Post by geoffrey on Aug 20, 2010 23:14:57 GMT -6
Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Weird Fantasy Role-Playing
by James Edward Raggi IV
This is going to be an idiosyncratic review. C’est la vie.
In late 2008 I acquired a copy of James Raggi’s The Random Esoteric Creature Generator for Classic Fantasy Role-Playing Games and Their Modern Simulacra (RECG hereafter). It revolutionized my view of A/D&D monsters. My favorite thing about the game used to be the monster tomes: the Monster Manuals, the Fiend Folio, etc. Along came this little book in the mail and turned my D&D world upside down. The essays therein are vintage Raggi: blunt, hard-hitting, metal, bottom-line, and most often right-on-the-money. Here’s a couple of quotes:
“Monsters that are not unique are not mystical creatures of wonder. They are simply animals, and the typical adventuring party is more on an African safari than participating in High Adventure when they face such foes. In fact, the idea of a standardized monster list for anything other than exemplar purposes is probably the worst thing that happened to role-playing.”
“The classic fantasy role-playing campaign has elves, dwarves, and halflings standing side-by-side with humans, with teeming masses of orcs, goblins, and more serving as cannon fodder. Eliminate them from the game. If it has two legs and two hands, remove it and replace it with humans.”
In their greater context the above quotes hit me “like I was shot…Like I was shot with a diamond…a diamond bullet right through my forehead…And I thought: My God…the genius of that. The genius…Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure.”
James’s viewpoints combined with the deep and powerful monster generation system in RECG made even my favorite book of monsters (the Fiend Folio) seem insipid by comparison. Eventually I sold all my old monster books, because I never used them anymore. Sometimes I’d feel a whiff of solemn nostalgia, but then I’d remember my psychedelically intoxicating new love and the nostaligia would dissipate.
I often said to myself, “Someone needs to make a version of the D&D game that doesn’t have a monster list, but instead is motivated by the RECG’s philosophy of monsters!” I considered all the various out-of-print versions of A/D&D, their clones, and C&C. The closest I could get was confining myself to the C&C Players Handbook, but even there the “standard” monster assumptions kept bleeding over into the rulebook.
Then I found out that James was writing a D&D retro-clone. Out went my C&C Players Handbook! James himself was making the version of D&D that needed to be made. Who better to do it than the author of the RECG?
My income is quite low (but, fortunately, my expenses are also quite low and my debts nil), so I keep my gaming expenditures very low by not buying things. If I can’t make a cheap print-out of a product from the internet, then I just don’t own it. Along comes the Lamentations of the Flame Princess game (LotFP game hereafter) which costs $54.95 on nobleknight.com. Ahhhhh……. That’s money I don’t have. Everything about the game looks beautiful and top-notch. I’m sure that the game is worth every cent. I’m not saying it’s not worth it. I’m sure it is. I’m only saying that the price tag means “Geoffrey won’t own this.” But James has generously and wisely taken a page out of other retro-cloners’ books and has made available free PDFs of the rules of LotFP (art excluded, except for the cover art). Click here to get the free LotFP game:
www.lotfp.com/RPG/products/lotfp-weird-fantasy-role-playing
It’s two books. The first book is the rules (93 pages), and the second book covers magic (120 pages). I cheaply printed both out in booklet size (8.5” by 5.5”) for about $7. I’m not suggesting that anyone else do that unless it’s a choice between cheap print-outs or not owning the game at all. (Please note that you get a LOT more stuff than these two rulebooks if you buy the boxed set.) Now let’s get to the actual review and look at the rules.
Basically the rules are in the mold of Moldvay/Mentzer, with spell lists that have an infusion of AD&D.
Classes are cleric, fighter, magic-user, specialist (what this game calls the thief), dwarf, elf, and halfling. Yes, it’s race-as-class. No, there are no demi-human level limits. Personally, I could have done without any dwarfs, elves, or halflings at all. (Remember James’s quote above about getting rid of demi-humans?) But, gamers have come to expect these races, and even some of James’s modules have demi-humans in them, so I can see why James elected to keep the demi-humans in the rules.
The five saving throw categories are: paralyze, poison, breath weapon, magical device, magic.
You’ll notice that there are no armor or weapon restrictions on any of the classes. This later gets addressed in the Magic book on page 14: “Magic-Users may not cast spells if they are more than Lightly encumbered. Elves may not cast spells if they are more than Heavily encumbered.” Practically speaking, magic-users won’t be wearing plate armor, but I can imagine some of them managing to wear chain armor. Clerics with sacrificial knives and spears? Yes. Magic-users with swords and axes? Yes. I like this. Michael Moorcock’s Elric had it right with his combination of armor, weapons, and spells.
The next thing you’ll notice is that there are no rules in the rulebook for turning undead. Good. I don’t like it when clerics can negligently wave their holy symbol all day long and make undead beat a hasty retreat. You’ll learn that Turn Undead is a 1st-level cleric spell. (Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that 1st-level clerics get a spell.) If your cleric wants to be able to turn undead, he’s going to have to devote a spell-slot to it. And then he can try to turn the undead only once. Uh, oh! The spell is gone. No more waving the holy symbol. So if your cleric wants to turn undead relatively often, it’s going to cost you spell slots. What spells will you sacrifice for this?
We’re only to page 7 and you’ll notice the very language of the game is so much more visceral than other iterations: “Fighters are these soldiers who have seen the cruelty of battle, have committed atrocities that in any just universe will d**n them to Hell, and have survived” (taken from a larger context of that same sort of thing). Then at the bottom of the page: “Fighters…are the only character class to further improve in combat skill as levels are gained.” James is serious about this. If you are not a fighter, your chance to hit an opponent with a weapon NEVER improves. A 1st-level magic-user and a 20th-level cleric have the exact same to hit scores as each other. Even elves don’t get better at it. Even dwarfs don’t ever improve in their to hit scores. Now you see another reason why James is so liberal with having no armor or weapon restrictions. It’s (partly) because he’s so restrictive as to who gets to improve their to hit scores.
Each character class dominates one niche:
Clerics have cleric spells. Nobody else does.
Fighters get better at fighting. Nobody else does.
Magic-users have magic spells. Nobody else does.
Specialists get better at “thief” skills. Nobody else does.
Dwarfs are tougher than anybody else. Nobody else has as many hit points.
Elves kind of break this pattern by being fighter/magic-users.
Halflings can hide like nobody’s business. And these guys almost never miss a saving throw (regardless of category).
Gods this review is all over the place. But the LotFP game is so packed with cool stuff that has implications later in the rules that I can only comment on things as they come page by page.
Magic-users get a 6-sided die for hit points at 1st level, and thereafter they have 4-sided HD.
Specialists’ skills are all d6-based. All their skills can be done by anybody (fighters, magic-users, etc.) on a 1 in 6 chance. This can NEVER be improved by non-specialists. Specialists, on the other hand, get skill points that they use to improve their chances in these skills. They start with 4 skill points that can be apportioned as they see fit amongst their skills:
climbing
searching
find traps
foraging and hunting
languages
sleight of hand
sneak attack
stealth
tinkering
Thus, a 1st-level specialist could succeed (if he wanted to be the master of climbing by plunking all his skill points in climbing) on climbing checks on a roll of 1-5 on a d6.
Each level after 1st they get an additional 2 skill points to assign however they like.
When a skill has a 6 in 6 chance of succeeding, it fails only on a roll of 12 on 2d6 (or 1 in 36 times).
Dwarfs (NOT dwarves) are a dying race. Not only are their HD 10-sided, but they continue to get constitution bonuses to their hit points even after they max-out at 9 HD. All other classes get constitution bonuses to their hit points only for the first 9 levels. Dwarfs get them forever. Tough buggers. Their saving throws are second only to those of halflings.
The dwindling race of the elves has the same spell progession as do magic-users, plus elves have 6-sided HD, plus they do better in armor. But they pay for it in the high experience point totals they have to get to rise in level.
Halflings don’t have much going for them except for two things: One, they all have a 5 in 6 chance of hiding outdoors (and a 4 in 6 chance indoors). Two, their saving throw scores completely out-class everybody else’s. If you don’t want to be missing your saving throws, be a halfling. Here they are for a 1st-level halfling:
paralyze: 8
poison: 6
breath weapon: 10
magical device: 7
magic: 10
And here they are at 8th level:
paralyze: 2
poison: 2
breath weapon: 2
magical device: 2
magic: 4
The game’s take on alignment is refreshingly unique. There are three alignments (lawful, chaotic, and neutral). To quote: “Alignment…has nothing to do with a character’s allegiances, personality, morality, or actions.” Another quote: “In the real world, every human being that has ever existed has been Neutral.” That makes it easy. Gandhi? Neutral. Stalin? Neutral. Etc.
In the game world, only magical or very strange humans are other than neutral. Lawful types believe that “the universe has an ultimate, irrefutable truth, and a flawless, unchanging state of being towards which it inevitably marches.” All magic-users are chaotic. “Those who are Chaotic in alignment are touched by magic, and consider the world in terms of ebbing and flowing energy, of eternal tides washing away the sand castles that great kings and mighty gods build for themselves. Many mortals who are so aligned desperately wish they were not.”
The extensive equipment lists try to inject at least a little bit of economic “realism” into the game. You aren’t going to buy a suit of plate mail for 50 gold pieces. Try 1,000 gold pieces. Also, two costs are given for most items: a city cost and a rural cost.
The rules for gaining experience are basically standard: you get points for defeating opponents and garnering loot. In what is only perhaps an oversight, the rules do not say that 1 g.p. yields 1 x.p. The rules simply say that you get (an undisclosed amount of) experience points for loot. The amounts of experience given for defeating monsters is pretty low. That huge, ancient red dragon with 88 hit points that you killed? Congratulations. You just got 1,500 x.p. “Let’s see…Divide that by the 6 surviving characters and we each get…250 x.p. What the…?” James’s reasoning is that “This is not a game about combat or slaying foes…Characters who prefer to fight when it is unnecessary are lunatics, possibly psychotic, and not likely to survive long in a game run by a competent Referee.” Once again, I like what James is doing, I like his reasoning, and I like the way he puts it.
Lest this review get totally out of control, let me only briefly mention that the last 55 or so pages of the Rules give utilitarian and easy-to-understand rules for (amongst other things) climbing, falling, disease, hunting, poison, starving, healing, languages, encumbrance (an innovative and simple system that is probably the best I’ve seen for D&D), movement, time, maritime adventures (6 pages), retainers (10 pages), property, and combat. (Oh, I forgot to mention that the game uses ascending armor class, and that an unarmored human has an armor class of 12.)
Now on to the 120-page Magic booklet…
The first 15 pages cover how spells are learned as well as the creation of magical items. What I find very appealing is the implied rarity of magic items in the LotFP game. Clerics can create holy water and scrolls. That’s it. Magic-users can create potions, scrolls, staves, and wands. That’s it. And staves and wands are darn near impossible to create. First step: Get your magic-user up to 15th level so he can cast Permanency. Then prepare to spend a ton of time and money enchanting it. You want to make a wand of fireballs? That will take 30 to 180 days to complete and will cost 100 g.p. per day of construction. (Unless of course you aren’t doing this in a fully-stocked arcane library AND laboratory, in which case the time required jumps to 60 to 360 days.) Then some wretched 5th-level weasel of a magic-user comes along and touches your precious wand with a Dispel Magic spell. Your wand is GONE, and it gets no saving throw. Poof! (That’s right. Dispel Magic is very effective and very nasty in the LotFP game.) Yes, your 15th-level magic-user will take grim pleasure in massacring the knave, but your invaluable wand worth 10,000 g.p. is now (and irrevocably) a 1 c.p. stick. Did I say irrevocably? Yes. There are no wishes (limited or otherwise) in this game.
In short, I think you’re a blasted fool to bother making most magic items (perhaps making a scroll might be rational). NPC magic-users will have figured this out, too. So there won’t be many magic items just lying around waiting for the greedy PCs’ groping hands.
The spell lists go up to 7th level for clerics and to 9th level for magic-users. There are a couple of brand new spells, but most are right out of A/D&D. Wait. That’s not right. Many of these spells are more evocatively described than in any other version of A/D&D. Some examples:
Conjure Elemental: “Spirits from the nether realm despise the natural world and wish to destroy it. This spell tricks one of these spirits through the mystic veil which separates our world from theirs, and forces them to inhabit one of the four classical elements (fire, water, earth or air), animating it into a nigh unstoppable elemental of pure destruction…”
Teleport: “This spell fixes the caster in one absolute point in space, and moves creation so that the caster appears to instantly travel an incredible distance…”
Speak with Dead: “People that were decent, honest, innocent, or at least devout in their religion (not all gods care about morality), will be anxious to answer questions and remain on Earth for as long as possible. They have learned that the afterlife is nothing, simply a void with no effective consciousness and no sensation but for the numbing awareness of passing time. They know that being alive, even inside a rotting corpse for the briefest sliver of time that leaves them in agony as the decay of their physical form leaves every nerve transmitting unrelenting pain, is better than being dead. Cads, scoundrels, and heretics, on the other hand, were pleasantly surprised to not find eternal torture waiting for them in death. Only the vicious and undeserving find this peace in death, and they will be furious about this peace being disturbed…”
You’ll also notice some spells missing from the lists: resurrection, raise dead, wish, and some others. Some other spells have been limited (such as continual light lasting for one day rather than for ever). This all has the effect of stopping the inevitable questions before they start: “Why doesn’t an enterprising 3rd-level magic-user cast continual light spells on small river stones and make a fortune selling them to the city fathers to light the entire city?” or “Why don’t the kings have cadres of clerics keeping them forever young, and raising them from the dead when an accident occurs? Why aren’t all royalty centuries or millennia old and perpetually youthful?” Etc.
And that’s pretty much the end of this review. What can I say? The LotFP game is fantastic. Anyone could probably find little things to nitpick, but the same can be said for anything ever published for D&D. The LotFP game remains thoroughly D&D while giving you a whole new flavor of D&D. You probably already own your favorite version of Gary’s A/D&D. Now you can own James Raggi’s version of D&D. I’d hate to do without either of them. Get this game. If you have the money, spring for the full ride. If you don’t have the money, click those free downloads. Either way, you won’t be sorry.
by James Edward Raggi IV
This is going to be an idiosyncratic review. C’est la vie.
In late 2008 I acquired a copy of James Raggi’s The Random Esoteric Creature Generator for Classic Fantasy Role-Playing Games and Their Modern Simulacra (RECG hereafter). It revolutionized my view of A/D&D monsters. My favorite thing about the game used to be the monster tomes: the Monster Manuals, the Fiend Folio, etc. Along came this little book in the mail and turned my D&D world upside down. The essays therein are vintage Raggi: blunt, hard-hitting, metal, bottom-line, and most often right-on-the-money. Here’s a couple of quotes:
“Monsters that are not unique are not mystical creatures of wonder. They are simply animals, and the typical adventuring party is more on an African safari than participating in High Adventure when they face such foes. In fact, the idea of a standardized monster list for anything other than exemplar purposes is probably the worst thing that happened to role-playing.”
“The classic fantasy role-playing campaign has elves, dwarves, and halflings standing side-by-side with humans, with teeming masses of orcs, goblins, and more serving as cannon fodder. Eliminate them from the game. If it has two legs and two hands, remove it and replace it with humans.”
In their greater context the above quotes hit me “like I was shot…Like I was shot with a diamond…a diamond bullet right through my forehead…And I thought: My God…the genius of that. The genius…Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure.”
James’s viewpoints combined with the deep and powerful monster generation system in RECG made even my favorite book of monsters (the Fiend Folio) seem insipid by comparison. Eventually I sold all my old monster books, because I never used them anymore. Sometimes I’d feel a whiff of solemn nostalgia, but then I’d remember my psychedelically intoxicating new love and the nostaligia would dissipate.
I often said to myself, “Someone needs to make a version of the D&D game that doesn’t have a monster list, but instead is motivated by the RECG’s philosophy of monsters!” I considered all the various out-of-print versions of A/D&D, their clones, and C&C. The closest I could get was confining myself to the C&C Players Handbook, but even there the “standard” monster assumptions kept bleeding over into the rulebook.
Then I found out that James was writing a D&D retro-clone. Out went my C&C Players Handbook! James himself was making the version of D&D that needed to be made. Who better to do it than the author of the RECG?
My income is quite low (but, fortunately, my expenses are also quite low and my debts nil), so I keep my gaming expenditures very low by not buying things. If I can’t make a cheap print-out of a product from the internet, then I just don’t own it. Along comes the Lamentations of the Flame Princess game (LotFP game hereafter) which costs $54.95 on nobleknight.com. Ahhhhh……. That’s money I don’t have. Everything about the game looks beautiful and top-notch. I’m sure that the game is worth every cent. I’m not saying it’s not worth it. I’m sure it is. I’m only saying that the price tag means “Geoffrey won’t own this.” But James has generously and wisely taken a page out of other retro-cloners’ books and has made available free PDFs of the rules of LotFP (art excluded, except for the cover art). Click here to get the free LotFP game:
www.lotfp.com/RPG/products/lotfp-weird-fantasy-role-playing
It’s two books. The first book is the rules (93 pages), and the second book covers magic (120 pages). I cheaply printed both out in booklet size (8.5” by 5.5”) for about $7. I’m not suggesting that anyone else do that unless it’s a choice between cheap print-outs or not owning the game at all. (Please note that you get a LOT more stuff than these two rulebooks if you buy the boxed set.) Now let’s get to the actual review and look at the rules.
Basically the rules are in the mold of Moldvay/Mentzer, with spell lists that have an infusion of AD&D.
Classes are cleric, fighter, magic-user, specialist (what this game calls the thief), dwarf, elf, and halfling. Yes, it’s race-as-class. No, there are no demi-human level limits. Personally, I could have done without any dwarfs, elves, or halflings at all. (Remember James’s quote above about getting rid of demi-humans?) But, gamers have come to expect these races, and even some of James’s modules have demi-humans in them, so I can see why James elected to keep the demi-humans in the rules.
The five saving throw categories are: paralyze, poison, breath weapon, magical device, magic.
You’ll notice that there are no armor or weapon restrictions on any of the classes. This later gets addressed in the Magic book on page 14: “Magic-Users may not cast spells if they are more than Lightly encumbered. Elves may not cast spells if they are more than Heavily encumbered.” Practically speaking, magic-users won’t be wearing plate armor, but I can imagine some of them managing to wear chain armor. Clerics with sacrificial knives and spears? Yes. Magic-users with swords and axes? Yes. I like this. Michael Moorcock’s Elric had it right with his combination of armor, weapons, and spells.
The next thing you’ll notice is that there are no rules in the rulebook for turning undead. Good. I don’t like it when clerics can negligently wave their holy symbol all day long and make undead beat a hasty retreat. You’ll learn that Turn Undead is a 1st-level cleric spell. (Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that 1st-level clerics get a spell.) If your cleric wants to be able to turn undead, he’s going to have to devote a spell-slot to it. And then he can try to turn the undead only once. Uh, oh! The spell is gone. No more waving the holy symbol. So if your cleric wants to turn undead relatively often, it’s going to cost you spell slots. What spells will you sacrifice for this?
We’re only to page 7 and you’ll notice the very language of the game is so much more visceral than other iterations: “Fighters are these soldiers who have seen the cruelty of battle, have committed atrocities that in any just universe will d**n them to Hell, and have survived” (taken from a larger context of that same sort of thing). Then at the bottom of the page: “Fighters…are the only character class to further improve in combat skill as levels are gained.” James is serious about this. If you are not a fighter, your chance to hit an opponent with a weapon NEVER improves. A 1st-level magic-user and a 20th-level cleric have the exact same to hit scores as each other. Even elves don’t get better at it. Even dwarfs don’t ever improve in their to hit scores. Now you see another reason why James is so liberal with having no armor or weapon restrictions. It’s (partly) because he’s so restrictive as to who gets to improve their to hit scores.
Each character class dominates one niche:
Clerics have cleric spells. Nobody else does.
Fighters get better at fighting. Nobody else does.
Magic-users have magic spells. Nobody else does.
Specialists get better at “thief” skills. Nobody else does.
Dwarfs are tougher than anybody else. Nobody else has as many hit points.
Elves kind of break this pattern by being fighter/magic-users.
Halflings can hide like nobody’s business. And these guys almost never miss a saving throw (regardless of category).
Gods this review is all over the place. But the LotFP game is so packed with cool stuff that has implications later in the rules that I can only comment on things as they come page by page.
Magic-users get a 6-sided die for hit points at 1st level, and thereafter they have 4-sided HD.
Specialists’ skills are all d6-based. All their skills can be done by anybody (fighters, magic-users, etc.) on a 1 in 6 chance. This can NEVER be improved by non-specialists. Specialists, on the other hand, get skill points that they use to improve their chances in these skills. They start with 4 skill points that can be apportioned as they see fit amongst their skills:
climbing
searching
find traps
foraging and hunting
languages
sleight of hand
sneak attack
stealth
tinkering
Thus, a 1st-level specialist could succeed (if he wanted to be the master of climbing by plunking all his skill points in climbing) on climbing checks on a roll of 1-5 on a d6.
Each level after 1st they get an additional 2 skill points to assign however they like.
When a skill has a 6 in 6 chance of succeeding, it fails only on a roll of 12 on 2d6 (or 1 in 36 times).
Dwarfs (NOT dwarves) are a dying race. Not only are their HD 10-sided, but they continue to get constitution bonuses to their hit points even after they max-out at 9 HD. All other classes get constitution bonuses to their hit points only for the first 9 levels. Dwarfs get them forever. Tough buggers. Their saving throws are second only to those of halflings.
The dwindling race of the elves has the same spell progession as do magic-users, plus elves have 6-sided HD, plus they do better in armor. But they pay for it in the high experience point totals they have to get to rise in level.
Halflings don’t have much going for them except for two things: One, they all have a 5 in 6 chance of hiding outdoors (and a 4 in 6 chance indoors). Two, their saving throw scores completely out-class everybody else’s. If you don’t want to be missing your saving throws, be a halfling. Here they are for a 1st-level halfling:
paralyze: 8
poison: 6
breath weapon: 10
magical device: 7
magic: 10
And here they are at 8th level:
paralyze: 2
poison: 2
breath weapon: 2
magical device: 2
magic: 4
The game’s take on alignment is refreshingly unique. There are three alignments (lawful, chaotic, and neutral). To quote: “Alignment…has nothing to do with a character’s allegiances, personality, morality, or actions.” Another quote: “In the real world, every human being that has ever existed has been Neutral.” That makes it easy. Gandhi? Neutral. Stalin? Neutral. Etc.
In the game world, only magical or very strange humans are other than neutral. Lawful types believe that “the universe has an ultimate, irrefutable truth, and a flawless, unchanging state of being towards which it inevitably marches.” All magic-users are chaotic. “Those who are Chaotic in alignment are touched by magic, and consider the world in terms of ebbing and flowing energy, of eternal tides washing away the sand castles that great kings and mighty gods build for themselves. Many mortals who are so aligned desperately wish they were not.”
The extensive equipment lists try to inject at least a little bit of economic “realism” into the game. You aren’t going to buy a suit of plate mail for 50 gold pieces. Try 1,000 gold pieces. Also, two costs are given for most items: a city cost and a rural cost.
The rules for gaining experience are basically standard: you get points for defeating opponents and garnering loot. In what is only perhaps an oversight, the rules do not say that 1 g.p. yields 1 x.p. The rules simply say that you get (an undisclosed amount of) experience points for loot. The amounts of experience given for defeating monsters is pretty low. That huge, ancient red dragon with 88 hit points that you killed? Congratulations. You just got 1,500 x.p. “Let’s see…Divide that by the 6 surviving characters and we each get…250 x.p. What the…?” James’s reasoning is that “This is not a game about combat or slaying foes…Characters who prefer to fight when it is unnecessary are lunatics, possibly psychotic, and not likely to survive long in a game run by a competent Referee.” Once again, I like what James is doing, I like his reasoning, and I like the way he puts it.
Lest this review get totally out of control, let me only briefly mention that the last 55 or so pages of the Rules give utilitarian and easy-to-understand rules for (amongst other things) climbing, falling, disease, hunting, poison, starving, healing, languages, encumbrance (an innovative and simple system that is probably the best I’ve seen for D&D), movement, time, maritime adventures (6 pages), retainers (10 pages), property, and combat. (Oh, I forgot to mention that the game uses ascending armor class, and that an unarmored human has an armor class of 12.)
Now on to the 120-page Magic booklet…
The first 15 pages cover how spells are learned as well as the creation of magical items. What I find very appealing is the implied rarity of magic items in the LotFP game. Clerics can create holy water and scrolls. That’s it. Magic-users can create potions, scrolls, staves, and wands. That’s it. And staves and wands are darn near impossible to create. First step: Get your magic-user up to 15th level so he can cast Permanency. Then prepare to spend a ton of time and money enchanting it. You want to make a wand of fireballs? That will take 30 to 180 days to complete and will cost 100 g.p. per day of construction. (Unless of course you aren’t doing this in a fully-stocked arcane library AND laboratory, in which case the time required jumps to 60 to 360 days.) Then some wretched 5th-level weasel of a magic-user comes along and touches your precious wand with a Dispel Magic spell. Your wand is GONE, and it gets no saving throw. Poof! (That’s right. Dispel Magic is very effective and very nasty in the LotFP game.) Yes, your 15th-level magic-user will take grim pleasure in massacring the knave, but your invaluable wand worth 10,000 g.p. is now (and irrevocably) a 1 c.p. stick. Did I say irrevocably? Yes. There are no wishes (limited or otherwise) in this game.
In short, I think you’re a blasted fool to bother making most magic items (perhaps making a scroll might be rational). NPC magic-users will have figured this out, too. So there won’t be many magic items just lying around waiting for the greedy PCs’ groping hands.
The spell lists go up to 7th level for clerics and to 9th level for magic-users. There are a couple of brand new spells, but most are right out of A/D&D. Wait. That’s not right. Many of these spells are more evocatively described than in any other version of A/D&D. Some examples:
Conjure Elemental: “Spirits from the nether realm despise the natural world and wish to destroy it. This spell tricks one of these spirits through the mystic veil which separates our world from theirs, and forces them to inhabit one of the four classical elements (fire, water, earth or air), animating it into a nigh unstoppable elemental of pure destruction…”
Teleport: “This spell fixes the caster in one absolute point in space, and moves creation so that the caster appears to instantly travel an incredible distance…”
Speak with Dead: “People that were decent, honest, innocent, or at least devout in their religion (not all gods care about morality), will be anxious to answer questions and remain on Earth for as long as possible. They have learned that the afterlife is nothing, simply a void with no effective consciousness and no sensation but for the numbing awareness of passing time. They know that being alive, even inside a rotting corpse for the briefest sliver of time that leaves them in agony as the decay of their physical form leaves every nerve transmitting unrelenting pain, is better than being dead. Cads, scoundrels, and heretics, on the other hand, were pleasantly surprised to not find eternal torture waiting for them in death. Only the vicious and undeserving find this peace in death, and they will be furious about this peace being disturbed…”
You’ll also notice some spells missing from the lists: resurrection, raise dead, wish, and some others. Some other spells have been limited (such as continual light lasting for one day rather than for ever). This all has the effect of stopping the inevitable questions before they start: “Why doesn’t an enterprising 3rd-level magic-user cast continual light spells on small river stones and make a fortune selling them to the city fathers to light the entire city?” or “Why don’t the kings have cadres of clerics keeping them forever young, and raising them from the dead when an accident occurs? Why aren’t all royalty centuries or millennia old and perpetually youthful?” Etc.
And that’s pretty much the end of this review. What can I say? The LotFP game is fantastic. Anyone could probably find little things to nitpick, but the same can be said for anything ever published for D&D. The LotFP game remains thoroughly D&D while giving you a whole new flavor of D&D. You probably already own your favorite version of Gary’s A/D&D. Now you can own James Raggi’s version of D&D. I’d hate to do without either of them. Get this game. If you have the money, spring for the full ride. If you don’t have the money, click those free downloads. Either way, you won’t be sorry.
