God that Crawls, Joop van Ooms, Poster, NOW AVAILABLE!!

The God that Crawls (Print/PDF and PDF-only versions), The Magnificent Joop van Ooms (Print/PDF and PDF-only versions), and the poster of the full Ooms wraparound cover art are all on sale in the LotFP store NOW!

(If you were a Monolith/God that Crawls IndieGoGo contributor, you should have gotten an email from me with the title "THE GOD THAT CRAWLS Link." If you did not, contact me before ordering anything from the store!)

Also, all non-LotFP items in the store are just 5€ each (4€ if you a Gardening Society member). That's a 75% discount in some cases. Get them out of my house! I need space for all the new stuff coming in this year!

A bit of bad focus and lighting (each picture is from the same spot on the same table to give you an idea) but this is the physical format of The God that Crawls:

God that Crawls to the Printer! + Updates!

(LotFP will be on holiday starting this afternoon. Orders placed through the store will not be shipped until September 3.)

God that Crawls is at the printer. But it will NOT have the Early Modern Supplement included; there's too much to do there involving new rules and research to do fun stuff that need actual play to see if they work and just kinda skipping that would be a BAD IDEA, and at the same time it was going to overshadow the actual adventure. It needs to be a separate book. So no reason to delay the already-completed GtC any more.

Monolith/God contributors will get this Early Modern book FREE as if it was part of their core contribution when it's ready. The idea now is that it will go to press alongside the hardcover and Hite's adventure and Zzarchov's adventure.

(The firearms rules will go up as a free PDF sometime this coming month when I have the marbles to get that together. The rules for them are a wee bit more complicated than for crossbows - concerning reload times mainly, but there's a character sheet redesign in the works so all the info will be at your fingertips during actual play.)

This creates a bit of layout complication as well, as the sponsors page that was going in the back of the Early Modern book now needs to be in the God that Crawls section which means a piece of art that was there (that was commissioned after the first layout was done) either gets bumped completely or... we're going to have something on the inside back cover. The pic attached here is that very piece (by Jason Rainville).

(God that Crawls is mean to players in a completely different way than Monolith is - it's a dungeon adventure where the players do not set the pace of exploration at their leisure, but it does also contain a couple paragraphs of me taking the piss out of the idea that you're supposed to follow game material like a Bible in the spirit of the "time paradox" bit in Monolith so if you didn't like that bit then get ready because this one's sillier. BTW I've added no new content to the God since Monolith came out so some of the stuff that seems like it might be a reaction, isn't, but they were originally supposed to be released together so...)

Writing is complete for the next mini-module, The Magnificent Joop van Ooms (about an NPC and his lair and his works and plot hooks to work him into a campaign). It's up to everyone else to get it together while I'm gone and hopefully that goes to press September 3 so it's ready for Tracon. It will go on sale to the general public with God that Crawls, with the same arrangement as Monolith/DLD. There will also be an A1-size poster (or perhaps a poster flag if that company gets back to me...) of the cover art (by Rainville, and the prelims are looking fan-fucking-tastic) available.

This is What Happens When You Reach Stretch Goals

Insert pithy caption concerning how musketeers are usually such swashbuckling ninnies/LotFP art is soooo misogynistic/how a musket is sooo useless since it's pretty much a one-shot-per-combat weapon/"Bring Your Game into the (Early) Modern Age."

Anyway, this is one of the two color pieces the stretch goal of the last crowdfunding campaign bought.

Gun Porn!

It's what LotFP's been missing, and what The God that Crawls is going to give.

69, 10, 2

10 hours left from the time I type this on the Monolith/God that Crawls IndieGoGo campaign. $69 to go to the second bonus goal... get it done!

Someone over at RPG.net has started a thread where they are talking about LotFP magic items and monsters. Some good stuff there so far, read it here.

Also, this monstrosity:

The God that Crawls Art Update + Monolith Playtest Results!

There's a full update today over on the IndieGoGo page, but just wanted to drop a couple notes here as well.

Playtests for The Monolith from beyond Space and Time went very well yesterday. (although almost 15 hours of describing physical and temporal anomalies was rather exhausting... boohoo my job is hard.) I've now played the adventure with five groups and the pattern is generally the same:

• The players stumble upon "the solution" soon enough but nobody even considers that to actually be the solution. So they continue to explore and come up with plans (sometimes for hours of real time) that usually pull them further and deeper into a weird mess.
• Atrocities are committed along the way. Once PCs encounter time and space as completely malleable constructs they lose inhibitions and respect for "the natural order." It's like Lovecraftian insanity in organic, rather than mechanical, form*. What at the beginning of the scenario is considered absolutely crazy is tried at the end just on the off chance it might work.
• Things get awfully quiet and a little bit desperate when they realize that their final options are all kind of crap.
• Things liven up afterward when they realize that it's the adventure's fault and it wasn't them just being too dumb to find the happy ending.

When it doesn't work like this, it's because the PC is OK with being an altered being and think that's better than the available alternative.

I don't know how the public at large will receive the adventure, but "eehh, same old shit" is not a criticism I'll be hearing often.

The God that Crawls is going to be a more familiar format of adventure, being focused on a dungeon, but with a great possibility of having a very unconventional structure. I'll be doing Google+ games for this hopefully in the next couple weeks. But take a look at a cool piece of Jason Rainville art from the adventure (which will be presented in a 210 × 550mm (about 8.25 × 21.5 inches) foldout on the reverse side of the maps):

* I recently received Trail of Cthulhu, Bookhounds of London, and Stealing Cthulhu. All are excellent, with Stealing Cthulhu in particular being exceptionally perceptive as a general resource for horror gaming and dissecting Lovecraft's stories for RPG scenario purposes. Bookhounds is a great concept. They are very useful non-system specific sourcebooks and idea mines...

The God that Crawls Cover Art

The God that Crawls cover art by Jason Rainville

The Monolith from beyond Space and Time/The God that Crawls Updates

The updates over at the IndieGoGo campaign site have been speeding up, and thought I'd throw them up here as well. (Pledging gets you both adventures plus Green Devil Face #5... and although I don't have much to show you yet, that Alfrey poster is going to be something else!).

The God that Crawls Map Preview #1

The rough prelims for the God that Crawls maps have been completed. Here’s a teaser (small enough that All The Secrets aren’t given away!).

I think these maps are the most complex maps I’ve attempted. Carcosa and Weird New World may have had been on a grander scale, but each of these dungeon levels has dozens of connections going up and down, meaning lining them up and making sure the map works requires an attention to detail that “color this area dark blue to indicate climate” doesn’t – if Weird New World’s hex colors were off one hex nothing broke; if one of these stairs don’t line up the adventure is in trouble.

Funny that the cartographer (James Hazelett) immediately noted upon seeing my hand-drawn scans that this reminded him of the old Ultima dungeon maps. The influence is strong, as the Ultima IV-V era probably is as big an influence on my gaming as D&D.

Note that these are just the barest roughs just to make sure we have the connections and relationships between levels. The final maps will be full color with extensive keyed bits (room numbers of course, plus treasure locations, various physical abnormalities noted on the map, aids to keep all the stairs and ladders lined up) to aid the Ref in running the adventure. If all goes to plan (cross fingers), these bits which should be layered with every category of map element able to each be switched on/off in the PDF version.

Alfrey Poster Update #1

The Aeron Alfrey poster (for the Psychonaut and higher contributors) will be Monolith-related. Depending on space needs, the picture may appear within the Monolith itself, but the poster will be 16 times larger, so the detail will be far greater.

I’d hoped to have more to show you at this point, but this is LotFP and the schedule is a mocking bastard.

But a big step forward has been made: We’ve finally got pics that will be used for the characters in the piece.

As anyone who’s looked through the Grindhouse Edition knows, Alfrey uses photo manipulation as part of his work, and I wanted to make sure the faces used were familiar this time.

Luna (who has previously been the reference model for the snake demon on the LotFP box cover and Grindhouse medusa pics – I do believe this is her clothed debut for LotFP!) got into costume and took over 200 shots for the piece to give Aeron a good amount of material to work with. Here is but one sample…

The God that Crawls Cover Update


My idea for the cover was along the lines of some King Diamond album covers (Them, Voodoo), a bit of brooding menace showing a location important to the adventure without showing what happens during the adventure. I do that a lot, don’t I?

That said, we do still need some “spice” to make this Cover Art rather than just a picture, so the final version will be a bit peppier in a way that doesn’t compromise the basic idea.


The God that Crawls Art Update #1
 
The maps for The God that Crawls will be included in a full color four panel glossy foldout… and I couldn’t just let the other side be blank!

Here’s the prelim sketch for the back-of-the-map pic by Jason Rainville. Details will be changed, and it’ll be in color, but I was blown away and thought you guys should see this ASAP!