Monday, January 11, 2016

Review and Commentary On Vacant Ritual Assembly #5 By Full Moon Medicine Show For Lamentations of The Flame Princess Campaigns & Your Own Old School Campaigns


Right out of the gate Red Moon Medicine Show continues to impress me with their Lamentations of The Flame Princess fanzine, Vacant Ritual Assembly issue #5 which is going to be the last one for awhile now. At least until Klint Crouse and his crew decide to do another issue. So let's dive right into the pdf of this issue.
GRAB IT RIGHT HERE
This is a pretty jam packed issue with lots of factions and content the pdf is perfectly timed out to use and drop right into the deep end of your Lamentations games.
Issue #5 Includes:
New Artwork from Jeremy Duncan, Aaron Hamric, Olli Hihnala, Sean Poppe, and Xolis
Koster's Knob: A ready-to-use halfling village by Judd Karlman.
Weedwise Wizarding: An accounting of the Knob's more popular strains of pipe weed. New "Pipe Arts" skill.

The Ritualist: A new LotFP character class framework by Kathryn Jenkins.
Unholy Inversion of Hope:  A grimdark, psuedo-Catholic religion from my campaign.

The Sineater Wolves: A heretical order of lycanthropic monks. Rules for lycanthropy.
On The Raggi: An interview with James Raggi IV, author of Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

This fanzine is like a shot in the arm of old school Pre code horror comics fun and games for a Lamentations of the Flame Princess blended with a fine coating of David Lynch and Mario Bava  splatter punk sensibilities. This is followed by  a ready to drop in Halfling village for your campaigns and its a quality adventure setting piece. I don't want to spoil it but its very nicely done. Weedwise wizarding is that herbal gardening and popular pass time of the Halflings including new skills, strains, and high weirdness for LoFP this is another thing that Dragon Magazine sort of hinted about. But here the adult pass times of the Halflings are revealed.
The Ritualist is a welcome addition to the pseudo historical and Gothic brand of adventuring of LoFP but could work in other old school OD&D style games. There plenty of room here to twist and bend this class to your home games to make it work but I liked what I saw.
The Unholy Inversion of Hope is a shot in the arm and a very grim and nasty piece of pseudo Catholic styling of a religion. The piece drips with lots of potential to be a giant factional pain for characters and PC's. There's also plenty of fodder here for further NPC's and adventure hooks. These are guys your going to love to hate.

I absolutely love the Sin Eater Wolves! Finally some decent rules for Lycanthropy and a heretical order of monks to boot! I'm a werewolf kinda guy and and this faction really hits the spot. There is enough adventure meet on the bones to really bring these guys home and with a bit of work they can be a perfect addition to a Red and Pleasantland campaign. Lots of adventure fodder and further bits of wonderfulness to add into any old school OD&D style game. This for me was one of the highlights of issue five.
Another interview with James Raggi and a nice in depth piece on the creator of Lamentations of the Flame Princess. I honestly have to say that Full Moon continues to produce some of the best pieces of gaming material for Lamentations outside of official releases from Raggi and company. Five out of five stars for a very well put together fanzine that you can use all kinds of horror related LofP or OSR games.

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