Happy New Year from the Dice Mines!

 

"Do you think they have Holmes-made pumpkin pie?"

A lot of you wrote in to inquire about yesterday's post [Does anyone believe me when I imply that I've received feedback or do you all see through these claims for the sham that they are?] I mentioned the baleful god of Blogger OCD without quite explaining the significance of it. You see, for the first several years that I maintained this blog, my end of year post count was always a number divisible by 6. I'm not sure when I became conscious of this, but I do know that I spent the last week of 2015 scheming to achieve 24 posts for the year. 

Then came December 2016. I started the month with an admittedly meager count of 18 posts on the year; all I had to do was sit tight until January and I was good for the year. But with one week to go, I decided to fly in the face of superstition; I posted an unlucky 19th post on Christmas day featuring Erol Otus's famed photo of the KEEP on the Borderlands, as seen above. Maybe I was trying to spur myself on to crank out 5 more posts in the week between Christmas and New Years--if so, it failed as inspiration. Or maybe I wrote that post months earlier, set it to auto-post for Christmas Day and forgot all about it. That was seven years ago, who can remember that crap?

The fallout has been tragic. Even though 2016 was my least active blogging year at the time, I have never achieved even that low standard in the years since. And only once have I managed to achieve another multiple of 6. True nerds will note that just last year I posted 13 times, missing the mark by just one post once again, but on that occasion, that 13th post came out in July; I had more than 5 months to come up with a few more posts, I just... didn't.

And so it is that, in hopes of fending off forces beyond my understanding, I am here typing this pointless, uninformative missive on New Years Eve. May the new year bring you all peace and prosperity, so long as it's divisible by 6.

Flame Princess review; or How to fend off the Baleful God of Blogger OCD

I started writing this post in 1973, but decided that the subject matter was a bit out of date already, so I never posted it. Now, with less than 32 hours left in the year 2023 and finding myself only two posts away from hitting a multiple of six posts for the annum, I need to squeeze out some content in a hurry. So here, read this if you want. Or don't, what do I care? I'm only posting it as filler.

On the advice of the dudes over at 3TRPG, I finally got around to buying Lamentations of the Inflamed Princess--holy hell that's a long-winded title. Even the abbreviation "LotFP" is too many syllables. If you're like me you can't even type LotFP without saying "Ell-o-tea-eff-pee" in your head. I could go with "LFP" but where's the sophomoric humor in that? Well, how about "LotFaP"? By adding one vowel I've shortened the name to a two syllable, completely innocuous, incorruptible word. Well done. Let's get to it.

Lotfap (snicker) is undeniably a good looking book. And a good size for a book. I was excited to see it on the shelf of my local gaming store, so I snatched it and ran home to start reading it. Don't worry, I paid for it first. 

Between the art, the reputation for dark subject matter, and the loquacious title of the game, I had expectations of a game that pushes boundaries. But once you start reading the book, you quickly notice that this is just an improved form of Basic D&D. Don't get me wrong, it's a pretty good distillation of D&D and an upgrade on Mentzer et. al., but, aside from the art, it's no more provocative than Labyrinth Lord.

Which isn't to say that LotFap has nothing to contribute; it certainly does. Following are the 11 coolest things Raggi's version of Basic D&D has brought to the world:

1. Specialist: Raggi succeeds where D&D so desperately failed. While renaming thieves as "rogues" may have decreased the likelihood of idiotic players trying to pick the pockets of their adventuring colleagues mid-adventure, it is a catastrophically terrible name for a character class, and still implies that members of the class are inclined to not be team players. The specialist is vague enough that you have no problem running this dude as a straight and narrow type who would never mix with the Artful Dodger. Also, they get a wider variety of abilities to choose from--such as "bushcraft"--so they can be kind of like rangers too.
   
2. Only fighters get better at fighting. That's right, every other class has reached their peak combat acumen on the first day they fill out their character sheet.
3. No standardized monsters: no orcs or bullywugs or Type IV demons or even dragons unless you make them up for yourself. Every adventure gets its own custom set of critters to deal with. This does raise the question: if there are no orcs to slaughter, why are dwarves, elves, and halflings available as player races? Did Raggi give in to pressure from the demi-human lobby?
4. Cool Art. No Peter Bradley.
   
5. Much vaunted Encumbrance rules: carry 5 things and you're fine. Pick up more things and you're gonna slow down. Still not sure people will track this in play but it could be done pretty easily.
6. Much vaunted naval combat and property ownership guidelines. Yes, they're a thing. Are they great? I'll try them out. 
7. -11. Ha. I just made that up, there are only 6 things.
   

Rogues Gallery: The Tragedy of Black Dougal

Two posts in two days: what kind of odds were the blogger bookies offering on this outcome? Maybe there's something to this whole A-to-Zed* challenge after all.

Anyway, for letter B of the Rogues Gallery Challenge I initially had my heart set on Bruno the Battler of Holmes's Basic Rules fame. But then I was reminded of the ol' Dungeon Masters Adventure Log with the sample characters in the back. There he is: Black Dougal, 7th level lawful neutral human ranger "slain by fire giant." We can surmise that the rest of the party exacted revenge since not only is there a fire giant listed under encounter #6 of the monster log but also in the treasure section we see that #6 yielded a rather massive haul. Well done party!

But why did I shunt aside poor Bruno the Battler--who, it should be noted, met a similar fate when he failed a save and died of spider venom--in favor of Black D.? Well what's interesting about Mr. Dougal is not his demise but rather its aftermath. Once the fire giant had fallen, most of the party followed Standard Adventurer's Protocol when confronted with the death of a compatriot: once a cost/benefit analysis of "raising" the lost ranger returned a negative result they began rifling through his belongings for magic items and other useful and/or valuable possessions. No sooner had the ritual scavenging begun than Sister Rebecca the party's cleric spoke up in her resolute, Lawful Neutral tones, insisting that Black D. be given a proper funeral in accordance with the warrior tradition to which he held. As this would entail burying him with his sword and armor, the others objected vociferously, noting that the armor was +2 scale mail and the sword was a +2 sword of dragon slaying. But she held firm and when the stalwart dwarven fighter Fred 9802 stood in support of her, the rest of the party acquiesced.

As Adventure Log enthusiasts will recall, Sister Rebecca became the second member of the party to fall in the course of the adventure; her end came at the hands (claws? fangs? acidic breath?) of a black dragon. The tragic irony of the situation is this: had the +2 dragon slaying sword been in the hands of one of the surviving party members when they met the dragon instead of gripped in the cold fingers of the deceased Dougal, Sister Rebecca might well have survived the encounter. 



Side note: the biggest shortfall of the Adventure Logs was that they provided just 12 lines per page for monsters and most of that space was taken up with useless "statblock" info like hit dice and special attacks that was presumably in the dungeon write-up and the DM need not waste time and space transcribing this info into the log. All that was needed in the log was the information necessary for tabulating XPs: monster type, quantity, and hit points. Likewise, there were only 10 slots for treasure. Those ratios are way off from the way we played back in the day.

Front note: The cover illustration clearly shows Fred 9802, Yolanda Mirabilis the MU, and maybe that's Morgan Ironwolf with the spear? confronting a gnoll in a very low-ceilinged dungeon. It should be noted that in encounter #5 the party offed 17 gnolls. 

* Foot Note: This is a nod to all the British TV I've been watching of late; primarily the cumbersomely named yet despicably funny 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown.