Commentary On The Driftwood Verses Kickstarter & Some Free Resources For The Lamentations of the Flame Princess Rpg System

Well, first of all I just got home after a day of repair work and more so its time for me to unwind and begin to look at some of the OSR material coming across my desk. Let's start with the fact that Clint and Cassie Krause  plus the Red Moon Medicine Show folks just hit 11,301 for Driftwood Verses!
Congrats to another successful kickstarter and there's more rewards and such to unlock yet. So head over there and check it out! There's something damn well appealing about Driftwood Verses and as a Herman Melville fan this really hits the same spot as some of the haunted sea tales that I grew up with in Connecticut. Now Driftwood Verses is Melville meets David Cronenberg meets Gothic Literature spun through a fever dream and drenched in acid for the Lamentations of the Flame Princess system.
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I have a tendency to think of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess rpg as a separate system completely from many of the other retroclone on the market. There are a variety of reasons for this one being that the add ons & adventures are system enclosed products unto themselves such as 'Better Then Any Man', two the system is modular so that it will work with, 'The Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia' and the quality of LoFP titles have been consistently useful at my table. Which brings me to the Red Moon Medicine Show's LoFP material which is almost always of a slightly better quality then some of the OSR efforts that I've seen over the years. The Red Moon Medicine Show's Vacant Ritual Assembly LoFP zines are killer and so are they're adventures. I would expect that The Drift Wood Verses is going to be up too or exceed this standard.

Some other free resources that I ran across today on the Public Domain Review website also fit some of the themes, ideas, settings, and elements explored in  Vacant Ritual Assembly and with a bit of work could be used to blow open entire campaign venues into past or future histories for Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Let's start with some of the more obvious ones :

Living Lights: a Popular Account of Phosphorescent Animals and Vegetables (1887)

Want a hook for drawing your PC's into the world of Driftwood Verses, perhaps the account of a scientist whose barely able to understand the weird entities and creatures of Driftwood. With a bit of work there's tons that can be mined from this book on glowing fauna and flora. 

 

Shells and other Marine Life from Albertus Seba’s Cabinet of Natural Curiosities (1734)

Is the perfect collection of marine life to stick that odd item, mystical relic, or biological curiosity into the collection of the Dutch pharmacist and collector Albertus Seba (1665-1736) was an ardent collector of plants, insects, and animals, amassing a collection which in 1716 was bought by Peter the Great. Together with the collection of one of Seba’s countrymen, the anatomist Frederik Ruysch, the collections formed the base for the Kunstkammer in St Petersburg, the first museum in Russia. In 1734, Seba published his Thesaurus, titled Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri accurata descriptio, translated as “Accurate description of the very rich thesaurus of the principal and rarest natural objects”, and consisted of four volumes of which two were published after Seba’s death.

Orbis Sensualium Pictus – or The World of Things Obvious to the Senses drawn in Pictures, as it was rendered in English.

"In the mid 17th-century John Comenius published what many consider to be the first picture book dedicated to the education of young children" and its a weird little affair of a book with lots of strange illustrations and more. The perfect thing to use as a hand out for PC's to find aboard a drifting wreck or ghost ship especially with other pictures drawn into the margins or blood stains on the sides of the book.

Need a conspiracy of vice and rich folks as villains for your LoFP campaign? Especially ones with ties down into modern times then go behind the scenes of Darkness Over All: John Robison and the Birth of the Illuminati Conspiracy

What about rumors and weird tales of sailors and legends of the  Driftwood Verses settings? Perhaps the tales might be found in one of the many hundreds of brothels and taverns talked about 17th-century London which saw an explosion of nocturnal activity in the capital, most of it centring around the selling of sex.The Nightwalker and the Nocturnal Picaresque is the perfect resource to get the tall tales going and the sex moving your plots along. 

"In On the Threshold of the Unseen (1917) he wrote that “it is not a very incredible thing to suppose that in the luminiferous ether (or in some other unseen material medium) life of some kind exists”. He imagined such beings to be “human-like, but not really human, intelligences — good or bad daimonia they may be, elementals as some have called them”. But where, then, did they dwell?" all of this comes from  Worlds Without End a look into the occult practices of the 19th century perfect fodder for Driftwood Verses and even more LoFP hi jinks.

 
  This is just a small sample of the wealth of information that's out there for old school games  with a bit of patience you can dig up some fantastic resources. I've got more material coming up soon.  But for now keep those dice rolling!

Commentary On The Driftwood Verses Kickstarter For The Lamentations of the Flame Princess Rpg From By Clint and Cassie Krause

There are certain Kickstarters who have delivered quality product to the OSR market again and again. Clint and Cassie Krause  along with their crew have continually delivered some of the best quality and evocative setting material for the Lamentations of Flame Princess rpg system. Now they've got a brand new nautical setting up for the game with some really strange connotations and weird material called Driftwood Verses.


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So I've been waiting months for Driftwood Verses to make its appearance in the wilds of Kickstarter. The authors let bits and pieces out to wet the appetite of the rpg public but the details of the setting make it stand out in spades;"

The Driftwood Verses is a gloomy, nautical fantasy campaign setting for old-school tabletop role-playing games. It's directly compatible with Lamentations of the Flame Princess and more broadly compatible with a large selection of traditional systems. The contents can be used as a stand alone setting or slotted into your existing kitchen sink fantasy campaign as a distinct region in a larger world.

The setting was conceived as a Dark Sun-esque re-skinning of standard D&D tropes, starting with the conceit that "whales are dragons." It has since developed into something well beyond that original idea. The major inspirations include stuff like Moby Dick, Dishonored, Sunless Sea, Dune, The Scar, and the Monster Blood Tattoo series.

The book focuses on a blighted maritime region called Walfismeer. It's an impressionistic fantasy setting, a collection of symbols and metaphors come to life. Anachronisms abound. Grizzled mariners pilot haunted, tentacle-powered iron ships across a sludge-poisoned sea. Sinister roachmen quad-wield black powder pistols in hungry cities ruled by vice and bloodsport. Secretly trained navigators employ esoteric disciplines to guide vessels across a mysterious psychic barrier called The Reef. Desperate meerfolk raise sonorous hymns to Leviathan in deep-sea, whale-corpse cathedrals."

This setting reminds me both of underground comics meets  weird fiction with a vicious nautical streak a mile wide. The concepts are original and very nasty built around some deeply disturbing ideas which fit the ideals of Lamentations quite nicely.

As I said I've been following this whole project for months now and the author has a whole background, cloud of play, and a very expansive vision for Driftwood Verses;"The whole time I've been writing this book, I've been talking about it over on Google Plus. You can catch up and find tons of excerpts, concept art, play reports, and more by checking out the #driftwoodverses tag over there. Feel free to circle me while you're at it. "



So what's actually going to be in the book and what opportunities are there for DM's to bring something completely different to the table? Well according to the Kickstarter:

• Introductory comic: Final Pursuit follows a crew of beleaguered smugglers as they attempt to escape from a Chancery gunboat.
• Introduction to Walfismeer: An illustrated overview of the setting and its factions.
• Three new character classes for LotFP: The psychic Navigator who uses sigil foci to unleash mental powers, the quad-wielding Blattarian roachman, and the pitiable Vassal, a vat-grown albino slave species bred to take pleasure in servitude.
• Optional rules for character creation: including quickstart equipment packages and the Toll of the Past table to saddle your character with some emotional baggage, special abilities, and stat modifications before the game begins.
• New equipment and vehicles: Such as the Pavnik Boarding Saber and the Wrecker shipwreck salvage mech.
• Oak and iron: Quick and easy rules for building and fitting ships. 15+ illustrated ship profiles ready for quick reference during encounters.
• Monsters and mariners: An illustrated bestiary containing over 40 creatures and NPCs.
• Campaign hex map: A campaign map of Walfismeer with over 60 detailed hex descriptions including numerous fully mapped and stocked dungeons, adventure sites, and settlements. Enough material to keep a campaign running for months with very little prep.
• D100 Rumor Table: That ties your characters directly into the mysteries and adventures contained in the campaign map.
• An appendix full of useful tables: Random encounters, setting-appropriate character names, ship names, and more.
• Optional rules: Ship-to-ship combat, maritime trade, Chancery justice, fishing, campaign achievements, sludgeblight, and more. Tons of ideas and mechanics that you can use as is or port to your system of choice.

So what makes this different then other underwater rpg pieces I've seen well besides the fact that its going to tie PC's into the deeper background of Driftwood Verses. There's a sense of the deeper watery doom that lurks just below the surface of the book.