Lamentations of the Flame Princess and the Pulp Pedigree - Observations on Original Dungeons & Dragons 1974 game, Original Traveller, and Lamentations of the Flame Princess rpg

 Alright let's pick it up from here. One thing that I noticed about Lamentations of the Flame Princess and original Dungeons & Dragons is the fact that both games pull quite heavily from thier respective  Pulp pedigrees. And this isn't a bad thing at all. With original Dungeons & Dragons this is evident right from the get go. 

Because Lamentations pulls so heavily from it's Mentzer Dungeons & Dragons legacy the proof of the game is within it's editing by James Raggi the IV. And it's world setting is laid out within it's adventures. John Q Public within thier December 2019 Amazon  review sums up nicely some of the advantages of LoFP;"What you get is a clear and focused restatement of the Basic D&D rules focused on what those rules do best: survival horror. But unlike the high fantasy safari of Dungeons & Dragons, LotFP Weird Fantasy concentrates on desperate treasure hunters hailing from a grimy replica of our own planet in the Renaissance/early modern period, where magic is a dreadful aberration and ne'er-do-wells who rob tombs and chance brushes with unknown horrors are shunned.

"The "D&D" you get is a finely-crafted rendition of the classic game: 7 classes include the Cleric, Fighter, Magic-User, Specialist, Dwarf, Elf, and Halfling. Saving Throws are divided into 5 categories, and magic involves spellbooks, memorization, casting, and forgetting. Attacks are resolved with a d20 roll compared with a range of Armor Classes, modified by Dexterity. XP is earned almost entirely by recovering treasure from dangerous adventure sites.
Each place where Weird Fantasy differs from Mentzer's Basic D&D really doubles down on the game's weird survival horror vision. Characters have 3 Alignments as in Basic—Neutral, Law, and Chaos—but it represents your character's role in a cosmic conflict regardless of their moral outlook. Certain classes are polarized by Alignment: Clerics must be Lawful, and Magic-Users and Elves must be Chaotic. Furthermore, the rules otherwise treat Elves as inhuman monsters, making them vulnerable to holy water and certain spells cast by Clerics." 

"Another big player-facing difference is that only Fighters get better attack bonuses as they increase in level. This helps really set them apart from the other classes. The Specialist, which is the Weird Fantasy alternative to the Thief class in D&D, has a unique skill system that gives players the option to create a wide variety of characters by specializing in different adventuring skills."

Original Dungeons & Dragons plugs into the same flexibility of system as LoFP but in a different direction. This is evident within OD&D 1974's wargaming roots and implimations of system. 
And here's where Traveller comes in once again. Traveller's 2d6 original 1977 system was also born out of it's era and wargaming roots to a certain extent. It's very nature allows it's flexibility and service ability as a game. 
The players of these games can literally with a few rolls come up with a workable campaign on the fly. And these campaigns plug into the literary source material and this is something we see in original Dungeons & Dragons as well as Traveller. Both games ply from thier sources one being Sword & Sorcery and the other being Space Opera respectively both being sources from different aspects of the Pulp magazine era. And LoFP also pulling from the Weird Fantasy era of the you guessed it the Pulps. 
Why!? Because there's something very compelling about the Pulp asthetic as a role player and gamer. And this is one of the reasons why we keep coming back to the table top because it's within these rpg systems mathematics and make up.