	Dwarf
Acorns	Specialist	Halfling

A Red & Pleasant Land: The Alice – A New Character Class

I am crap at writing reviews, so instead of writing a review of the marvellous Lamentations of the Flame Princess sandbox supplement titled A Red & Pleasant Land, I will be posting a blog entry for each of its chapters. That will be my way of writing a review of sorts, by showcasing how inspiring reading the book has been to me.

Chapter II of A Red & Pleasant Land is entirely devoted to the description of a new LotFP character class called The Alice. Now instead of merely paraphrasing this chapter (because that's pretty much all you can do with a technical piece such as a new character class), I'll be repurposing The Alice character class for the Monsters & Magic role-playing game, along the lines of what David Rollins has done for D&D 5e.

The Alice
a new character class for Monsters & Magic

Prime Attribute: Dexterity
Physical Hit Points: D4
Mental Hit Points: D10
Starting Money: 3D4×10

As explained in A Red & Pleasant Land, whereas your average adventurer sets out looking for adventure, in the case of Alices, it is actually adventure that seeks them. The Alice is a mysterious magnet for odd occurrences, perplexing phenomena, and extraordinary endeavours.

Restrictions
Alices are human, and from a civilised background.


Alice Traits
✠ Light Armour
✠ Simple 1-Handed Weapons
✠ Tool of the Trade: Choose one particular Game or Musical Instrument
✠ Luck Manipulation (as described in Aperita Arcana)
✠ Read and Write
✠ Exasperation, per the text in A Red & Pleasant Land, but use the Effect Engine instead of rolling the dice, i.e.:

• Difficulty: whatever is causing the exasperation, or a GM-set value (p37 of M&M)
• Minor effect, subtract 5 and read the resulting number on the Exasperation table on p31 of A Red & Pleasant Land
• Major effect, subtract 10 and read the resulting number on the Exasperation table, allow for some leeway
• Extreme effect, let the Alice choose the number on the Exasperation table

Alice Advancements
Each time the Alice levels up, instead of letting the player choose the advancement, have them roll 1D100:

1D100 Roll	Results
01-20	The Alice may choose one of the Monk traits on p17 of M&M as an Advancement
21-70	The Alice may choose one of the Thief traits on p22 of M&M as an Advancement
71-74	per the text of the Alice D100 Level Up Table on p32-33 of A Red & Pleasant Land
75	The Alice gets Recognise Faction or Function of Any Voivodjan Aristocrat as an Advancement
76-79	per the text of the Alice D100 Level Up Table
80	The Alice may replace STR with CHA in a combat roll
81	The Alice gets Identify Drugs & Plants as an Advancement
82	The Alice gets Lie Convincingly as an Advancement
83	per the text of the Alice D100 Level Up Table
84	The Alice gets Voivodjan Etiquette as an Advancement
85-87	per the text of the Alice D100 Level Up Table
88	The Alice gets an extra language as an Advancement
89	The Alice gets Artistic Forgery as an Advancement
90	The Alice gets Appraise Treasure as an Advancement
91-93	The Alice may replace STR with DEX in a combat roll
94	per the text of the Alice D100 Level Up Table
95	The Alice gets Dodge Missiles as an Advancement
96	The Alice gets the Stalwart Defence stance (p42 of M&M) as an Advancement
97-98	The Alice gets Sylvan Sympathy as an Advancement
99-00	The Alice gets Utterly Blasé as an Advancement

As a bonus, I am adding a further sub-class of the Alice, the Goose-boy, devised by yours truly, and inspired by Lúdas Matyi, the Hungarian epic poem written by Mihály Fazekas.

The Goose-Boy
a new Alice sub-class for Monsters & Magic

Secondary Attribute:Wisdom
Starting Money: 5D6

The Goose-boy is the commoner counterpart to the Alice. The Goose-boy starts as a young peasant boy who leads a quiet life but who is severely wronged by some upper-class NPC, and who sets out on an adventure to settle a score with the NPC.

Restrictions
The Goose-boy is a human from the sticks. The player must choose the reason the PC has become a Goose-boy; possible reasons are:

• stolen property
• someone forcibly married his sweetheart
• killed relative

Goose-boy Traits
✠ Light Armour and Shield
✠ 1-Handed Weapons
✠ Country Bumpkin: Choose one particularly lowly profession such as goose boy, pig herder, etc.
✠ Luck Manipulation
✠ Disguise (p23 of M&M)
✠ Exasperation

Goose-boy Advancements
As the Alice above, except:
75 Sense Orb Loc - the Goose-boy may detect the hidden human settlements of Voivodja
84 Exhort the Commoners - the Goose-boy may stir up trouble against the aristocracy
88 Thieves' Cant - the Goose-boy has learnt the secret language of lowlifes
89 Impersonate Trade - the Goose-boy may pass off as a trader or an artisan
90 Rigmarole - the Goose-boy may fast-talk his way pretty much anywhere

If you are using my 13C setting, Goose-boys are agents of the Trickster.

A Red & Pleasant Land: The Land of Unreason – Geography

Still reading A Red & Pleasant Land, at last now in dead tree format. The setting vividly brought to life in the book, the Land of Unreason, is described by Zak S. as being a mix of Transylvania and Wonderland (page 14):

the world in this book is a sort of alternate-universe Transylvania underneath your “real” Transylvania, reachable through mirrors

A close inspection of the map, however, reveals a land far larger than Transylvania, with Cachtice in the north-western corner, Zombor in the south-west, and Castle Poenari in the south-eastern corner. The north-eastern part of the map is more difficult to identify with any real-world place names, but the shape of the rivers and of the mountains suggests Ruthenia.

As a result, given these geographical limits, the Land of Unreason corresponds quite exactly to the historical Kingdom of Hungary, i.e., the model behind my very own “Fair Kingdom”.

The Land of Unreason used to be a unitary kingdom, the Once Palace. After the demise of the latter, it became a war-torn land, with the two main powers being the Heart Queen, based in the north-west, and the Red King in the south-east. This again somehow reflects the disunity of the Fair Kingdom, torn between the Empire of the One Faith, the Empire of the Crescent Moon, and the independent-minded nobles of Transylvania, who try to keep their distances from both empires.

Should you want to run a mash-up of my Fair Kingdom setting, with its icons, and the Land of Unreason, you could expand on the notion of Twins presented on page 16 of A Red & Pleasant Land. The Fair Kingdom is the geographical twin of the Land of Unreason (and vice-versa). Everybody has a twin in the other land (and vice-versa). The Heart Queen is the Twin of the Blood Countess. The Red King is Vlad Dracul's Twin.

LotFP Adventure Seed

I have several gaming blogs so as to keep my blog entries separated and dedicated to a given genre whenever I feel like posting. This present blog is dedicated to my early modern weird fantasy posts, but I'll briefly mention the Giannirator, my bookshelf-based random adventure generator, from my gaming blog dedicated to Sword & Sorcery.

I have noticed that, whenever I use the Giannirator, most results are geared towards Glorantha, which is actually not a surprise considering that the bulk of my gaming library is composed of RuneQuest/HeroQuest/Glorantha publications. So, in order to showcase a more diverse use of the Giannirator, I'll use my gaming PDFs, which are much more diverse in scope than my dead tree bookshelves.

NPC1 (from PDF One)
1D20 --> 18. Folder No.18.
1D6 --> 3. Start counting from the beginning.
1D30 --> 11. Eleventh PDF from the beginning: D6 Fantasy Locations.
1D6 --> 1. Start counting from the beginning.
1D100 --> 43. Worthington the Priest.

Location1 (from PDF Two)
1D20 --> 7. Folder No.7.
1D6 --> 3. Start counting from the beginning.
1D30 --> 15. 15th PDF from the beginning: A Mighty Fortress.
1D6 --> 3. Start counting from the beginning.
1D100 --> 75. the Scheldt Estuary.

Action (from Table One)
1D20 --> 19. Conquer / Invade / Raid / Pillage / Plunder.

Person/Object (from PDF Three)
1D20 --> 13. Folder No.13.
1D6 --> 4. Start counting from the end.
1D30 --> 23. 23rd PDF from the end: Night Witches.
1D6 --> 1. Start counting from the beginning.
1D100 --> 57. Forbidden Love.

Motivation (from Table Two)
1D20 --> 11. Selflessness.

NPC2 (from PDF Four)
1D20 --> 10. Folder No.10.
1D6 --> 5. Start counting from the end.
1D30 --> 8. Eighth PDF from the end: 13th Age Errata.
1D6 --> 2. Start counting from the beginning.
1D4 --> 4. Putrid Zombie.

Location2 (from PDF Five)
1D20 --> 14. Folder No.14.
1D6 --> 4. Start counting from the end.
1D30 --> 10. Tenth PDF from the end: The God That Crawls.
1D6 --> 2. Start counting from the beginning.
1D100 --> 26. a large "null space" of pure darkness.

Element (from PDF Six)
1D20 --> 5. Folder No.5.
1D6 --> 2. Start counting from the beginning.
1D30 --> 14. 14th PDF from the beginning: D&D 5e Player's Basic Rules.
1D6 --> 6. Start counting from the end.
1D100 --> 36. the Schools of Magic.

Result: Worthington the Priest asks the PCs to go to the Scheldt Estuary to Conquer / Invade / Raid / Pillage / Plunder a Forbidden Love. Motivated by their Selflessness, the PCs will end up confronting a Putrid Zombie in a large "null space" of pure darkness. During the course of the adventure, the Schools of Magic will feature prominently.

This really looks like a nice Lamentations of the Flame Princess scenario seed. So: Worthington the Priest, before settling down as a clergyman, used to be a chaplain in England's Royal Navy during the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604). He even saw action at the Naval battle of Gravelines, in 1588, which saw the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the English. Worthington, however, was stranded in Flanders and started a romance with a local Protestant woman, before being repatriated to England. Five years on, Worthington still thinks of his beautiful Flemish lover, and has asked the PCs to go and find her and, if possible, to bring her back to England. The PCs, being incredibly selfless, won't even ask for a reward.
Somehow, the PCs should learn that the woman is now the wife of a prosperous burgher and lives in the fortified Dutch city of Bergen op Zoom. The city is besieged by the Catholics, and the PCs will somehow have to benefit from magical help to get through the besiegers, and into the city. Unbeknownst to them, the husband of the woman is a necromancer and he has a portal in his cellar to the Negative Energy Plane.
The PCs will talk to the woman, she will agree to following them, but the necromancer will discover her plans and lock her in the cellar. The PCs will have to confront the necromancer and his putrid zombie, who keeps regenerating because of its closeness to the Negative Energy Plane.

A Red & Pleasant Land (Very First Impressions)

the Blood Countess, Zak-style

James Raggi has made available his latest batch of LotFP books for purchase on his web-site at last, and I have thus ordered A Red & Pleasant Land, the new version of Death Frost Doom, and No Salvation for Witches. I am particularly curious about the former since it is set in a fantasy version of Central Europe. Or should I write, in a Zak S.-ised version of Central Europe.

Lo and behold! One of the major NPCs is the Blood Countess herself. I won't add anything so as not to spoil the surprise for those who are going to play in A Red & Pleasant Land, but other tidbits similar to what has been appearing in my blog also appear in Zak's book, like her castle at Csachticz (spelled Cachtice in the book).

The art (obviously) is superb... More when I have time to read through the book.

Elizabethan Weird Fantasy

The aim of this blog is to slowly build, disparate element by disparate element, a Central European-flavoured early modern setting for weird fantasy role-playing.

The idea is to remain rules-agnostic, even though a certain number of rule sets are put forward on this blog, namely: Lamentations of the Flame Princess (LotFP), Renaissance, Monsters & Magic (M&M) or 13th Age. Please refer to the sidebar for the relevant links.

LotFP, whose default setting is Central Europe during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) is the most obvious candidate because it shares the same geographical location as Lamentations of the Blood Countess (Central Europe), and almost the same time-frame — I tend towards the turn of the 17th century myself.

Well, if you'd rather you'd be playing brave Englishmen, I direct you to Jeremy Duncan's O Brave New World, a free PDF supplement to LotFP. The premise is as follows:

The year is 1589. PCs are English sailors, soldiers, gentlemen, and their hangers-on. A sudden TEMPEST struck whilst engaged with the galleon La Visitación de Nuestra Señora, and all hands lost beneath the waves. By the grace of GOD, you awake to find yourself and several comrades washed safely ashore on an unfamiliar beach.

Enjoy.

Armour Class Conversions

It used to be simple. There was only one rule set, and it had descending armour class (descending— why, oh why?)

Then the OSR came, and each rule set had its own way to compute armour class — and it was usually ascending. I am hence providing you a small table to convert from classic fantasy AC to the values used in my favourite OSR systems:

Hacking Death Frost Doom — A Compilation

I intend to run a "hacked" version of Death Frost Doom to make it suit my style of play and to customise it to my campaign world. I know several GMs have done a similar job before so I have started investigating on the 'net and found a lot of good input. I am certainly not going to use of all the following suggestions, especially since some of these ideas are mutually exclusive, but I think having them all in one place can be useful for future reference [I'm actually surprised no-one did this before].

Obviously, the following selection is CHOCK-FULL OF SPOILERS so please do not read it if you are going to be a player; that would definitely spoil your fun.

From the Dungeon of Signs:

1) Make the Crypt Map Less Linear – The actual crypts in Death Frost Doom are on a grid that shouts out “this is not the point of the adventure” – some looping sections, steps and oddly shaped rooms would help. This would also make mapping more interesting – and I think requiring the party to map would really help the end game rush as the adventurers attempt to find their way out. A map that provided a logical place to hold off the undead horde would be amusing as well, while it’s equally obvious that a party can’t hold off thousands of undead, some place with clear barricades and maybe a narrow causeway over a pit of even more undead would taunt players into trying and being forced to retreat.

[...]

4) Re-skin it All! – Perhaps a necessity for using Death Frost Doom for grognard OSR types. This adventure is easy to re-skin with all sorts of touches. Cultural glosses are the easiest. Viking style tombs shaped like dragon ships with knotwork and evil runes carved everywhere, Egypt flavoured dusty tombs beneath a graveyard of burning sand, a Qín Dynasty terracotta army (with non-historical skeletons inside of course) and monumental bronzes in Shāng style, or a perhaps a Meso-American gloss. All would be easy enough to add, and suggest ways to conceal the fact that this is Death Frost Doom from a group that is in the know. As a general idea I think a re-skinning Death Frost Doom to fit one’s own game world is important as the events at the end of the adventure will be campaign changing. Death Frost Doom’s best elements (the trapped doors and strange curses) can be slapped onto anything without losing any impact, so re-skinning makes a lot of sense.

5) Make the Undead more Interesting – When the party flees from the crypts and across the graveyard pursued by scrambling hordes of undead, it seems worthwhile to add a variety of strange dead to encounter. Yes there are child corpses and ghouls, but there isn’t much more here. It’s just boring “ewww a dead guy” – which in D&D is a monster that does not actually inspire fear or revulsion. A table of abominations (chanting lines of undead pilgrims stitched together like centipedes, ghost hounds, corpses with grafted on stone, animal or metal parts, spectral presences, scuttling skeletal hands etc, etc.) would be nice to help run the escape.

6) Change the “cult cabin” – There is much discussion within the module about an entire ancient evil nation, yet the cabin above ground is straight out of Evil Dead. This is a lovely homage to those haunted cabin movies, but really it doesn’t get with the underground shrine so well – unless one were to re-skin the whole shrine as some kind of hillbilly nightmare of crude mineshaft style construction and sacrificial victims in flour sack body bags. A cabin would be fine, but its accoutrements (while excellent) don’t really feel connected to the tombs below. It might be something as simple as making the cabin a new addition with some ancient stonework as its basis to give the idea that the evil but inconsequential cult that was run out by villagers a generation ago was connected to some kind of ancient evil. Anyway this connection would work better if it was more concrete as otherwise the descent into the tombs is a jarring switch.

From Necropraxis:

Necropraxis replaces the cabin with an abandoned tower. I will definitely use this modification.

From Fighting Fantasist:

Coopdevil suggests quite a critical hack by removing the susurrus-emitting monster and replacing it altogether with something else.

THE TOM BOMBADIL OF THE DUVAN'KU DEATH CULT!

Now we have a wizened old immortal, perhaps one of the very first members of the cult back in Ye Olde Days. He sits in room 22 playing a bone flute. This can be heard everywhere in the dungeon that the original susurrus could. He has sat there since time immemorial playing his bone flute very badly, awaiting the day that a new Grandmaster of the cult will arrive and declare that is time for HELL TO VOMIT FORTH ITS FILTH. This has never happened in the past. But the eschatology of the cult says that it will one day. Maybe the Grandmaster doesn't know he's the Grandmaster. Maybe he was living the carefree life of a murder hobo dungeon bastard right up until the point where he made the music stop. Who knows? Duvan'Ku moves in mysterious ways.

If the PCs try to talk to him he will carry on playing his flute. Should they make moves to attack him he will stop, ask "Are you sure? Are you really sure?" and if they are sure he'll just shrug and let himself be hacked down (1hp which should shock and worry any player who thought that this was THE BIG END OF LAST LEVEL BOSS and was preparing accordingly).

And then HELL VOMITS FORTH ITS FILTH.

Another tiny problem I have is that there is a chimney up from room 22 clearly intended to be an emergency exit from, basically, the shitstorm that the PCs have just caused. This is claimed to be difficult to find from the surface (i.e., you must use DM's fiat to stop them finding it or the scenario will be fucked) but as we know, what is intended purely as an exit sometimes get used as an entrance as well. The chimney is partly blocked by susurrus brambles but the scenario is quiet on what exactly it would take to clear this and what, if any, this effect would have upon the susurussy noise. It strikes me that this was put in more in hope than expectation that the PCs don't find it. A bit scruffy.

Also why would you have a secret door in room 22 that requires a human sacrifice to open (this is good), alongside another secret door that, err, doesn't require a human sacrifice to open and leads to exactly the same corridor? I would cut out the linking N/S 10' of tunnel that links room 23 to the likes of rooms 24, 25 etc. or have the ritual open both.

From Untimately:

The first problem I noticed was a number of "site only" magic items. By site only, I mean items that might cause problems in a long-running campaign, either because they are too powerful or might otherwise upset some aspect of game balance. I detest this practice. It reminds me of using thieves to steal magic items back from PCs. One room in the cabin has two examples of this (page 8 in the print copy). The first is a mirror that doesn't show chaotic (or evil) characters:

    The mirror looses its magic if it is moved, but will regain its power if replaced in this spot.

The second is a clock that can stop time:

    Removing the clock from the wall or damaging it in any way permanently removes its magic (even placing it back on the wall will not restore it).

There is not really any narrative grounding why either of these items work this way, and certainly nothing that the PCs could discover (without resorting to DM improvisation). If the mirror was used to detect spies, why would that only be useful in one location? If you're going to put something interesting into a module, and PCs are creative enough to liberate it, they should be able to use it. If it is of a nature that would be problematic in a campaign, then it should not be included at all. There are much better ways to handle this, such having a limited number of uses. Or, in the case of the mirror, why not have a pond, or a fountain, that only reflects lawful and neutral characters? How do you move a pond? And yet, the restriction does not feel contrived (it doesn't even feel like a restriction).

I plan to leave the mirror in, but it will work anywhere. The mirror itself will be a full size heavily gilded standing mirror, so it will be difficult to transport. This might end up becoming an interesting campaign item if the players are able to recover it. And it might also prompt me to think more about how alignment works in this particular campaign. I will probably just remove the magic properties from the clock. I need to think about this a bit more, because there may be ways that enterprising PCs could use the clock to forestall the the module endgame, and I don't think there is any need to make this module harder.

Tales of the Grotesque and the Dungeonesque didn't like the clock either. Here is the suggested solution:

What I find problematic about the clock, especially if it is adjusted forward, is that it effectively splits the party and creates a headache for the GM who now must run two adventures along two divergent time-lines.

My hack for this is simple: moving the hands on the clock causes the room to suddenly go dark... an outline of a door appears against a wall in fearful luminescence... and out of that unholy portal steps... THE CHRONO-CRONE!
Please refer to the original post for details on how to use this new creature with the adventure.

From A Dungeon Master's Tale:

The party never got to hear Zeke's warnings because they discovered him cold and stiff amongst his bed-things, such as they were.  He died of natural causes, however, so went in relative dignity.  They found his craftwork, and the animal skins and the nearby pile of guts and even some strange writing in the characters of the Duvan' Ku.   In this manner Zeke presented a puzzle to solve while still establishing the tone and beginning the building of tension.   No wild eyed prophecies of certain doom.  Just subtle hints at it.  Death suited him.

I also deep-sixed the entire Greater Tombs area including any mention or appearence of Cyris Maximus.   You might be saying to yourself, "Well hell, that changes everything then." and in a way I suppose you're right.  I felt like the entire encounter was not only unnecessary but actually detracted from what I considered to be a nearly perfectly constructed situation up until that point.
So instead of the greater tombs area and the danger awaiting them there a single secret door from area 22 led instead to an escape tunnel that led out the sheer side of the mountain.  The party with enough rope, enough balls and enough luck might make it out alive that way.

[Personal note: while I can understand this, I think the presence of Cyris can add heaps of role-playing potential to the adventure, see for instance James Maliszewski's play report here]

Also, TPK is all well and good for an OSR adventure, but sometimes crippling characters is more fun than killing them. Several blogs, comments, etc. have suggested inflicting random mut[il]ations instead of outright killing the characters.

Added on 1 October 2013: Death Frost Doom has also been covered by Claytonian JP on his Kill It With Fire! blog, with a beautiful isometric map:

and with also a flute-playing chap in lieu of the susurrus-emitting plant monster:
I still had a plant hanging down blocking the way to the giant skeleton room, but it does not susurrate. Instead, there is an ancient old man that ceaselessly pipes away on a flute in 21. He has an extra flute in his coat and will offer it while still playing. Any player that takes it up is cursed to play until a new flautist comes.

Added on 10 August 2014: Billy Goes to Mordor has added a roster of various undead monsters to add diversity to the undead horde.

Firearms in LotFP — Semi-Official Rule (of sorts)

Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role-Playing (aka LotFP) is an Old School Renaissance role-playing game whose mechanisms are derived from those of the world's most famous fantasy role-playing game.

Several tropes of said classic role-playing game, however, are given a markedly different treatment in LotFP. To me, the most saliently divergent elements (and the reasons I love this game) are:
1. Although LotFP doesn't provide a default campaign world, the published adventures emphasise a humanocentric setting, as opposed to one with Tolkienesque demi-humans.
2. The rules explicitly advocate a paucity of monsters (there isn't even a bestiary), as opposed to the well-known over-abundance of critters in other OSR role-playing games.
3. The game is exceptionally deadly to player characters.
4. There is a general Renaissance feeling about the published material (art & adventures), as opposed to a pseudo-mediæval one again in most other OSR role-playing games.

Now with regards to point No.4 above, if you say 'Renaissance' you're also saying black powder and firearms. Alas, nor the LotFP core books nor the published adventures contemplate any rules for firearms. I have hence asked James Edward Raggi IV on G+ to give me some guidelines. Not only did he provide some guidelines, but he's also allowed me to post them here!

So, with no further ado, here are James' guidelines:

1d8 damage, ignore 5 points of armour. Rate of fire once/combat.

As a further bonus, a link to the Firearms Fumbles table from the Dungeon of Signs blog.