[Review] Red and Pleasant Land (Lotfp); Once more Unto the Breach…

It was the time of the Two Thrones when the Artpunkman first came to our lands. The OSRmen were few, living lives of pious observance to the Appendix N, and would only occasionally look upon the great purple monolith that had been erected alongside the twenty-sided throne with wary disgust. Even then the ways of the Artpunkmen were disturbing and strange. But we had been told to be kind, and thus we welcomed them.
For a time the OSRmen sought in vain to teach the Artpunkmen the word of St. Gygax, but always the Artpunkmen would misunderstand. They had roving minds that walked strange, twisted corridors and always they looked for new things on the horizon. Yet for a time Artpunkman and OSRman worshipped together.
When the first purple monolith had been erected in the village square, we were appalled. Was this not what they had fled from? But again the softer of the OSRmen urged patience and understanding, and so hands that had reached for axe and torch relaxed. There was room enough, it was stated, in the OSR for Artpunkman and OSRman alike.
It began with a single purple monolith. Soon they were everywhere. Soon many of the alleys and streets of the OSR became unsightly in our eyes.  The streets were filled not with the earnest hymns to St. Anderson or Jaquays the Twice-born, but with the eerie wailing and meaningless babel of the Artpunkmen. The statue of St. Gygax was first besmirched with offal and then pulled down, replaced with a hideous lernean idol, whose many horned heads would vomit a perpetual torrent of black slime. Yet still we did not take up our swords.
One day the Artpunkmen stood before our temple. “We have endured your insults long enough,” they said. “You refuse to worship the OSR by raising the purple obelisk, the true sign of fealty. You insult and belittle us. We demand that you fire this profane edifice and submit to our will.”
When it came, it was not preached by any state or church. Yet still one day an Artpunkman was found nailed to the purple obelisk in the village square. On his chest was branded a message; “Thou hath taken our OSR and delivered it unto moneylenders, charlatans and harlots. Thou maketh merry, and mocketh, and hath forgotten thine Appendix N, and on the forums thou speaketh lightly of the OSR if at all! But our OSR is a jealous, and a vengeful OSR, and mockery he abideth not! For we believe in the living, unbroken and eternal OSR, who came from Appendix N and who manifested itself through Gygax, Anderson & Jaquays and whose word is preached by Lux, Fullerton, Huso and countless multitudes that came before and after them, and we follow its inscrutable Will, whose true designs mankind cannot nor ever will unravel.
Excelsior.”  
And thus we made war upon them.

[Setting]
A Red and Pleasant Land (2014)
Zak S (Lamentations of the Flame Princess)
Lvl 6+

Another reReview and the reason should be obvious. Red & Pleasant Land by Zak S. is another landmark entry in the Artpunk phenomenon, and the first campaign setting that has the problems commonly associated with it without it being absolute shit. It is also hugely successful for an Indie publication, it comes with endorsements from China Mevielle and Monte Cook and lauded with awards: The Gold Ennie, the Monocled Raggi of Prestigious Excellence, the Nobel Peace Prize for Roleplaying Literature and the Zak. S. Award for Exceptional Roleplaying Achievement. Get in the back of the bus Gramps! The Powers That Be have decreed this is a work of GENIUS and YOU had better shut your prole mouth and get on board the Z train!

So against all the powers of heaven and hell I will do something which is exceptionally boorish and ask the question “but has anyone actually played it?” After the outraged boohing and angry hisses have died down, A cursory google search “Red and Pleasant Land play report” or “Red and Pleasant Land actual play” brings up several entries: There are multiple single session entries and on the Lotfp website there is what appears to be a 4 part play report that takes place largely in locations of the GM’s own devising, involving no significant creatures or content from RaPL besides Vampires (but sounds fun though!). This is a slippery argument because play reports under a certain weight class are as rare as diamonds but given the popularity of the work it is certainly reasonable to expect there to be some. This also doesn’t mean that you can’t be inspired by this setting, or that there aren’t things you can steal from it (there are!) but I am a utility guy, I judge material by whether or not you can use it. Let’s dive in.

Red and Pleasant Land is a 197 campaign setting by Zak S, set in the Volvodja, a Transylvania that has been transfigured into a single gigantic palace dungeon and functions more or less like a crossbreed of Alice in Wonderland and the movie Dracula as envisoned by M.C. Escher. This strange country of mirrors, croquet, impalement, Chess and temporal distortion is the site of a paradoxical war between mad powers; the fickle Queen of Hearts and the cruel Red King fight a senseless, temporally distorted war. On the sidelines, the forces of the Pale King and the Colorless Queen jostle for position. It illustrates the strengths and flaws of Zaks stuff like no other; a stunning, bizarre aesthetic and a few intriguing ideas coupled with a lack of overall substance.

I think in order to understand the problem I must fall back to my crude typology of campaign settings that I discussed when I reviewed Carcosa. There are, fundamentally, two types of DnD setting. One (we will call it A) arranges elements from traditional D&D in such a fashion that it can serve as the backdrop for play and generally accommodates a variety of playstyles, themes, moods etc. etc. The other (B) involves major deviations from the standard framework and sacrifices a lot of the versatility of old DnD to provide an experience that is much narrower, but potentially much deeper. Carcosa is my favorite example of a type B setting.

Red and Pleasant Land is a type B setting for sure, and it wears it on its sleeves. The old bestiary is nowhere to be found and has been replaced with an alice in wonderland themed vampiric one [1], there is a beautiful custom class to differentiate this DnD from Ye Aulde DeeAnnDee as played by your grandfather, the appendix N has been chucked out in favor of Alice in Wonderland, the Movie Dracula, Flatland and some other crap no one has ever heard of (Borges, Cortzar, Barthelme etc. etc.), and all the conventions of the old setting have been turned on their head. Conceptually, it is intriguing for a short skiff, but the problem is that this has been conceived as a backdrop to sustain multiple levels worth of play, and elements that are intriguing as a change of pace become tiresome over a long period of time.

The themes in Red and Pleasant Land are very narrow, perfect for an adventure, limited for a setting. Time and space are screwy at best. The underground is all well-furnished dungeon-palace. The top is all well-manicured gardens and hedges. The last humans in this nightmarish baroque hell-scape huddle in concealed cities in the woods, but the unreality of the setting works against it. There are children in wells that will trade items of a certain letter for food and magic shopkeepers that exist essentially because they do. Besides the castle of the Red King and the Queen of Hearts, which we will discuss in detail, everything is cut from the same narrow bolt of fabric.

The idea behind Red and Pleasant Land is that the characters gradually become embroiled in the senseless and irrational politics of Volvodja but here the arbitrary nature of the setting works against this concept. Intrigue relies upon firmly defined stakes, well established characters, a system to manipulate etc. etc. In Volvodja events may be reversed, motives are irrational, history has been abolished, stakes are often arbitrary and there is ultimately, no reason to care about anything beyond immediate survival. To quote from the author:

To capture the pointlessness of life in Voivodja, it is best for the Referee to try to think up ways to keep any conversation going as long as possible. When a character asserts a fact or other idea they want an NPC to believe, have the NPC ask questions about it, deny it or otherwise find an excuse to talk instead of act.   

To Zak’s credit, the atmosphere, the one thing timeless and spaceless Volvodja retains, is pinned down very precisely. In a page, he manages to pin down the difference between wacky and weird, that of malicious, sinister ulterior design, reasonably well. The problem is not the vision of Volvodja, which has a bewildering attraction, the problem is in the t-axis. In depriving itself of stakes, history, motive and a plethora of different themes, that singular vision must do an ungodly amount of lifting.

But other then that, how was the play Miss Lincoln?

Stand up and applaud the inclusion of the Alice class, the specialist with randomly generated abilities, many of them tied to a unique Lewis Carrolian-sounding sentence. Each hour, a reality altering ability may be invoked to get some extra help, be it in the form of a mundane object, sudden ally or suddenly appearing secret door! Oh how witty, you say to your fellow theatre goers, such thematic fealty, many Lewis Carol. Wow!

78 It was very shiny and stuck out like a soup spoon… On a successful mêlée hit, the Alice may immediately make a Sleight of Hand attempt to grab an item (other than the target’s weapon) off a target. This won’t work twice on anyone above zombie-intelligence who sees it. Re-rolling this result means the Alice gets a bonus to the Sleight roll: +1, then +2, then +3, etc.

And then of course there are the creatures! Again, to RaPL’s credit, many of the unique NPCs are given specific relationships with eachother so a sort of tapestry is formed as the basis for interaction. The Sphinx hunts the Unicorn. The relationship between the King of Hearts and the Queen of Hearts are established. The Red King has three Brides, each with a different agenda (one wants to kill him, one wants to kill the others, one is loyal). Ceshire Cat, Mad Hatter, and other Carrol favorites all make their appearance, often with a dash of horror to spice things up a bit. The temporally shifting nature of the Land is tied to the reverse-aging Jabberwock, potentially its most powerful inhabitant, so slaying it will stabilize these changes and reveal details about the setting (though what details these should be is anyone’s guess).

The bulk of the bestiary is stuffed with all manner of bizarre vampires, organized like Chess Pieces, with the Pawns of the different houses making up the lower rank of vampire, the Knights comprising its fighting men, the Bishops its unholy spellcasters (often with different blasphemous unique abilities). Of interest are the Rooks, gigantic lumbering Humpty-dumpty like monstrosities equipped with odd and terrible powers. The Red rooks can hold people in place with riddles, the Colorless rooks must be drawn and function

There are some additional gripes, which are exacerbated in a long campaign. 1) Magic is already unpredictable in Castiche Castle, to the point where every spell has a failure chance, and most of the powerful vampires (the kings & queens, duchess etc. etc.) have blanket Magic Immunity. If you combine this with the Quiet Side, a place on the other side of the mirror, that the PCs are likely to have their serious bossfights with, magic in RaPL has been gelded.   

A second very vulgar point, disrespecting of the Artiste’s unique Vision! requires a glance at the random encounter table in Volvodja. A casual glance at the Interior table reveals that approx. 40% of encounters are with Vampires of various houses. A similar glance at the Encounters Forest (Night) yields about the same ratio. Quick DnD trivia question: What do DnD vampires do? Did you answer include something like Charm Person and Level Drain? Then perhaps you start to understand the problem.

The basic idea behind RaPl is that you enter at about level 6, run weird errands (like finding the Queen’s Wicket) for various bizarre NPCs, get embroiled in various relations trying not to get eaten, while looting the furnishings of the massive Interior until you are about level 9-13 and ready to take out the Queen and King. Now it is stated that no one in Volvodja is unalterably hostile, but unless that means that the majority of your random encounters are going to have a nonviolent solution, you are looking at a steady diet of vampire encounters, every one of which has the potential to kick someone back a single level, thereby obliterating thousands upon thousands of experience points and sessions worth of play with a single attack. Now Level Drain is exciting because it sucks so much, but only if used sparingly. In a campaign where everyone and their dog packs Level Drain and Charm Person, with no reliable counter-measures, no resurrection or restoration spells on the Lotfp spell list, that’s a different fucking story.    
 
But this is all terribly tedious and perhaps I should dwell on positive things: The Random Demon generation table is probably the best I have ever seen, and manages to convey the horrible, reality-altering nature of these hideously powerful monstrosities with quick and elegant lines of evocative description. If you have this thing anyway, the Random Demon Generation Table is worth porting if nothing else!

Then comes what is the best content in the entire book, the two castles of the Vampiric monarchs, but the tragedy is that they rely on a framework that will virtually guarantee that they will never see any use. This is the Porn part of Red and Pleasant Land, to fill your mind with visions of running this awesome vampire execution module in castles of twisted reality, but first your PCs must endure an entire campaign worth of inane cobbled together bullshit about shoe-theft and shrinking potions before they are deemed worthy to run the module as Le Artiste has conceived it. They lie outside of the Light-Cone of any possible campaign and there they will stay, forever beyond reach, tormenting you with interesting design choices until you give a disgusted sigh and wrench out the parts that you like to jam these unceremoniously into whatever cobbled-together B2 Rehash the party is going through this session because its easier to run.

Some general observations. The maps are hard on the eye and the skewed cubist style is vaguely nauseating, to the point that it hinders absorption, but this is not a dealbreaker. Two Alice in wonderland like features, that of shriking potions and the ability to walk through Mirrors into the other “Quiet Side” are implemented in both adventures, but they are never used in such a way as to cleverly bypass obstacles and end up being included more as mood then anything else. Having some sort of area that is only accessible if you are tiny (as in a subsequent 1 page dungeon) or including areas of the dungeon that are different in the quiet side then they are on the normal side, would have been a textbook method of implementing it. As is, all the bossfights (for lack of a better word) are on the quiet side, meaning the PCs have a time limit before the silence drives them insane, and clerics are not allowed to cast any spells.

There’s a little bit of assembly required with both adventures, as the relationship between the PCs and the Vampire monarchs should ideally be something other then directly antagonistic, but I think given the amount of random generation tables this should be possible. The most puzzling are the Random Encounter Tables, which says to check “Every 2 in game minutes” or about 5 times per turn, with a +50% chance of getting an encounter? Am I reading that correctly? There’s a bat tomb room in the Castle Poenari that takes 20 minutes to search, is it really the idea that you have to make 10 random encounter rolls?

Useability is very high. The contents of the room are conveyed through a series of bullet points and the text tends to err more on the side of brevity then then loggorhea. Indeed as I have remarked before, this use of Bullet points was all but unprecedented at the time, and I think might be the work’s most enduring (and likely unacknowledged) legacy.

Castle Cachtische
The superior of the two and probably the best part of the book, the Castle of the Queen of Hearts seeks to present a sort of living environment, complete with storerooms, bakeries, banquet halls and tearooms, for the PCs to at first cautiously explore, until it becomes time to deliver the killing stroke. The first floor is only dangerous if the PCs are clearly intruding, something that delivers roleplaying opportunities. There are multiple means of ingress into the castle proper, the castle has proper gateways and patrols, some entrances are hidden, and progress through the castle is bottlenecked in a manner reminiscent of Metroidvania. You often stumble upon odd roadblocks that have their resolution elsewhere in the castle. Similarly, the adventure occasionally takes into account unconventional tactics, such as destroying the wall of a cistern so the lower levels flood (vampires cannot take running water).

In the case of Castiche, half of the castle is at a 90 degree angle to the other half, and by walking through a complicated Tesseract-like set of small doors, the players can reverse their local gravity so it points to the ceiling, wall or whatever. This is great! The odd spacially fucked up corridor or chamber sustains the feel of unreality. The actual progress to the lower levels, which ARE guarded, is hidden and will require some combination of searching, cleverness and luck to find. Part of what makes this place, at least theoretically, fit for purpose is something like the hidden catacombs, which hold the beheaded corpses of the monarchs of the other suites, the lost heads of which can be used as fodder for adventure hooks later on.

This gravito-spatial fuckery takes on a nasty turn as the PCs progress deeper into Castle Castiche. Pools of blood clinging to walls, the unsettling amphibian vampires of the Nephidean House, concealed maps, the odd interesting magic item like the Rapier of Unnaming or the Vorpal Bolt, a room with a ball clock that can be fucked with to stop time, it all flows together rather well in a laudably ambitious manner while not bottlenecking you into a giant railroad.

I am less pleased about the implementation of the throne room then I am about the concept. You are deposited into an Escheresque landscape of inverted stairways and must fight the Queen and her demoniac Guests with rules that are the equivalent of the GM shaking the table and shining a bright light in the eyes of his players.

Castle Castiche’s strongest point is probably the weird spatial transitions between interlocking realms that convey the sort of nightmarish Alice in Wonderland vibe the entire book is going for. Strange gravity, spatial distortion, impaled virgins it’s pretty good.

****

Castle Poenari

The Palace of the Red King, in contrast, is more traditional dungeon fare, and is designed around that concept. It’s Castle Ravenloft turned up to eleven, strongly reminiscent of the last level of Castlevania: Bloodlines, a distorted, reality-warped castle full of enemies. The relationship between characters and dungeon is more straightforward, though the Red King’s Three Brides [2] play a prominent role in the adventure, alternatively aiding or tricking the characters as they progress through the castle proper. This is the real deal, a giant wall dotted with impaled foes, manned by living rooks and vampiric knights, with the castle surrounded by a moatway of blood. An almost cartoonish level of dark, something you would see in the Abyss or in Hell itself.  

There is another classic element present in Castle Poenari but its very understated. Vampires obviously sleep during the day, so as a result both the King and his Brides will not be present during a daytime assault, with the walls only being manned by rooks and mome raths (green pigs). This day night element is exploited rarely; a hallway on the first floor causes characters to have to save or collapse from dehydration/exhaustion, with every minute of action taking an hour of game time, and there is a room where time repeats that advances the clock by 1 hour. I think an opportunity has been missed here, but it would have meant adding another element to a dungeon that is already overloaded with gimmicky mechanics.

There is the aforementioned Quiet Side that can be accessed via mirrors but this, like the night/day element, comes across like an afterthought or a gimmick, more then a central mechanic that can be exploited. The same goes for the shrinking mechanism: there is an opportunity to shrink oneself to a smaller size, but not really any point where this can be used to one’s favor, or any area that can only be accessed.

Poenari has a few encounters that are stronger then anything in Castiche but overall it is the weaker dungeon. When it is strong the imagery is striking and nightmarish. A liquid floor that you sink into and must swim to the bottom, a tesseract room with the inner sides opening and disgorging pawns of the red king, complete with stilt-like legs. A door that once opened, seals off all other doors until it is closed once more. An ever-turning hallway. One of the best encounters has bizarre golems appear and surround each character. This is all very good stuff. It has a unique, menacing vibe to it.

But at the same time the set-up for this entire thing is much more artificial then Cachtische, to the point of being half funhouse dungeon. You have to get four keys to open four doors so you can fuck around with some sort of chess puzzle room that I thought I understood but that feels, dumber then it should be?
 
The final tomb is on the quiet side but this is only an extra hindrance in what is already a brutally tough fight. The king wakes up at the first sound (rendering much of the day/night element void) and the characters must now fight him and their dopplegangers on an instant death timer without the benefit of their divine magic. As a last, defiant fuck you, the treasure is very cunningly hidden but runs into the 100k if you find it, and the hint is not an asspull.

With attempts at organization essentially ending at the gate of the Castle proper, Poenari is essentially a funhouse dungeon with some very strong environmental set-pieces to it. There’s good ideas but some of them end up as little more then fluff.

***

A vast amount of work is spent on describing these two high level castles, the piece de la resistance of any campaign in Red and Pleasant Land. Conversely, the campaign proper, the giant runway that is to lead you to this orgasmic vampire promised land, receives all of 3 one pagers, with individual encounters described in a few throwaway tables that are, frankly, underwhelming.

And herein we have the problem with RaPL in a nutshell. The campaign proper takes place in a map that has place names but that is essentially repeats of the same 4 flavors of ice-cream, you are provided with a torrential deluge of randomly generated adventure hooks, events and encounters but the question that should be asked is why do you have these tools in the first place? Red and Pleasant Land does not have the depth to sustain infinite amounts of campaigning, nor does it really need to. What it really needed was a small amount of content of very high quality, illustrative of its general principles, to serve as landmarks for the run on the castles proper.

The same principle applies to rules about nobility, or combat resolution, or whathaveyou. Its not that these rules are bad, although some are stopgap, it’s that its more ideas bolted onto a framework that is really only equipped to do a few things well.  

Red and Pleasant Land should serve future OSRmen as the textbook example of the perils of the vision of the artiste growing too divorced from the realities of play and an illustration of an important dichotomy, that work can be compelling and have admirable qualities without ever seeing use at the table. If there was a way to condense it into a single adventure without doing overmuch violence to the interactive components I think it would be a superior work. For now it is good to read, to steal from, to place on the coffee table, to discuss in the salon and perhaps even in the bedchamber with M’lady. But to actually play it? Heaven help you. **

[1] To be fair, Lotfp does not have a bestiary to begin with!
[2] An allusion to Dracula’s three Wives.

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