The Weird Crushers that will Accompany the Imminent Releases!

 The next upcoming LotFP releases will be delivered from the printer THIS WEEK!

Leading up to the big new releases... here are the FIVE new Weird Crushers that will start shipping out with the new stuff!

More information about these things here:

Introducing the new LotFP releases, out at Ropecon and Gen Con!

 Here is a video introducing the 10 new releases, 6 reprints, and one third-party book that we have for you!

We'll have them on sale at Ropecon (July 28-30), Gen Con (booth 2930, August 3-6), and from the EU webstore (we ship worldwide) on August 11!

Big LotFP Sale!

 Hello all!

First, if PDFs are your thing, we have a "Everything is $1.25 each" sale going on over at our DriveThru RPG storefront for another day or so.

But for the print stuff, we're running a separate sale through Friday!

It's Monday morning and time for the big LotFP sale on PRINT ITEMS!

The coupon code is TAKE30 (all caps!) and it is valid in both the EU and US webstores!

In the US webstore, it gives a 30% discount on everything in the store.

In the EU webstore, it gives a 30% discount on everything except the items printed this year*, and the Deck of Weird Things. (we're limiting the EU webstore to 100 coupon uses because I have to pack this all up myself by hand and it takes time and I have shit to do and I want these all out the door before my US trip!)

We can only ship to US addresses from the US webstore.

We ship worldwide from the EU webstore.

There are some different items available in each of the webstores.

Still ongoing is our "order eight or more items, get a free copies of the Death Frost Doom throwback edition hardcover, and the Orgasm Weird Crusher" offer for EU webstore orders.

Sale ends when I wake up Saturday morning.

EU webstore: https://www.lotfp.com/store/

US webstore: https://us.lotfp.com/store/

* items not eligible for the discount: Bee-Ware!, Beware the Mindfuck, The Jovian Visitor, Magic Eater, the Adventure Anthology Slipcase, Better Than Any Man Hardcover, No Salvation For Witches, Qelong, Rules & Magic Variant Cover 1, Rules & Magic Variant Cover 2, Deck of Weird Things. Still, buy them anyway, because they're good!

Enjoy!

Looking for Artists!

 It's time to update the Lamentations of the Flame Princess artist files. We publish dark fantasy, horror (cosmic, splatter, all sorts of weirdness), and historical fantasy tabletop RPG books.

If you're an artist, send an email to lotfp@lotfp.com with a link to your portfolio.

We are ready to commission a number of pieces immediately.

If you're right for one of the current projects, we will be in touch. If not, your info will be kept on file for possible future projects.

Well this is just dandy... OGL 1.1 provisions

 ... from the (hopefully preliminary) draft of the OGL 1.1 that's been posted:

"We know this may come off strong, but this is important: If You attempt to use the OGL as a basis to release blatantly racist, sexist, homophobic, trans-phobic, bigoted or otherwise discriminatory content, or do anything We think triggers these provisions, Your content is no longer licensed. To be clear, We want to, and will always, support creators who are using the OGL to help them explore sensitive subjects in a positive manner, but We will not tolerate materials We consider to be in any way counter to the spirit of D&D. Additionally, You waive any right to sue over Our decision on these issues. We’re aware that, if We somehow stretch Our decision of what is or is not objectionable under these clauses too far, We will receive community pushback and bad PR, and We’re more than open to being convinced that We made a wrong decision. But nobody gets to use the threat of a lawsuit as part of an attempt to convince Us."

... the boilerplate disclaimer that Wizards of the Coast has put on all of the old TSR D&D stuff over at DriveThru (including the 1e Players Handbook, Mentzer Basic, and Moldvay Basic rules...):

"We (Wizards) recognize that some of the legacy content available on this website does not reflect the values of the Dungeons & Dragons franchise today. Some older content may reflect ethnic, racial, and gender prejudice that were commonplace in American society at that time. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. This content is presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed. Dungeons & Dragons teaches that diversity is a strength, and we strive to make our D&D products as welcoming and inclusive as possible. This part of our work will never end."

Anyone else seeing a problem here?

Consider the efforts that have been made to make sure people see everything from Lord of the Rings to Avatar 2 as racist (nevermind earlier works foundational to D&D), and considering the pressures brought recently brought against Complete Kobold Guide to Game Design and Mythic Polynesia.

I've seen work criticized as racist because somebody was writing characters of a different ethnicity. I've seen work criticized as racist because certain ethnicities weren't present at all.

This clause can be defined as strictly or as loosely, as desired, at any time. Who's going to decide? Not you, that's the important thing. And the recourse you have? None.

Even aside from that, the "We will not tolerate materials We consider to be in any way counter to the spirit of D&D." bit... that's all they need, someone at Wizards to think something is 'counter to the spirit of D&D' as they at that moment perceive it, and you're done.

This is the Hays Code, the Comics Code, and the 1990s TSR product code all wrapped together, because they don't even have to say what exactly it is you're not allowed to do.

And from Wizards' own February 2009 FAQ (which may or may not carry any weight legally), upon which a good number of people and companies over the past 23 years based their adoption of the Open Game License, and in some cases their entire livelihoods:

I'm going to go ahead and be very naïve, and very hopeful, when I say they can't do this.

And I believe they're going to anyway.

LotFP at Gen Con THIS WEEK

 LotFP will be at Gen Con August 4-7, Booth 3032! THIS WEEK!

Our Deals for the Show:

* Purchases of $100 or more get a free copy of two debuting titles, Curse of the Daughterbrides and Just a Stupid Dungeon, while supplies last. (300 copies each)

* Every 4 books purchased at once (not counting free items!) gets a 5th book free. (The cheapest is the free one.)

* Buy 8 items (not counting free items!), you also get a free copy of the Death Frost Doom throwback edition, plus your choice of an Orgasm (less than 100 left) or the Octo-Planetary Blade of Somnambulistic Beneficence (less than ten left!) while supplies last!

* A free copy of either The Printer's Devils or The Expiration of Barrington Peake with every purchase, while supplies last.

* Buy the Deck of Weird Things, get a free book of your choice (of equal or lesser value).

Our guy who has in the past provided the card payment capabilities isn't going to be there this year, so we can only take cash (please bring lots of $5s and $10s!) or Paypal (done through your phone, have the url www.paypal.me/lotfp ready to go on your phone's web browser... unfortunately we have to charge a +7% fee for Paypal payments)

The mysterious Alucard Finch, author of Big Puppet, will be at the booth 1-3pm Thursday, 4-6pm Friday, 12.30-2.30pm Saturday, and Sunday 1-3pm! He's got a personalized, annotated copy of Big Puppet, and will be giving it away to some lucky/poor bastard!

Also Debuting at Gen Con:

Curious Conundrum of the Conflagrated Condottiero $15 (new Kelvin Green adventure!)

Obsidian Anti-Pharos $15 (new Alex Mayo adventure!)

Other Titles:

6x6x6: The Mayhemic Misssile Method $35

Adventure Anthology: Blood $60

Adventure Anthology: Death $30

Adventure Anthology: Fire $25

Asterion $10

Big Puppet $35

Book of Antitheses $50

Carcosa $30

Cursed Chateau $25

Death Frost Doom $20

Deck of Weird Things $100

Earth Incubation Crisis $30

England Upturn'd $15

Fermentvm Nigrvm Dei Sepvlti $35

Forgive Us $15

Frostbitten & Mutilated $25

Green Messiah $25

Idea from Space $10

In a Deadly Fashion $25

Midvinter $25

No Rest for the Wicked $15

Obscene Serpent Religion 2 $10

Punchline $20

Random Esoteric Creature Generator $20

Rules & Magic $25

She Bleeds $10

Staffortonshire Trading Company Works $35

Strict Time Records Must Be Kept $30

Terror in the Streets $30

Terror in the Streets Boxed Set $120

Towers Two $25

Wight Power $25

World of the Lost $30

The Bodkin and the Quietus

So a couple days ago, two things happened. First, I posted this thing to LotFP social media where a fan talks about being introduced to the game  in a session where he encounters Penelope Foxlowe:

Later that same day in the LotFP Facebook group, a pic of this passage from the game Quietus was posted (mutual plugs!), and... spirited, shall we say... commentary ensued.

... yeah.

(I did have the idea of taking out a Facebook ad, naming all the authors credited in that game as specifically recommending LotFP, but rather than making it personal I just did this post.)

To me, if you're advertising your game as "emulates tragic horror movies like Oculus, The Strangers, The Babadook, Inside and the Netflix version of The Haunting of Hill House. If a piece of fiction can make you cry and scream, then it’s a great model for the sort of stories that you can tell with Quietus," and then talking at length about safety tools, it seems that you're deliberately watering down the experience you're advertising the game to provide. Why would you want that?

I mean, you're going to do things your way at your table – AND YOU SHOULD – but to me as the head cat herder around here, everything is always possible as default and it's your job to edit things for your table, not my job to edit things based on what I think you think is suitable at your table. As publisher, I trust that if somebody buys a product promising them hell, they actually want hell.

I want you to have the most intense experience possible, and stories of groups noping right out of adventures like Death Frost Doom and Death Love Doom, freaking people out so much they refuse to have their make-believe people go into make-believe places to face make-believe dangers...

This isn't an "SJW snowflake" issue (I work with people who describe themselves as Trump supporters, Marxists, and everything in between, I don't care what people believe beyond the project in question, weirdness and horror aren't limited to any particular political persuasion, and any political system or ideology that limits artistic and creative expression is invalid and should be shot into the fucking sun), this is a "Are you trying to deliver a horrifying experience or not?" issue.

Here are some images from movies released 1985-6*. A very specific period in time when I was 10-11 years old, seeing this sort of thing WITH MY PARENTS. (ok, Reanimator I didn't see until later but it fits right in time- and themewise and the image is too good not to include)

(Facebook auto-deleted the Return of the Living Dead shot when I posted this there. oh no, a woman's body is visible, so they censor that, and leave the other pictures which are so so so much worse. The inevitable result of do-gooder censorship, demonstrated right there.)

To me, this sort of thing represents awkwardness, embarrassment, everything going completely off the rails and having no idea what is even happening. That memory of my father slumping in his seat facepalming while Linnea Quigley danced naked in the graveyard, in the movie he brought his 10 and 6 year old sons to see, I want that feeling stamping on all human faces forever, that's what the world should be like. I didn't see much of my father growing up, and this is actually my most vivid and treasured memory of him. Both the gift he gave in letting me see that wonderful movie when both it and I were new and fresh, his reaction to it, and oh yeah me scaring the shit out of my brother for months afterward by bringing it up because he was terrified by it. yup, LotFP is DADDY ISSUES.

(I don't even remember awkwardness with my mother seeing Leatherface miming chainsaw fucking that woman, but around this time she decided to show me Flesh for Frankenstein – which I definitely remember feeling awkward watching – so I don't think she gave the first shit about things like that. Yet she wouldn't let me watch The Day After. yup, LotFP is the result of being raised to enjoy entertainment as such and avoid propaganda. :P :P :P :P)

Other people will receive this imagery differently, and it's way way out on the no-no list as a standard in this industry.

There's always going to be an unbridgeable divide between those who want (at least the potential of) their minds blown apart by batshit insanity in their entertainment, and those who want some assurance of limits.

I want you to wonder if that ache in your belly is actually the first detectable sign of the tumor that will kill you, not because it's distressing, but because sooner or later you'll be right and that's just life, so why not have some fun with it. Name your tumor Belial because Frank Henenlotter rules.

You don't like that?

ok.

To me all that disagreement isn't worth any more than preferring baseball instead of football.

Now this attitude does relate to the new books.

Kelvin's Strict Time Records Must Be Kept, it's clean as a whistle without any of this nasty stuff, but to me that Doctor character is so cringe over the top camp insanity that it falls right into this same category, despite/especially because it's in a game line with a reputation for edgelord negadungeons. 

Alex's Earth Incubation Crisis seemed to be more sane (the cross-genre mecha stuff to me falls under more straightforward gaming activity) until he started the art. That one piece he asked me if it was OK to do, and me, the person who greenlit Wight Power, what was I going to do, say no? So now we have in print and distributed worldwide an illustration of 14 year old girls fiddling with a corpse.

"14 year olds can't consent. Corpses can't consent. So if a 14 year old fiddles with a corpse... who is the victim?"

LotFP asks the tough questions society is afraid to face.

(The answer is of course YOU the READER.)

The real world is filled with so many limits and considerations and responsibilities and concerns and many of them are even valid, necessary, and good.

Let us at the very least be "free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy" in our imaginations.

To sum up, if you use safety tools, that's your business, it's certainly not going to be ours. The official LotFP line is that negative emotions in the proper context are exhilarating, and whatever emotions you feel during a game of LotFP, positive or negative, we hope you feel them to the fullest possible extent.

So if you want some game-level authority to hold your hand and make sure your intense gaming never gets too intense, by all means go check out the producers of not-too-intense gaming. Make them millionaires. Tell them I sent you.

But if you want something that offers a sharp, nasty experience and then will actually stab you right in your fucking heart, then Lamentations of the Flame Princess is your dagger, baby. Welcome home.

WHY I PUBLISHED... #1: The Book of Antitheses!

'allo all!

On October 25 we made 10 new releases available from https://www.lotfp.com/store/ ; eight for sale, and two freebies to entice purchase.

I'm going taking a few minutes every day or five to explain why I decided to publish the items I did, and I will do so in order from what I expected to be the most generally acceptable to what I expect to be the most controversial.

Now coming in at #1: The Book of Antitheses!

It's been a little bit before this final entry because I've both been swamped with other publisher duties, and frankly I've never known what to make of this book.

When Jobe pitched it to me, my thinking was "well, I have absolutely no idea what he's talking about, but why not?" When the book started to take shape, my thinking was "I don't understand this at all. What is this? I guess I'll just have to publish it to find out what happens." The process of understanding what it is that I would be publishing became like an LotFP adventure itself... yeah, it starts innocuously, but by the end I was entangled in some sort of cosmic horror that would be with me forever.

Because the beautiful, and terrifying thing about Jobe Bittman, is that he really seems to just not give a shit, in the best and fearless of ways. Telling him "no" seems to me to be an act of cultural vandalism, frankly. This stuff needs to be out there in the world, changing it. But... that change might itself be cultural vandalism. I have no idea. But that's the best place to be, not knowing what something is exactly or how it will be received. That means it's real.

I'm sure I've told this story before, but when Jobe had first turned in his draft for Towers Two, it was right before the UK Games Expo, in 2014 or 2015, I forget. So I read it on the plane over to Birmingham, and it was just insane. Cuntwhip? Deathfuck magic? The antagonist's goal is to WHAT for WHAT purpose? I had two thoughts as I touched down in Birmingham and then made my way to the venue to set up my booth... "this is going to kill my company" and "I can't wait to tell EVERY SINGLE PERSON I MEET ABOUT THIS PROJECT I'M DOING!" I remember cornering Monte Cook and Shanna Germain near the elevator in the venue and not shutting the fuck up about it. (I also remember being at the airport going home from Gen Con 2017, ending up in the same waiting area as those two and telling my already ex-wife I'd brought with me "Those are the people I'm rebelling against!" as a public spectacle. In good fun, really, but who the hell knows how it was actually received.)

Some of the early bits of Antitheses were intriguing to me. Jobe brought in Benjamin Marra, "a Grammy nominated artist," and my first concern was "does this guy know what he's getting into?" I wasn't familiar with him, it was immediately after The Events of 2019, and I had nightmares of some mainstream normie artist being recruited and then being horrified at what his art was attached to in the final product. But I was sent a copy of Marra's American Blood and had a chat with him, and of all the problems I'm volunteering for with this book and this job... this wasn't one of them.

Jobe also wanted to know if we could have a hole in the cover of the book. I'd seen such things in softcover books, but never hardcover. But the printer said that's not a problem.

OK. So we had a concept I didn't understand, a product that I had no clue about how I'd present or what use it could possibly be to anyone, and I couldn't have been more excited. The way I imagine some gamer that's only ever played WotC D&D or Pathfinder and then coming into contact with LotFP, that's how I was feeling with this. No fucking clue what was going on, and loving that I had no fucking clue what was going on. This was going to be a great big major thing for LotFP!

One thing I glommed onto was the numerology section. Now numerology is one of the things that ruined Coast to Coast AM for me after George Noory took over the show, all numerology and angels and a lot less of the hardcore weird that Art Bell would present. And here was some friggin numerology in this book proving that the very roots of the industry were Satanic. I had to remind Jobe that he was publishing for Lamentations of the Flame Princess and maybe acknowledge that in the numerology section.

And now that I'm talking about that section, I guess it's time for a little discussion about how real this all is. I have no idea if all the math adds up in that section. I assume Jobe ran the numbers, I don't even know if the editor did... but as far as I'm concerned, numerology that is mathematically accurate and numerology that doesn't add up is all equally nonsense. I published this book because it's interesting and prickly and an entirely different state of mind than I have or that as far as I know any gamers have, and that's enough for me. I don't believe the "magick" in this book is any more real than the butt parasite weapon in Monolith or Xaxus or Wiki Dot Pod.

Does Jobe believe it? I... don't know. I think I asked a couple years back, but frankly it's irrelevant to me so I didn't retain the information. As far as I'm concerned, I'm publishing gaming material. "It's all made up," is my stock in trade and hardly a strike against else I'd publish, so I wouldn't consider it a strike against this one either. If he does believe it... well... good for him. Maybe he began the whole thing as a joke and worked himself into a shoot. It's not my job to judge or police someone's beliefs, it's just my job to make sure the material is presented well.

But

but

but

So after the layout was completed and the artwork started to come together, I really started getting what Jobe was doing. Seeing it all organized rather than a giant text dump does wonders for comprehension sometimes. (too bad I can't afford to have every first draft submission laid out before trying to read it. )

And the "magick" on offer? It's not so different from what I do before games. Because there's what I call "wizard" magic, and then there's what I consider the pretentious label of "magick" applied to basically meditation and mental focus techniques. And I have anxiety and panic before game sessions. "Oh my god, a bunch of people are coming over and then I have to not waste their time and I hope the game is fun AHHHHHHHHH PEOPLE WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE PEOPLE" kind of mentality. I've never ever not once hosted a game where I wasn't hoping that everyone would get sick and not be able to come at the last minute. Anxiety is real!

So I have some techniques, rituals if you will, to get me calmed down and focused before a session starts. They aren't the same techniques that Jobe details in Antitheses, but I've never seen any similar thing addressed seriously in a game book before. Referee/GM advice in game books is about how to prepare THE GAME. How to run THE GAME. Not how to prepare YOURSELF, not how to run YOURSELF.

So it hit me like the clicheverbial ton of bricks: I don't believe at all in what the book is saying, but I believe 100% in what the book is doing.

Holy shit. This book really is going to be huge.

And then there was the adventure, where Jobe has his usual "I belong in a loony bin" imagination runs wild, what with the butt-faces and 'Poor People' listed in the adventure's bestiary, presented in a novel way and I can't wait to hear the play experiences from people in the wider world.

There is the fact that the book is an in-game object, so there's this thing where it exists for both the real people around the table and the characters they're playing, and how that works. (are there really guns small enough to fit through the hole? Was Jobe working with a larger hole in his playtests? have fun with that one)

Then there was the issue of the runes. The method I used to read them was cheating... and we took some steps to make sure others can't do that. All that stuff is actual writing. More content for the diligent (or the not-so-diligent once some buttface posts a transcription).

Then there was the foreword. Jobe had trouble getting someone to do that, and the list of names he both proposed and tried to recruit I'm sure would result in many annoying comments. The person who did do it, J.F. Martel, was perfect. He cohosts the Weird Studies podcast ("a series of conversations on art and philosophy, dwelling on ideas that are hard to think and art that opens up rifts in what we are pleased to call 'reality.'") and is a published author (his book Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice is very interesting)... and he delivered 4000 (!) words for the foreward of Antitheses, really digging into some things. And the message? At least the one I strongly received from it? The evangelicals were exactly right about D&D and the reason it didn't transform the world is because people only saw it as an entertaining diversion.

And that... that's disturbing. One of the driving forces of my life has been imagination and creation (more enjoying others' than doing my own most of my life) and encouraging and fighting for freer expression of the same, which is necessary since much of my taste is... let's just say not very classy, so it's under constant attack, so it needs defense.

But what if all the accusations are true? What of the defense?

Well... I've already addressed this in years past. Something along the lines of "If the King in Yellow was a real play and it truly caused madness and death, that would still not be grounds for censoring or banning it."

That's what I think.

So what if I'm wrong about what gaming is, and the effect it has (and also wrong about the actual effects of my "edgy" tastes and publications), but also at the same time still right about the defense? Or what if I'm wrong about the defense because what I do isn't what I think I'm doing?

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh my brain hurts.

What if I haven't published a game book?

What if unbeknownst to me I've published a book that is real, and speaks only the truth?

Do you read Sutter Kane?

WHY I PUBLISHED... #2: The Butchery of Agnes Gooder!

'allo all!

On October 25 we made 10 new releases available from https://www.lotfp.com/store/ ; eight for sale, and two freebies to entice purchase.

Packing and shipping from that initial avalanche of orders is DONE! But while there are other duties, I'm going to take a few minutes every day or five to explain why I decided to publish the items I did, and I will do so in order from what I expected to be the most generally acceptable to what I expect to be the most controversial.

Now coming in at #2: The Butchery of Agnes Gooder!

So late last year, I was thinking of how the catalogs I'd pass out at conventions were a good way to hook people. Product descriptions, a good piece of art to hook people in, I think it's one of the few promotional ideas I've had that was just gold star quality... (developed because I hated the constant banter of trying to hook interest and sum up the game to random passersby... carnival barker plus flyer is more my speed in that environment) But all our 2020 conventions were canceled, and 2021 was not looking good either at the time (we ended up not traveling internationally for the conventions that did happen), so I had the idea of doing a freebie thing to encourage more direct orders.

The idea was an A3 page folded to A5 size, to easily add to orders and not add to the postage weight. On one side of the page would be "cover" art, product information and general boilerplate stuff. On the other side would be an A3-sized adventure (which would dictate what the art would be).

So I made an open call for pitches, and ended up getting four or five of them submitted. But of course the first one was going to cost a whole lot more money than budgeted... because this fuckin' guy had an idea that would require TWO folded sheets, and two additional pieces of art, because there was a sort of paper doll thing going on with it. So clever, so good, so greenlit.

But.

But.

It's definitely in the deep end of the LotFP pool as far as content. And not everyone who likes LotFP likes the nasty stuff. Because contrary to what you may have heard, we do release a good amount of material that works with general audiences. And now people after the easier stuff is going to get some hardcore LotFP that they didn't ask for.

And I started stressing about it ten months before it was released: https://www.facebook.com/groups/lotfp/posts/2451894658453200

The thing about LotFP, a big problem, actually, has to do with the question "Is this a good idea?" I imagine most other publishers don't stress too much about this. I think they're able to separate "Does this appeal to me personally?" and "Will this sell well/is this a good idea for my business?" and separate their personal taste from their professional activities.

Me? "Does this appeal to me personally" is all there is. What is the bloody point of going through all the hassle of running a business, of living with the chaos and constant uncertainty that comes with being a small-time operator in the "culture industry," if not to trust myself and be me in choosing projects and how they are presented?

So... the intended cheap freebie that's just had its art cost tripled and printing cost more than doubled (the second sheet requires special folding), that'll piss off some unknown number of my most valuable customers to boot... the concept appealed to me, so fuck it, it happens.

Sorry to all you Glynn Seal fans who only wanted a completely inoffensive book of maps.

So much of this business is just saying "fuck it" and leaping into the void with blind faith that there's a soft landing at the bottom. The entire industry is a bad idea to begin with... "Hey, let's codify and sell ways for people to play pretend with each other! You know, things people can already do without outside help!" was iffy enough as it is as the basis for an industry, but almost 50 years later adding on "... even though there are already a million choices out there, many of them available for free!" So yeah, "is this a good idea to release?" really doesn't even have a rational basis to even be asked because if I was so worried about good ideas I'd be selling insurance or something instead of ever doing this in the first place. So fuck it.

Anyhow, to me personally (I do remember my ex-wife telling me to never follow the golden rule because I'm so weird that following it would only offend everyone else) the thing shouldn't actually be offensive to anyone who was a fan of NCIS or Silent Witness. But RPG people are bizarre.

And the cover art pictured here was not part of the original idea... but it needed a cover, and considering what the inside art pieces are, I decided to take the idea from Deicide's Once Upon the Cross cover art since it would apply very well here.

The back cover format we'll be using for these things is an adaptation of the Grindcrusher compilation cover art. That thing was so valuable to me when I was just starting to get into death metal and grindcore in 1992. It's been released with a variety of different color schemes for the cover, but the one we used here is the same as the cassette copy I had back in the day.

The other promo freebie concepts that were accepted will be released in the months and (hopefully not too many) years to come. Buy from the EU webstore so I run out of copies of this one and have to move on to the next!

WHY I PUBLISHED #1 soon! You should be able to figure out which one it is.

WHY I PUBLISHED... #3: Asterion!

'allo all!

On October 25 we made 10 new releases available from https://www.lotfp.com/store/ ; eight for sale, and two freebies to entice purchase.

I'm going to take a few minutes every day or five to explain why I decided to publish the items I did, and I will do so in order from what I expected to be the most generally acceptable to what I expect to be the most controversial.

Now coming in at #3... Asterion!

I was first pitched the project in August 2020. It had a basic layout, was very short. My response was, "How would you feel about expanding this concept into a proper adventure for publication?" and also had the note "would need to sophisticate up the minotaur a bit (couldn't just be SEX MONSTER, have to be something 'real' and able to be interacted with in real ways in there)."

We went back and forth for a couple weeks, then... time passed. I had honestly forgotten all about it.

So this past June, I get an email with an updated product, with a fresh, slick layout and all, with this note: "You said Asterion couldn't just be a horny man bull and I took that as a challenge to prove he could."

I admired the chutzpah of the author in defying my notes, because it actually worked. It was still a short ziney sort of thing, so my thinking was as a quick, simple concept it was OK in a way it might not have been if it was a 48 page adventure of horny man bull.

But the truth was the devil-may-care attitude in the product (in full form right there on the cover!), the atmosphere created by only using Metropolitan Museum pieces in the layout as art, and the fact that this was all intended in the spirit of naughty fun very easily won me over. I wanted to release this!

Since it was so short, it wasn't going to be a hardcover book or anything, so I wasn't going to print thousands of them and try to push it through retail. As a direct-order-only limited run? Why the fuck not.

One problem. It really is all about a horny man bull who wants to fuck you whether you want to be fucked or not. People get... testy... about that sort of thing in media in general and gaming in particular. Especially when presented in a decidedly unserious way. (I treated myself to the Boiled Angel collector's boxed set from my take of the spectacular sales last year's release cycle, so that tells you right there what my thoughts are on that matter... just imagine the finger-involved gesture I'm making right now at the frowny-faced brigade right now)

I do believe that anything that happens, or has happened, or might happen, or could be imagined happening, belongs in fiction, and anything in fiction belongs in gaming. And if this sort of thing specifically can be in novels and movies and music and GREEK FUCKING MYTHS, it can be in gaming. Other people disagree, but then that's why there are multiple people all making things according to their own philosophies and taste.

But I didn't want to hear the blah blah blah over this with all the other blah blah blah I was likely to hear with this release cycle, so I just put it front and center in the promo material. People have seen their twitch channels crash when dealing material even in the general direction of this sort of thing, and there have been controversy and all sorts of shit when people introduce this kind of material in convention games.

So that's what the promo blurb said. This is what it is, you either want it or you don't. No surprises.

Then there is the disclaimer blurb on the back cover... that comes from a copy of 120 Days of Sodom I have, produced in 2008, which contains this blurb on the copyright page: "This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race have changed before allowing them to read this classic work."

whaaaaaaaaaaat? That's what you're worried about kids taking away from that story? They're having a laugh with that, right?

But the idea of parents presenting 120 Days in Sodom to their kids to read was hilarious to me, and the idea of parents sitting down to play Asterion with their kids is similarly hilarious, so... that explains the back cover.

Fun fact: A couple days ago DriveThru informed me they will not carry Asterion. Someone remind me at the beginning of September to put together a real presentation next year for Banned Books week because we've got quite the collection of publications that have been banned from one venue or another.

#2 soon! It's not going to be getting any friendlier!