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Cubicle 7 Sale Starts Today

That's your chance to grab a copy of The Celestial Empire with a 10% discount. Just go to Cubicle 7's web store and look for Basic Roleplaying System in the left hand-side menu.

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Using LotFP supplements with TCE - The Tower

The Tower is a short Lamentations of the Flame Princess (LotFP) adventure from issue No.4 of Green Devil Face, LotFP's in-house magazine. As with most LotFP adventures, it presents a lonely location to be used by the GM as he sees fit. In my particular case, that would be in Imperial China, and using The Celestial Empire!

The rest of this post is hidden because of major spoilers that it contains.

The Tower is a mansion, not necessarily a day's journey from civilisation, but maybe 2-3 hours from the centre of the closest town/village, or in its most ancient part. The architecture is clearly from the previous dynasty, or even older. The mansion is, however, absolutely shunned by the locals.

The thing guarding the door of the mansion needn't be a monster if the setting doesn't contemplate them. It could be a tall, foreign guard, who doesn't speak Chinese.

The door can be kept the same. After all, metamorphs abound in Chinese legends.

First Level: The statues are those of female immortals (xiān); their rhymes refer to a magical lofty kingdom in the abodes of the Immortals, or to a fiefdom within a Dragon kingdom in a nearby river/lake.

Fourth Level: The people who put the woman to sleep are not wizards but some kind of foreign-looking priests. The glyphs within the thaumaturgic circle are undecipherable ancient and/or foreign-looking characters, even for scholarly PCs.

How It Happens: Instead of meeting a knight, the characters meet the wealthy but low-status son of a merchant who dreams of marrying the Beloved Daughter of the Dragon Kind (or some other bombastic title), even if it means leaving this stupid material world behind. His retainers are obviously men from the Rivers and Lakes...

Using LotFP supplements with TCE

Thanks to a recent sale on the PDF versions, I have recently bought quite a few LotFP supplements. For those of you who have spent the last two years on Mars, Lamentations of the Flame Princess (LotFP) is a weird fantasy role-playing game, which is part of the "Old School Renaissance" (OSR) movement. However, contrary to most OSR fantasy role-playing games, whose sole aim is to re-create that 'dungeon' feeling from our high school years, LotFP has a few innovations of its own, which I'll detail in this post. These are much more important in my eyes than what LotFP is usually only known for: a general taste for adult themes and illustrations.

1. To me, the most important innovation is that LotFP adventures, for all their 'dungeonness', are definitely different from those 1980s modules: they are usually designed for low-level characters, and there is only one major opponent within the 'dungeon' -- the rest of the dungeon is there to unnerve the PCs through its many traps or weird encounters.

2. Another peculiarity of LotFP is that its default setting, although never really described, is more of a 15th-17th century Europe than an imaginary Dark Ages quasi-European fantasy world. Again, this makes for grittier adventures where the enemy is not an exaggerated 'monster' but a cunning, evil enemy that has laid out a careful plan to trap unwanted trespassers.

3. Yet another peculiarity is that LotFP adventures tend to be light on stats and heavy on description. A creature's armour class, for instance, is never given as a numeric value but always as "as unarmored man", "armor as leather", etc. Movement is likewise always rendered as a multiplier of an unarmoured man's movement value.

As a consequence, LotFP adventures are surprisingly adaptable to The Celestial Empire. I have started penning conversion notes for No Dignity in Death, The Tower, and Tower of the Stargazer. Since I don't want to spoil these adventures, I won't write anything here. Just PM me or let me know in the comments if you are interested.

Renaissance

Elegant British game designers Cakebread and Walton have released for free their 139-page d100 engine for Renaissance-themed frp gaming. The system is aptly titled Renaissance and may be downloaded from their web-site.

I haven't had time yet to fully scrutinise it, but I believe this rule set should be >95% compatible with The Celestial Empire and hence an interesting, free alternative to the purchase of Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying (BRP) System.

Renaissance features a lengthy section on Black Powder weapons and should hence be a welcome addition to any Qīng-dynasty games.

Renaissance also features a fully-fledged, spell-based alchemy system. Now, I am not in favour of magic-based alchemy systems (I'd rather manage alchemy as a set of mundane skills), but until I produce Chinese Alchemy rules for The Celestial Empire, it might be a good idea to try and use Renaissance's alchemy sytem -- with the obvious modifications for China, such as replacing the Philosopher's Stone with the Pill of Immortality. The Alchemists' Spells listed in Renaissance could be considered as a sub-set of The Celestial Empire Daoist spells.