Tuesday, October 19, 2010

LotFP to release Zak Sabbath's Vornheim City Kit

Lamentations of the Flame Princess is pleased to announce it will be releasing the Vornheim City Kit by Zak Sabbath of “Playing D&D With Porn Stars” and The Escapist’s "I Hit It With My Axe."

Zak: "The Vornheim City Kit will be a guide to the city that my campaign is based around, but way more than that, it'll be a tool for running open-ended city adventures anywhere. I'm not going to be Mr. PR here and claim I'm sure it'll have 'Everything You Need To Run A Campaign In A Fake Medieval Urban Setting' but I am sure it'll have everything I need, because this is actually the stuff I use when we play.

"The Vornheim City Kit will feature: oddities of the city; maps of major locations; a souped-up version of the "urbancrawl" rules for creating fully-stocked labyrinthine streets while players are actually being chased through them; and loads of tables for creating taverns, merchants, libraries, decadent aristocrats, and other accoutrements of urban living in a split-column format allowing the DM to generate functional details on the fly or mix-and-match results during adventure prep in order to create more individualized environments.

"The emphasis will be on creating instruments you can actually use, rather than burying the DM under masses of pre-imagined information. This won't be a big, fat, where-the-fuck-did-I-put-that-bookmark encyclopedia of every loose toothpick and manhole cover in the city. This will be a little book that you can put on your table and say to your players "Ok, it's Friday night in 1200 AD, what are we doing?" and be confident that you have an environment ready to roll with any punch the party throws. The pictures will be helpful, the maps will be clear, the tables will be fun to roll on, and it will all be easy to find."

The kit will also include notes and commentary on how the tools in the kit can or have worked out in actual play from James Raggi, Zak Sabbath, and the 'Axe' girls.

Look for it Winter 2011.

22 comments:

  1. Cool!

    This is relevant to my interests. :-)

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  2. We're talking hardcopy, right? I am not a consumer of pdfs, personally, but I'm way down for a book or box...preferably the former.

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  3. Hardcopy and if everything goes as expected, hard cover.

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  4. Zak S, Geoffrey McKinney and James Raggi all in the same place. There's *got* to be more to this than simply offering high quality gaming material to the buying public.

    Own up Jim: you've finally discovered a way to extract limitless clean power from more-grognardly-than-thou nerdrage and this is your move to corner the market early. :)

    Less facetiously: I'm definitely up for a copy of this. Zak's pics and musings are always good brain fodder.

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  5. I guess this is my karmic reward for not only defending these guys in past GREAT OSR INTERNET CONTROVERSIES, but counterattacking on their behalf. :P

    As far as the system question above... I know for sure that if you play the games this blog supports, then you can use this book. I haven't yet seen too much of the system-specific information in the book so I can't speak to whether it'll work as a "generic" supplement that way.

    The announcements were made at this time because of some business negotiations this week in Essen and these books give me quite a bit more leverage than on just the strength of my own work. Hopefully win-win-win scenarios here.

    More detailed information on each release will be given later on. But they're going to be awesome, both as useful gaming aids and as physical objects.

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  6. Well constructed press release, too!

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  7. (crossposted from Zak's blog)

    Vornheim is a kickass name for a city, but The Vornheim City Kit sounds less like an awesome RPG supplement and more like something for model railroaders.

    Maybe just title it Vornheim and use a subtitle to flesh out the full purpose behind the product? That's just my opinion, though, so good luck regardless!

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  8. So you now have Zak's Vornheim and Geoffrey's Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown - you only miss Blair's Algol to become my new hero!

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  9. Il Male: I second that emotion.

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  10. Great partnership.
    Great idea, in the sweet spot.

    Winter 2011?

    As in, February, or as in, next December?

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  11. So first it was the Cthulhu-rape guy, now it's the porn guy.

    Somewhere, an old-school message board just exploded in nerd rage. ;)

    I've already said I'd buy an A5 hardback LotFP rpg in an instant. Add this to the list.

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  12. Sounds good, I like Zak's stuff.

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  13. Damn, looks like a lot of mighty fine stuff coming our way next year. Can't wait. I'd love another crack at the art and will try not to flake out thinking I sent back a reply ;).

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  14. I'm quite tickled to see LotFP expanding this way! Awesome!

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  15. Good for you Jim. Great partnership on both Zak and Geoffrey. You guys are all very creative and I'm glad to see it. Once you get Joesky involved, all will fall into place.

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  16. Because I've learned a hard lesson about offering preorders before the product is in the can and I have no wish to unlearn it.

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  17. So I should maybe check for responses to comments that I make sooner than 2+ months after the fact...

    Bummer on the preorder thing, but I totally understand. I guess I was mostly saying "This looks to be filled with awesome and I want one."

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  18. It is filled with awesome and it gets ever closer to press.

    With recent developments in the webstore, when you pre-order the book you'll get to download the PDF immediately at no extra charge.

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  19. Yay, got my copy yesterday. Looks sweet, is full of inspiration and useful little quirks for GMs to create with minimum preparation during the game. Haven't read the whole book yet, but this far (1/3) I like it.
    I like Zak's blog, and this book is great in a way those neat ideas are tied together. Also the small size of it is not a burden for GM to carry around.

    Great value.

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