Lamentations of The Flame Princess & A Halloween Vampire Campaign Set Up With A Red & Pleasant Land By Zak Smith & Dark Albion By RPG Pundit

You can view a solid article
on Harry Clarke right here

Last night I grabbed my copy of Lamentations of the Flame Princess rule book , Zak Smith's A Red & Pleasant Land. Its been a few months since I cracked open the book & things don't sit on my shelf for long. So why now? Well because of Halloween & I got a chance to stumble upon the work of the Irish stained glass artist and illustrator Harry Clarke. The more I got into Mr.Clarke's artwork the more I kept hearing this eerie little diddly in my mind last night.

I really haven't gotten into the Maze of The  Blue Medusa book because I don't have a ton of time to look into it. That being said I love the tone of Harry Clarke's Faust artwork & the demonic guests of a Red & Pleasant Land. The material resonates with me on a lot of levels & while I've been going through my sword & sorcery period lately. This material could be refitted into a cohesive campaign even using the Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea system but personally I think that these two gentlemen would make excellent NPC's for A Red & Pleasant Land adventure or a campaign.



The genteel horror bubbling just below the surface of Clarke's work is a really nice complement to the tone and ideas within a Red & Pleasant Land. There's a ton of ideas in a Red & Pleasant Land  that are screaming to be used in conjunction with either Poe or some other Gothic era luminary writer.

Prints of the artwork from a Red & Pleasant  are available here

Harry Clarke's work is seminal to Edgar Allen Poe and has been copied, pirated, and used countless times over the years. The fact is that both of these might go together like peanut butter & jelly or blood filled pastries as the case may be. Crumbling ruins, weird family secrets, vampirism, the undead, its pretty much a campaign that writes itself for Halloween.


Which brings me to an idea that I've had for some months now, taking the lands, setting, and more of a Red & Pleasant Land and dropping them into the vampire filled veins of Dark Albion. The material, tone, and OSR goodness certainly fits right into the background of Dark Albion and it works on a number of levels.
You've got background, magick, circumstances, and a hell of a set up for political intrigue with several systems that can simulate the moves and counter moves of the politic of both a Red & Pleasant Land the world of Dark Albion.


This could be the set up for the back end of Dark Albion's vampire courts and the state of affairs in Transylvania right now as the Rose War begins to heat up!