LotFP Week 2015: Death Frost Doom

In this penultimate post of the week devoted to Lamentations of the Flame Princess I will talk about the adventure Death Frost Doom, written by James Raggi y Zak S.

The edition of Death Frost Doom which I will review in this post is the second and revised edition taking as a basis the original adventure published in year 2009 and which the game Lamentations of the Flame Princess owes its succes and subsequent expansion in the role-playing games scope.

Analysing Death Frost Doom

As in other posts of this week I haven't planned to explain the plot of the adventure to avoid spoiling the fun you may have playing it, instead I will try to convey the sensations I got while reading it.

Death Frost Doom is an adventure you may set in any campaign scenario, link it to other books in the Lamentations catalogue (in fact there are many moments in the adventure showing this connection points) or play it as an autoconclusive module.

In this adventure Player Characters will climb an inhospitable and frozen moutain, whether searching for gold rumours say it's hidden somewhere in its peak, discover the secrets it may hide or moved by the desire or need of investigating the events that happened there years ago. At hte time of reaching the top they will find a cemetery with a great number of tombs and a seemingly abandoned cabin, it's also possible that they may encounter Ezekiel Duncaster (some member of the Duncaster family of Scenic Dunnsmouth?), living in a little hut near the cemetery which seem to have the selfimposed duty of being its guardian and keeper. Player Characters may speak with him and try to obtain information of what happened there a long time ago... Will they succeed?, and how will react Ezekiel to his questions and actions?

First moments of Death Frost Doom are strongly based in psychologic terror, manifesting in a events happening as Characters start to explore the zone and that will increase their uneasiness and their possible paranoia, which will worsen as they begin to discover evidence of what happened there and want to know more about it...

To have an idea of the sensations you may have paying the adventure I advice, if you have the chance, of watching films like The Shining (1980) (IMDb | Wikipedia), cinematographic adaptation directed by Stanley Kubrick of the book of the same title by Stephen King and Ravenous (1999) (IMDb | Wikipedia).

As characters discover what the mountain hides and act in response to it they will gradually closer to the end ... Will they survive or they are doomed?

Musical accompaniment

As part of this adventure authors suggest some music pieces and I gathered them in a Youtube playing list inserted below, in it you will find A Dying God Coming into Human Flesh by Celtic Frost, Toccata and Fugue in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, The House of the Rising Sun, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly and a scen from Ghostbusters; I also have included Night On Bald Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov because I think it fits perfectly in the last part of the adventure.

Conclusions

Death Frost Doom will appeal to players who love the terror genre and even more if they like games as Lamentations of the Flame Princess or Call of Cthulhu, in fact the contents of teh adventure are perfectly adaptable to other rulesets and scenarios, even as an adventure of the gothic Western genre, like David Rollins thinks in this post of his blog which I advise you to read for rules and adaptations regarding this theme, I also advise you to visit The OSR Library by David Baymiller to find more inspiration sources.

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