Dogs and Magic

I've made these spell cards to use instead of rolling on a table and writing down the result. At level 1 you draw Read Magic and 3 other spells at random from the deck. This means that all the level 1 wizards in the same group will have different spells.

(I added some spells to the traditional LOTFP list, but realized too late that Ventriloquism is actually pretty much identical to a second-level LOTFP spell, Audible Glamour. Throw it out if that worries you.) 

I also made cards out of the entries in Zak's Available Dog Table.

 I printed them out, cut them up, and put them in card sleeves like these. Put a handful of them on the table at the beginning of the session, haggle for the price of each on an individual basis. "This dog dragged my grandmother from the ruins of our burning village! I couldn't accept less than 10 gold."

It worked really well. The spell cards were perfect for functionality, cutting down on character creation time and making it obvious what spells were available and memorized. The Dog cards were lovely as a ridiculous frippery. It's great how much dog descriptions can add to the world.

(eg.: "Why is the Carcassian Hoghunter trained to disarm enemies with a bite to the hand?"

"Clearly you've never seen a Carcassian hog.")

What I love most is that you can have an enormous world of possibilities, but your players only need to choose from a tiny amount of them at one time. So first, the world is bigger and stranger and more mysterious: you know this shop doesn't sell every dog in the world, and that you may never even see every dog in the world. Every shop is surprising and new. Second, it reduces the amount of time people spend staring down at pieces of paper, deciding what to buy.*

(The original table and this random generator version did both these things, but I never had easy access to the internet to get to it, and I like how instantaneous it is to just give people a card. No writing down, no rubbing out when the dogs die in waves.)

The only problem I found is that dogs can't really replace Hirelings: you can't play as your dog after you die. I wonder how far I should take this. A deck of hirelings? A deck of weapons, instead of using the equipment list? I'm very tempted to splurge even further and have decks for Weapons, Magic, Dogs and Men.

Cleric Spell sheet.

Level 1 clerics all get the same spells, right? So - surely a sheet like this has already been made? Y'all can't be just looking up and writing down ten spells and a table at the start of every chargen, right?

It seems like that must be true, but I couldn't find any other sheet like this for Lamentations of the Flame Princess. The character sheets I keep seeing don't even come with a space to write down spells. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. How are you all doing this?

Well, assuming everyone but me isn't using some secret better method, and I haven't misunderstood some crucial rule, print out this A5 sheet and give it to your cleric. Write down the number of spells you've got prepared in the boxes (For example: 2 Cure Light Wounds, 1 Turn Undead.) "LVL" means the caster's level.

Turning chart stolen from Jeff Rients.

Negadungeon

For a while now, Lamentations of the Flame Princess has been pretty much single-handedly promoting a type of Inverse Dungeon, embodied in modules like Death Frost Doom and The Monolith. What separates these Negadungeons from normal adventures is:

1. Entering the Negadungeon is a mistake.

If you're in a Negadungeon, you've fucked up. Everything within will:

A. Curse you

B. Trigger traps

C. Unleash unspeakable evils

D. All of the above.

It is not made to entertain you; it is made to destroy you. It holds nothing but negatreasure and negaexperience.

Scholars debate whether or not there should actually be anything good at all within a Negadungeon. James Raggi's "The Tower" ends with the sentence: "There is no treasure in the tower". Certainly, the players need to believe something good can come of entering. It's up to you whether it's ok to deceive them.

James Sutherland enters Silent Hill because he's received a letter from his dead wife. That's the kind of thing that brings people to Negadungeons: Doomed obsessions. Everybody knows that finding his dead wife won't end well, even James. But he keeps going, because:

2. Once you start the Negadungeon, you're committed to finishing it.

I don't mean physically - the door should always be open behind you. But once you've entered, things can never go back to the way they were. Something has changed in you, or in the world. You're compelled to keep going, even though it just gets worse and worse the further you go.

Even if you leave, you act as one cursed. When you sleep, you'll dream of the Negadungeon, and wake with blood on your hands.

3. Descending is morally despicable.

It might start small - an old man tries to stop you from going down, and you have to tie him up. Next thing you know you're breaking the ancient seals, disturbing the dead, killing the guardian children. It's obvious that going down is bringing evil into the world.

In Dark Souls, a city was flooded to contain an ancient evil. To descend, you have to kill the last holy man and release the flood gates.

4. This is all your fault.

It's very important that the players decided to come here. You're not allowed to trap them in: They must trap themselves. They walked past the warning signs, they knocked over the guardian sigils. When push comes to shove they should be crying "Why? Why did we go to Death Mountain?"

The flipside of this: A Negadungeon is a great addition to a campaign setting even if the players never go there. Having a place that the players avoid at all costs is great.

Why would anyone enter a Negadungeon?

1. Something was stolen from you and taken to the bottom. Each level you descend, worse things are stolen.
2. Fell from a regular dungeon.
3. To save a dead PC.
4. Sick curiosity.
5. Greed
6. Looking for revenge

Why would anyone keep going down a Negadungeon?

The sunk costs fallacy.

You're cursed, Dave is dead, the zombies you've unleashed are destroying the countryside. "Well, we have to keep going, or all this will have been for nothing!"

At the end of the Negadungeon, you are allowed to reveal that the goal was useless, and it was all for nothing.

Edit: What's the point?

1. They're different, strange, and your PC's don't expect them. It challenges expectations, shakes things up.
2. They change the Risk-Reward template of a dungeon into a Doomed Journey; an experience like Heart of Darkness, Silent Hill, or this guys journal. That's a cool type of story to emulate.
3. Losing is fun.