Lamentations of the Flame Princess Referee Book (Old Grindhouse Edition) by James Edward Raggi IV is a role playing game supplement published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess. This is the referee’s book for an OSR role playing game system, also called Lamentations of the Flame Princess.
This is a 98 page PDF that is available for free from RPGNow, or the original printed Grindhouse set of which it was part can still be found from places such as Amazon. One page is the front cover, one page the Table of Contents, one page a table of brief charts for NPCs and settlements and there is a single full page illustration.
What is a Referee? is a single page on what a Referee – aka Dungeon Master, GameMaster, Keeper etc. – is.
Rules doesn’t really give the rules of the game – such would be found in the Rules & Magic book. Instead it covers how the Referee handles the rules. The only two definite rules here are Rule Zero – the Referee is the final authority on all matters for his campaign – and Rule One – Rule Zero is not an excuse for being a despot and rules need applying consistently. This is also covered with handling dice.
The Weird is on running a weird campaign and starts with fear, terror and sanity. This tells the Referee not to use dice on such matters, but to take away player knowledge. How graphic a campaign should be, in any matter, is discussed; players should not be uncomfortable. There should also be mystery and any science of magic found should not necessarily be possible to be duplicated by the characters. The Referee can, and should, create such that is strange and cannot be done by characters.
The Adventure considers what an adventure is, which is the basic unit of play. How adventures are set up and different types of design are covered. Event based adventures tend to run on a timeline. Exploration adventures consider such as megadungeons and wilderness adventures – hex crawls would fall into the latter category. These types of place can never be fully cleared. Location adventures are a single area, and perhaps one that can be cleared, such as a small dungeon. An Exploration adventure can have many Locations within it. Finally, Personage adventures are based around character interaction.
This section continues with the principles of designing adventures. The basics, the elements needed to be found in a good adventure and a discussion on what is and is not railroading. How to place obstacles, such as tricks, traps and encounters, when maps are needed and how to do experience and place treasure – and how magic items should not be overused. Pacing the adventure and how to use random encounters to stop players taking forever to check for everything. Using published adventures, and how to fit these to your campaign. One advantage stated to be with published adventures is that they are a different style to the Referee’s own material, which can change the experience, so they shouldn’t be changed so much that this difference in style is lost.
The Campaign starts with what a campaign is and two methods of building it; prior design or accumulated play. Prior design means designing the world beforehand whilst in accumulated play the world is designed as the adventures progress. It advises that, when designing a world, to start with the areas that are immediately needed. These areas would get the greatest detail; other areas can just be given a general overview.
For Referees who are not basing their world on accumulated play, the rest of this section is on building the campaign world. Civilisation, religion, culture, adventure locations, languages, town and social structure, how easily equipment is available, fees and taxes, owning land and how cultures interact.
NPCs considers non-player characters and what depth to go into when creating them. Most do not need stats, as characters will not be fighting them, and even many that might have stats will not have anything exceptional. NPCs should have personalities and names, if they are going to be interacted with in some detailed way – many do not even really need a name. There are charts at the back of the book for creating NPCs briefly.
Monsters considers the foes. Lamentations deliberately does not have a bestiary, at least in the main supplements. This section suggests that one monster be used as the central focus of a dungeon (quite how this works with the suggestion about the use of wandering monster tables or just what other things should be encountered isn’t really explained). Different types of monsters – animals, constructs, humanoids, oozes and slimes and undead are discussed. For humanoids, this section recommends not overusing them; if a human will do the job, use a human.
There is one monster described at the end, a vampire, but this doesn’t have any stats provided – the idea is that monsters, even familiar ones, should be unique, and this mostly describes different features for vampires.
Magic Items is on magic items, naturally. As mentioned earlier, in a LotFP game magic items should be quite rare and never available for sale, and have consequences for using. In the original D&D games magic items seemed to just spontaneously manifest in dungeons – no-one ever created them, as for one thing rules on doing so tended to be lacking and for another it was much easier to simply loot them. Especially as the monsters owning the treasures rarely bothered to use them. In modern games such as D&D 3.x/Pathfinder magic items are so common that even a thorp of under 20 people would have 1d4 minor magic items – items that could easily have a combined worth greater than that of the entire settlement.
There are only three magic items described, all of them with problems for the users. Scrolls, rods, wands and potions are considered to be more readily available, for these are all essentially charged items and the rules on them can be found in the Rules & Magic book.
Other Topics is on matters such as recruiting new players for a game, and getting rid of unsuitable players or groups, what to do when characters die (in LotFP this is quite probable) and good and bad reasons for how to run parts of the game.
What Else is Out There? mentions that LotFP is deliberately intended to be compatible with other OSR games. This section notes the differences between this system and others – even though much should be familiar to OSR gamers, there are differences – and explains what should be done to adapt material created for another system. There is also a list of some companies that create OSR material.
A Stranger Storm is a starting adventure. The monster in this is the Changeling. No stats are given for this creature, as it has the stats of whatever creature it duplicates – and the nature of this duplication means that it is only possible to tell which is the original being and which is the Changeling in a few ways. Even watching the duplication doesn’t help. There are asides intended to help the starting Referee run the adventure, especially as it may be rather more freeform than some are familiar with. This adventure also pretty much lacks any stats, so it could be used with any system.
Lamentations of the Flame Princess Referee Book (Old Grindhouse Edition) in Review
The PDF is decently bookmarked with most major and minor sections linked. The Table of Contents is to a similar level of detail. Navigation is decent. The text maintains a two column format and was largely error-free. There are a number of black and white illustrations, although these give the appearance of being stock or filler in many ways rather than being specifically designed for the book. Presentation is okay.
This is from the old Grindhouse Edition boxed set and, as such, makes reference to the Tutorial Book and the Rules and Magic Book from that set, neither of which are included with this. There is a new Rules & Magic, but the Referee Book has not been updated as yet, which is why this one is available for free.
Much, if not almost all, of the supplement is quite generic in nature, being general advice for a Referee/GM rather than game-specific stats. Any reader wanting LotFP-specific material is probably going to be disappointed. Any reader after general advice on being a Referee or GM, and for running a campaign or adventure that is a bit different to the rest, will find more of use. Experienced Referees will probably know most of the basic material already. Lamentations of the Flame Princess Referee Book (Old Grindhouse Edition) does have useful material for running a game and it can be found for free by clicking here.
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