Get ready to hunt Ghosts! One more of the LotFP adventure modules that I – Disclaimer! – got sent by, from and for Lamentations of the Flame Princess. And it is all about residual souls with a proverbial axe to grind.

Heart of the Saint: The book

Outward appearance: Red! It is all red.

The design and workmanship are very solid, the hardback even sturdier than usual with LotFP.
The interior pages are all red, glossy sheets with white script, which still has good contrast and the unusual look helps underscore the central topic: We will see dead people. Supernatural investigations, ghost-hunters, handling dried and shriveled body parts.

And so we get to:

Heart of the Saint: The content

Heart of the Giant is essentially an X-Files or Supernatural kind of deal: It all starts when the party encounters an obvious ghost-activity in broad daylight. A dead person is meddling in the affairs of the living and not even hiding it.

It is not an unreasonable expectation of the author, one Alucard Finch, that the party will handle that issue. Since roleplayers tend to me media-savvy, any character in any roleplaying game can be expected to stand the ground unfazed and handle some ghost-action. And that is the reason why the party gets involved: however the characters will deal with the situation, it will make them stand out publicly and “The Church” will contact them.

“The Church”, in this case, is modeled very closely along the lines of something “Catholic-Italy-ish”, but the details can be as close or far from Catholicism as fits the table. Bottom line, there is a Church in a region plagued by ghost activity, and the head priest wants to see something done about it. He will invite the party with the plan to offer them a job, basically for a treasure-hunt for multiple relics, body parts belonging to a dead Saint.

Free Choice

That is a filmworthy premise, could be either horror or thriller or comedy. Of course, at your table everything will depend on the free decisions of the group. Will they take the job or not? Will they work for the Clergy or do it to grab these body parts themselves? Will they be good, faithful employees or rough bandits? That is all the choice of the players and will all change everything that comes next.

Moral questions

We all know our players and their morality. Many RPG-player-characters tend to kill humans with the amount of moral dilemma they face when brushing their teeth. For the average D&D-player, working within the confines set by a Catholic moral authority will be hard. Harder than fighting twenty ghosts at once. In Heart of the Saint, the temptation to go rogue will be there the whole time. To keep them on the straight and narrow, the author embedded a chaperone in the adventure: a priest to tag along who will call the party out on any immoral acts.

Criminal Investigations

The Heart of the Saint adventure is structured in a way that makes it easy to follow regardless of party policies. Alucard Finch has also taken care to make it easy to incorporate in a longer campaign. It can be one big adventure strung together in a line, or just as easily a number of semi-independent missions mixed among other missions of a larger campaign. (The chaperone will probably tag along for non-Ghost adventures too then, but that is up to the Referee)

Either way, Heart of the Saint is about chasing a number of supernatural phenomena, either by direct order of the Church or following rumors. Seen as a whole, these missions form a sort of puzzle that the Church wants solved.

And, obviously, the players can decide to go against the Church and either refuse or rob them, or they can be honest agents and do their jobs.

Running Heart of the Saint

Running a session out of this multi-mission-module is fairly straightforward: Most of the individual missions fit on one or two pages, which helps organisation and quick-reference during play. Some missions are a bit more complex and need better preparation. It pays to read through the whole thing once, if only to make sure the Referee knows all the implications of, for example, the restrictions of movement that exist.

Next make notes to organise the various missions in order to put them on a mental map and stay organised about what the party will find where.

Then each mission can be run as a full session or in case of the simpler ones as a side-quest next to another mission, or several in a row if the party is particularly efficient and the dice roll hot.

Even more so, in theory a good deal of additional missions can be added, with or without any direct connection to the main task. The adventure module describes the perpetual presence of multiple additional ghosts, who may all provide extra adventures.

Style considerations

Reading the collection of missions some small elements stood out. I had the impression that the author may have made a series of Ghost stories first and then “tweaked” some of them to make them more “Lamentations of the Flame Princess”-ish. Some details – especially some bodily-fluid-humor – feel “added”, as if they could have been left off if it was offered to another publisher. Or am I reading it wrong and they are a much more natural fit than my gut says?

Be that as it may, these elements can be easily toned down a lot, or at least toned down a bit, or they can be kept as-is, with no effort on the part of the Referee.

A select few touches of light-hearted comic relief do not overwhelm the tone: it is not a gonzo game but rather focuses on investigation around a “treasure-hunt”.

Who will like it?

Apart from those who simply like ghost stories: The adventure has a strong religious vibe, so it will appeal particularly to players who like to explore cleric-topics. It will be interesting to play for someone who is critical of religion: that will offer good roleplay opportunities.
If players are naturally confrontational about anything religious or abhor clerics with a vengeance, the adventure can still work but the GM will have to do a bit of extra work. The structure allows for a fair bit of adding and removing of missions,  and with that flexibility various extra homebrew adventures or activities lifted from classic genre sources can fit into the arc.

More LotFP on this blog