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.)