It took me long enough to finally play … or rather GM … LotFP. The system is no longer fresh, not by a long shot, and it has tickled for a long time. After all, among the Dungeons & Dragons editions, Moldvay’s B/X is my favourite, and Lamentations of the Flame Princess is based on it, so trying it out should come naturally. And yet, finding the opportunity to play a beginner game has eluded me too long.

Finally it happened: I GMed the entry-adventure “Tower of the Stargazer” with a Magic User, a Specialist, a crazy and murderous “Alice” (from Red & Pleasant Land), as well as two late-comers, a Fighter and an Elf, over two sessions, [which would later continue for two years as a LotFP campaign that incorporated several modules bent to fit into this party’s premise] which the party completed victorious and with zero casualties. The adventure continued with a homebrew siege situation that turned completely on its head when the players decided to ally with my bad guys and cut down my good guy — a development that delighted me, as the freedom to choose one’s own path is what makes RPGs great in the first place.

The following is my review of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, the rules system, and will assume familiarity with the Rules of D&D Basic/Expert by Moldvay/Cook; so it will be a bit weird for readers who have no knowledge of Basic DnD, and it will be boring for experienced Lamentations-players.

You are warned.

The Rules

The Rules of Lamentations of the Flame Princess read like the work of a B/X fan who didn’t like the d100 “skill” system (are these skills or probabilites? That is a debate independent of this post) and felt that the Fighter class got short-changed and could do with some power-up: Killing someone is a hard choice, and most people are not very good at it (represented by a base AAC of 12, not 10). Only Fighters are really good at it (represented by a starting attack bonus of +2 to match the higher AAC), and they get ever better killers when they level up. While non-fighters don’t. Clerics, Specialists, even Elves and Dwarves do not advance their murder-talent, ever. They have other advantages.

As a result of this, and through various tactical options, combat is different than in B/X, allowing for aggressive or defensive stances etc, with actual influence on the fight. Clerics get a spell at level 1, but Turning the Undead is such a spell, so it is essentially a power-down. Magic-Users have the same problem: They get 3 starting spells instead of 1, but casting is risky in a pinch: It means you are just standing there and mumble your arcane formulas, and you cannot defend, so whoever chooses to strike you down while you use magic is bound to kill you if are still level 1 or 2.

Two of my favourite changes from B/X are Death and Taxes: PCs do not die at 0 HP, they fall unconscious, and only negative 4 means death. This is more or less as I used to play B/X, so I am quite happy with it.

The Money

My second big gripe with B/X are the insane prices of items. Nearly always it is far better to make stuff on your own or barter with a craftsman than to pay the unbelievable piles of gold that are demanded for a simple ration for travel or a longbow!!

Seriously: The B/X-longbow costs 40 gold pieces, and a sailor earns 10 gold pieces a month. By contrast, an Lamentations-longbow costs 45 silver pieces, and a sailor earns 60 silver pieces a month. The longbow is still expensive, but there is at least hope to get one without murdering a longbowman.

A week of dried meat costs 15 gold pieces. A week of normal rations for travellers still costs 5. Try supporting a family with the wages of a sailor. It is not merely hard, it is impossible without turning to piracy.

LotFP even takes the time to think about what should happen with loot after you bring it to town. Where do you stash it? Can you invest it in a business venture? Can you buy a house? Will you spend it all or plan for a future? All important considerations once you survive a couple of dungeon delves, and these questions make loot something more than a number.

Firearms

Lamentations of the Flame Princess is set in quasi 1600, mostly 1630 or roundabouts 1650, plus some small change. That means, there are guns, and there are quite elaborate rules for gunplay, and they actually make sense. The gun ignores much of your armor levels as if they weren’t there, but their direct damage output is limited and they need to be cleaned, prepped, loaded and fired, with black powder.

Even a pro at reloading needs time so much time for it that the aforementioned longbow looks pretty darn attractive…. but when you take a military unit of 50 men, the gun becomes a fearsome weapon: Burst after burst of lead balls that smash through your expensive plate armor like through so much wadded cloth.

The Setting

Like any RPG, you can mix up everything and use the rules for any kind of adventure, but naturally it has its own implied and even articulated setting, and this setting is Weird Fantasy in the dog-eat-dog era of the 30-years-war. That means, where Dungeons & Dragons tends towards clean, happy, and beautiful special forces action into enemy territory to collect loot, Lamentations of the Flame Princess tend towards grimy, stinking, and disgusting human-on-human violence with a taint of the bizarre. Monsters are less platoons of creatures built from stat-blocks and monster manuals – more free-form, tending toward the unique, unknown and weird.

Weird Fantasy also means that Lamentations of the Flame Princess de-emphasizes the normal and emphasizes the horror aspect of roleplaying. That horror aspect is always there: Even in the tamest of D&D games, crawling underground to fight creatures who make their homes in dank tunnels has an inherent horror vibe. It falls to the Referee to convey this state of affairs. Lamentations of the Flame Princess lends some help towards this goal.

Dungeons can be, and often are, described superficially, even clinically. Or they can be made tangible, evoking their smells and, especially, their darkness and otherness – the weird. This is what LotFP is made for, and which is highlighted in most of the adventure modules written for it; this is also where some of the opposition towards LotFP comes from: a defensive reactions from those who shy away from the dark, the dirty, the horrifying.

Magick

The mindset of the “weird” is important for magic too. In B/X, the magic user starts out very, very weak. Nobody dies as easily as the mage. A frail body, no armor and only a dagger to defend with, that means he is (or at least feels) pretty useless in combat and needs weeks of downtime learning to get better at magic … weeks that the campaign group could spend looting and advancing, but have to wait for the mage to rifle through books.

With many adventuring groups, this creates friction. Often, the others don’t want to wait. The magic-user has to rely on his comrades to get badly hurt so he can use their recovery time for studying – or on the GM to handwave study time between sessions.

Needless to say, this is not ideal.

In Lamentations of the Flame Princess, a magic-user has more options. For one, his cating restrictions are simply tied to encumbrance, not the use of any items or armor. In a fight a wizard can take a gun and shoot a guy just as well as any priest. He can stab people, or blow them up, in other words, he can do non-booky stuff in between his learning sessions. (To balance this state of affairs, casting a spell leaves the mage defenseless .. standing still to complete complex ritual gestures and incantations is a huge risk that gives opponents an auto-hit with maximum damage if they manage to get close.)

Young upstart wizards starts not with one known spell like in B/X, but with three randomly selected in the spell book, plus the abilty to “Read Magic”. The random selection is important because it reinforces the need for creativity that is front and center for any magic user. Think out of the box if you want to bend reality to your will! The “Read Magic” is essential because there are very clear and consistent rules that allow your wizard to expand on his knowledge. Copy spells from others, copy spells from scrolls, and most importantly, do spell research…. anything goes.

Magic-Users MUST be of chaotic alignment, which means, they cannot believe that there is an overarching order to the universe … as befits someone who rearranges reality with secret words. Just as clerics MUST be lawful, meaning they must belive that life makes sense and is ordered after a system, as befits someone who prays to a higher power beyond our measly earth-bound existence. So we have a built-in friction between the Arcane and the Devine.

Finally, magic is not a clean-cut affair of formula ==> effect, but weird and dangerous, almost unpredictable. This concerns the GM, as it is a mission statement for spell descriptions.

Variations and options

Every magic-user has his own personal style of magic, and must understand and bend a spell to his or her personal mindset. This is flavour, not rules, as in actual play a spell is still just a spell. The personal style only affects learning time and transcription, which is highly randomized.

In general, Lamentations has a much bigger number of spells than B/X or any other old school Dungeons & Dragons edition — 20 per level — and many extra-spells come with modules, as well as women-only spells in the special add-on “Vaginas are Magic” and another batch of spells in the later addition “Eldritch Cock”.

Eldritch Cock

Lamentations has come out in several editions as of yet, but all of them are basically the same thing. The biggest change is the switch from gold to silver standard. And all over, B/X can be absolutely felt as the skeleton and muscles of our Flame Princess. LotFP is undeniably a child of B/X.

So far.

But the journey goes ever forward, and there is a supplement called “Eldritch Cock” that introduces a number of playtest options which develop the game farther away from B/X and make it its own thing. One interesting aspect is the unification of damage to uncouple it from weapon choice, like back in ODnD.

Eldritch Cock Lamentations also toy with the idea of ditching the “classic Fantasy races”… concentrating on humans and waving Elves and Dwarves goodbye. These species are great and everything, but they are not strictly necessary, especially not for a game set in the age of black powder.

Another aspect, among many more, is a new magic system: Mages can still prepare spells … and even should do so … but they can go beyond it. They can cast more, or differently, risking grave and serious consequences from meddling with the Forces dark and arcane.

Eldritch Cock, in other words, means freeing the system from the confines of DnD, and growing it into a fresh form that can stand on its own.

In practice, though, this unique system will have a hard time to establish itself in the market. Even so, it is full of good ideas that can be ported into the original LotFP rules with little effort.

Skills

I have mentioned skills up there. In place of the strict table of d100 “thief” skills, Lamentations of the Flame Princess introduces the “Specialist” a flexible expert-character that starts with skill points and can allocate them to various potential fields of expertise. This makes a thief just as possible as a scholar or an assassin or even a medic, because other skills can be chosen with ease, and so most every civilian can theoretically be statted as some sort of Specialist.

This flexible “skillmonkey” build would later be adapted successfully by the rejuvenated B/X rules known as “OSE”, serials numbers filed off, leading to thousands of instances of the repetitive discussion about who came up with it.

Conclusio

In conclusion: B/X is still my favourite D&D edition for quick Dungeon-Delving and play by post, where simplicity is of the essence; but overall, for face to face sessions that include the aboveground and daily life, as well as more detailed combat, Lamentations of the Flame Princess appears superior. It also has the better Healing rules, and a clearly superior take on Economy.

On this blog: More Lamentations of the Flame Princess

The Company: LotFP.com

2025 LotFP modules reviews:
Earth Incubation Crisis
Lair of the Brain Eaters
Don’t Fuck the Priest
Heart of the Saint (coming up)