LotFP Week 2015: Scenic Dunnsmouth

In this week I'm devoting to Lamentations of the Flame Princess today I will talk about the Scenic Dunnsmouth module, written by Zzarchov Kowolski. Will Player Characters discover the secrets Dunnsmouth hides or will they die trying...?

Influences that's possible to detect in the module creation

Scenic Dunnsmouth is influenced by the tales The Dunwich Horror and The Shadow Over Innsmouth by the United States writer H.P. Lovecraft (not surprisingly the name of the town giving the module's title is the union of the towns where the action of the two tales takes place) and allows us to design a place where it's possible to set an adventure with a background in the Lovecraft canon: Dunnsmouth is an impoverished town in a swampy area and pretty far from any civilization center (so any government or commercial visit is at least sporadic) and its inhabitants are victim of a terrible and dark secret which have affected them during years (like the Esoteric Order of Dagon affecting Innsmouth inhabitants), furthermore the swamp where the town is located also hides... something accountable for the strange effects taking place in the region.

Creating Dunnsmouth

This module allow to create Dunnsmouth, a town which can repeatedly used with the same player group and its composition decided randomly as a prelude to the adventure the referee wants to direct, this composition is variable regarding the internal composition of the town (houses and significant buidings like the church) and the presence of its inhabitants (members from Duncaster, Dunlop, Samson and Van Klaus families and individuals like uncle Ivanovik or Magda the gipsy).

The elements the referee needs to generate Dunnsmouth are a set of dice (1d4, 10d6, 1d8 and 2d12, each one of a different colour) and a deck of poker cards using only 4 suits (diamonds ♦, spades ♠, hearts ♥ and clubs ♣).

Dice will be rolled over a blank sheet of paper and notes taken about where have each one has falled and the obtained score, depending of the obtained outcomes of each one buildings and the circumstance affecting each one will be established, taking in account that if any of the d12s roll is 7 or higher this localization is special and may be related to the possible secret that Dunnsmouth is hiding...

For each building designated as a home of a family a random card is drawn to establish, with the corresponding suit and its value, to which family clan belongs this home and which persons live there (the background of each family and its members are specified in the section describing the four clans).

Miscellanea

In the miscellanea section of Scenic Dunnsmouth there's additional information to extend the Van Klaus family background and add options related to a secret of their past, a list of spells and magical objects suitable for its use in Dunnsmouth and advice for expanding the town and also create neighbouring villages like Dunnbank and Dunnford and add other creatures or individuals result of the secret haunting the town.

Game aids

With this review I have prepared a pdf archive including 5 random dispositions of Dunnsmouth following the suggested rules of the book (of course you will need the supplement to properly read the results).

Google Drive | 4Shared

Conclusions

Scenic Dunnsmouth is a very interesting source of inspiration if you want to create a cursed town for Playing Characters to look into, although I think that the degree for reusing it its not so higher as it initially seems, this will depend upon the referee's imagination and resources and to that effect supplements like Realms of Crawling Chaos for Labyrinth Lord (which I reviewed in this post of the OSR Week 2015) are the perfect tools for this kind of work, and if the referee is truly inspired he can put Dunnsmouth in other scenarios like for instance Qelong, which I already reviewed in 2013 (in this case you obviously will have to do the necessary changes for passing from a west setting to one more akin to Southeast Asia).

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