{"id":2853,"date":"2015-11-18T07:15:12","date_gmt":"2015-11-18T12:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=2853"},"modified":"2015-11-04T08:01:45","modified_gmt":"2015-11-04T13:01:45","slug":"fuck-for-satan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=2853","title":{"rendered":"Fuck for Satan"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ffs\"<\/a>
\nby James Raggi
\nLotFP
\nLotFP<\/p>\n

Animals and children have gone missing from the village of Schwarzton. Locals suspect that an old Satanic coven has re-established itself! Can your intrepid heroes survive dread dungeons and bizarre monsters and save the day? <\/p>\n

META<\/p>\n

Well, it\u2019s not as bad as some of the other Raggi adventures. As the publishers blurb says, some kids have gone missing and there was once a satanic cult around. The adventure comes in three parts. The closer you get to the actual cause for the disappearances the shorter the details. The first part is where the party is generally directed and makes up the bulk of the text of the adventure proper. It\u2019s a red herring. The second part, usually triggered after the party gets back from the dungeon in the first part, takes up quite a bit less space and it, still, essentially, unrelated to the actual cause of the disappearances. The third part, the actual cause, is a couple of paragraphs long. A random bear has wandered in nearby and ate the kids. Random chance each day the party stumbles on to the bear. Everything is pretext. Everything is unrelated. It\u2019s just an excuse for the party to stumble around until the bear shows up.<\/p>\n

The adventure gets off on the meta. The summary above should clearly illustrate one aspect of the meta. In another part, right outside the dungeon, the party finds a note for them that clearly indicates that the dungeon has nothing to do with the missing children and they should not go in it. In another part the DM is instructed to make their next adventure very easy because one aspect of the adventure has cursed them, the referee. Clearly Jim has fun breaking the fourth wall. All of that nonsense is just performance art. Or, worse, it breaks the contract with the players of the DM being a neutral third party. <\/p>\n

The DM has absolute power. The players put themselves at the DMs mercy. There is a contract here. The DM will be neutral and not be a dick and the players will play. When that is broken we get to Killer DM territory; the junior high DM would views the game as adversarial. \u201cI\u2019m too good, You can\u2019t beat me!\u201d one potential DM once told me. I wisely did not play in that game. When the DM goes meta there\u2019s a problem. I\u2019m not saying this adventure does that. Or maybe I am. I\u2019m not exactly sure where the line is. I do know this adventure walks VERY close to that line. One of the most delightful parts is the note addressed to the party. It tells them not to go in. The DM is clearly fucking with the party by putting it in. Is a META note like this FAIRLY fucking with the party? I don\u2019t know. Like I said, it\u2019s close to the line. I like fucking with the party. I like tempting the party. Putting in a deathtrap dungeon, having all of the PC\u2019s say the solution to the quest is in the deathtrap dungeon, putting a sign outside the deathtrap dungeon saying \u201cNope, the missing kids are not in here.\u201d \u2026 I don\u2019t know. It\u2019s too close for me. Maybe it\u2019s a mean-spirited\u201dfucking with the party.\u201d I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

The satanic cult aspect is quite nice, with a misunderstood alien space penis. It\u2019s a cute little section and it\u2019s too bad that the only you can find it, probably, is after exploring the deathtrap dungeon. That smacks of linearity. It\u2019s a great section where everything makes sense and the party gets one up on the local dirt-farmers with a fellow buddy. A little silly, but in that way all D&D adventures tend to get when they are the most fun, and not much sense of the entire situation being forced (except in getting there in the first place.)<\/p>\n

The village is non-existent. There is a lot of padding at the beginning with designer exposition (not much\/any useful) and a couple of pages of a long example of play. Instead of this nonsense Raggi could have included some nice NPC\u2019s for the village. The play example is quite colorful but meaningless to the adventure. A page of Pembrooktonshite NPC\u2019s for the village, or the two NPC\u2019s in the play example condensed down to three sentences each and augmented with a dozen more \u2026 any of this would have supported the village play. As written the adventure does next to nothing to support this major portion of the adventure. Not good enough! You\u2019re meant to fuck around the village for a long while. And there\u2019s nothing. Well, almost nothing. There\u2019s a pretty good rumor table. <\/p>\n

The dungeon is decent and more good than bad. \u201cBad\u201d in this sense is \u201cJim Raggi Random Deathtrap.\u201d Again, it\u2019s important for the players to know the consequences of the decisions they make. When very bad things happen to them out of the blue, or seemingly out of the blue, it can seem random. When they KNOW they are making a decision it\u2019s so much more wonderful. Putting a nice treasure on an obvious pressure plate? DELICIOUS. Putting a death trap around the corner at the bottom of a long staircase with no warning? Uncool. This type of nonsense encourages game-slowing behaviour. The kid where the party searches every ten foot section of the dungeon corridor. The kind where it takes 15 minutes of real time to open every door because the hinges, direction of the door swing, construction, etc must all be examined and dealt with. There are a couple of these things in the dungeon. There\u2019s SOME room for this stuff at much higher levels when augury\/etc come into play for the characters, but I don\u2019t get the sense that this is a high-level adventure. But there\u2019s other stuff, more of it, that is good. There IS an obvious pressure plate. There\u2019s a room with levers that do things. The stairway deathtrap DOES have a good effect, both in the trap and in the solution and in the color. <\/p>\n

Treasure is good, nice and unique. Monsters are good, as they always are in LotFP adventures. New creatures, well described, unique abilities tailored to the environment\/creature\/theme. <\/p>\n

Jim goes on a diatribe\/monologue in the beginning about how he gets bored and the quantity of adventures on the market. How he\u2019s not inspired and thus this is how the Meta aspects of Fuck for Satan. I would assume, he\u2019s justifying his other adventures as well \u2026 at least the gimmickry\/gimpy ones. It\u2019s too bad he feels like he has to do something with a silly gimpy gimmick for it to be interesting. <\/p>\n

The village needs an overhaul. The dungeon is nice, if meta and little unfair. The cult is great as an ending. The parts just don\u2019t work together well because it\u2019s meant to be a screw job. Is it fun playing a game you know will be a screw job? (Jim directly advises the DM to not let on it\u2019s a LotFP adventure\/screwjob.) Adversarial D&D is not my thing. Maybe Jim should write Fiasco playsets?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by James Raggi LotFP LotFP Animals and children have gone missing from the village of Schwarzton. Locals suspect that an old Satanic coven has re-established itself! Can your intrepid heroes survive dread dungeons and bizarre monsters and save the day? … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2852,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/ffs.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2853"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2854,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2853\/revisions\/2854"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}