Lamentations of the Flame Princess (First Part)

After some days busy with some Real World ™ matters I come back with a review of the game Lamentations of the Flame Princess (Grindhouse Edition), the Weird Fantasy Role-playing Game created by James Raggi.

This game, based upon the first edition of the original Dungeons & Dragons, is clearly orientated to dark and gothic fantasy (in fact it is specifically oriented to adult gamers due to issues dealt with).

The complete game it’s in a box with three manuals (printed in A5 size), a set of little dice and copies of the character sheet and the corresponding OGL license.

As it is divided in three distinct books I will divide this review in three parts, in this first one I will talk about the book of Rules and Magic.

This book it’s devoted to characters’ creation, the game system and spells available to magicians and clerics.

Let’s begin with the characters, they can reach level 20 and are divided in the following classes: the typical ones, including Clerics, Warriors, Mages, Dwarfs, Elfs and Halflings, and a new class named Specialist that, taking the Thief as a basis, can be used as inspiration to develop new classes (in fact is the only one with a defined set of abilities using the typical template of the original game).

After the characters’ creation the book offers some interesting parts, like an extensive list of goods and equipment that can be acquired by the characters, rules to manage adventures (including outdoor’s activities and sea travels) and rules to manage the hiring of followers (and verifying their loyalty), property owning and inversion management that can produce juicy gains (or not).

Following straight we reach the rules for encounters and combat, clearly based in the original ones, but in this case using ascendant Armor Class (AC), so attack throws have to overcome it to hurt the adversaries (it is more close to Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 than the original game).

This first volume also give us the magic system with an extended list of more than 100 spells for Clerics and Mages, with rules for creating potions and scrolls and use of laboratories and libraries.

Some of the spells are clearly oriented to a dark fantasy style with Lovecraftian influences, clearly demonstrated by examples like Chaos, that puts its victims in contact with Universe truths that can make them to act madly or with an irrational behaviour during a time, Contact the Outer Sphere, that permits the character to obtain knowledge from the stars (with the danger of being possessed by outer space beings) or Call, that permits to rally creatures of different origins is space and time, with risk of calling really dangerous and uncontrollable creatures.

To end this first book the back cover offers tables needed for combat in gaming sessions: Saving Throws, Melee and Missile Weapons, Attack Bonus and Armor.

Here ends the first part of Lamentations of the Flame Princess (Grindhouse Edition), the second part will be devoted to the Referee book.

This entry it's also available in the following languages:
Castellano Català