[Review] Strict Time Records Must be Kept (Lotfp); Greending Gear

[Adventure]
Strict Time Records Must be Kept (2022)
Kelvin Green (Lamentations of the Flame Princess Adventures)
Lvl 1-3

I don’t know what the fuck is going on with Kelvin Green but I like it. With the bulk of Lotfp’s coomer/furry/don’t-come-within-100-metres-of-a-public-school fan-segment shamelessly migrating to trendier pastures and many of its former champions stepping back nervously for fear of incurring the fickle damoclean guillotine of public dissaproval, the class clown who was always doodling away in the back now has to become the star quarterback. And by golly he’s actually doing it! Nourished on a breakfast of horse blood, gasoline, cayenne pepper, alpha brain and cereal, the once loveable slacker has been tightening up his game with every iteration.

Gone are the days of a meme-module half-baked. With Terror in the Streets, Green demonstrated that he can, if outfitted with some sort of timed explosive device, do a serious, ambitious module provided there is an outlet for the constantly mounting charge of dad jokes that he accumulates from the co(s?)mic background radiation. With Strict Time Records Must be Kept, Green converts his earlier buildup of potential energy and writes what might be the first genuinely strong entry for Lotfp since the Great Comeuppance.

A rare note about the appearance of the PDF. The production value has plummeted drastically, art has been fucked onto the pages in glaring copy paste fashion, and maps have been truncated in areas that make the pdf easy to use, it just looks like shit. It might also be an artifact of the contrast between the stark black and white and red line art with the salmon colored background. Throw a border around that shit! Since the writing is top notch and the adventure quality is actually good, I have no problem busting your balls about this. It looks like it was done in an hour, by a high school student, with the PDFmaker tutorial open.

The premise is quintessentially Lotfp; Horrific and even sadistic, with a touch of the absurd and the occult. A friendly physician that the game recommends you set up beforehand by taking the emminently sensible measure of making his services slightly more efficacious and affordable then any other physician in the region, invites the characters to dinner in his mountain retreat, together with some other aristocrats. During the dinner, he reveals the PCs have ingested a slow acting poison that will kill them in 12 hours, having actually poisoned one of his other guests to illustrate its gruesome effects. His entire mansion has been booby-trapped, and he has ordered one of his servants to hide the antidote somewhere in the mansion, and then had him killed. The other guests are there to bet on the outcome, and follow the characters around as they explore the mansion. Also, all of the servants and guarddogs have been dosed with a drug turning them into rabid berserk-killers. YEAAAAH.

Years ago this would be a good premise followed by lacklustre execution now Green has tightened up his game and the adventure is actually very well set up for you to actually run it. What to do if the PCs attempt violence against the doctor and the guests, what do you do if the PCs attempt to flee the mansion and reach the nearest settlement etc. etc.. This is all accounted for and fleshed out, with the character’s doomed flight down the mountain resulting in likely death. Several permutations of the adventure, with longer poison duration for easier difficulty, animating corpse mannequins [1], various hiding places for the antidotes, and a decidedly Raggian variant of either providing insufficient antidotes or only providing fake antidotes and replacing them with horse-piss or saliva. Good useability too, everything from a cheatsheet with durations for actions like bashing in a door or searching an entire room, to a turn tracker with the poison’s side effects noted by each hour. It is the type of refinement and advice you see from either heavy playtesting or a day’s worth of training in the hyperbolic time chamber and likely a combination of both.

I can see one minor area of improvement. The idea of providing possible areas where the antidote is located and providing alternatives in case the antidote is not in that particular area is a good idea, allowing the adventure to be customized, but it would have been a good idea to have a sort of recommended placement for the extremely lazy and/or terminally unimaginative.

The conceit of a slow acting poison spurring the characters on is not quite new, but some lessons have been learned since the days of the Hidden Shrine of Taomachan. The poison affects the characters gradually, meaning every 2 hours they make a save vs poison or suffer a debilitating effect, starting with minor tremors, and progressing to very unpleasant consequences as the time elapses, never allowing the characters to forget their dire predicament. There’s discussions of spells like Delay Poison, and even an unlikely but plausible solution of finding the doctor’s secret notes, deciphering his coded notes and using his hidden alchemical laboratory to brew more antidotes.

Each room labelled with a brass plate after an Arch-devil FUCK YEAH

Procedurally it is great but during the execution Strict Time Records Must be Kept is no slouch either. Although Green has chosen to map the house from attic to cellar in what I assume to be an experiment to create the least intuitive maporder that is physically possible, the map of the mansion is quite good and gosh darn it with the various sadistic traps, hidden passageways and secret doors, it damn near feels like I am playing the actual game of DnD. It expands on its strong premise with weird variations that add a bit of color, like a small cluster of caverns underneath the manor holding the ancient crypt of a venusian space wizard (and one of the spectators is actually a cultist).

Gameplay proper is somewhere between sadistic and engaging. Every door is locked, so I suspect opening them will be a bit sloggy, even if a specialist is engaged, although perhaps the Doctor can be ‘persuaded’ to part with the keys. Encounters are far and few between, instead it is a race between the PCs, a bunch of SAW-traps and the clock. Doors primed with muskets. A trapdoor in the centre of a hallway, dropping you in a room with barbed wire. Some areas hold deliberate bait, designed to waste precious time and frustrate. Others are stacked with relatively abundant hard to carry treasure, unusual for an Lotfp adventure. It is Grinding Gear but instead of plodding, it is nerve-wracking, every action consumes the most sacred resource: time! and characters must glean possible hiding spaces from obvious fakeouts. The hints to the puzzles, a combination safe and a coded notebook, are just enough to enable someone to actually solve them with a reasonable application of educated trial and error. A razor-edged puzzle box, smashing it will damage the contents, fuck you you think, but then there is a note on maybe using heavy gloves or gauntlets and you remember the suit of armor on the 1st floor. The traps are certainly cruel but never quite unfair. A room with hundreds of vials, only one of them contains the antidote. A great heavy box with 20 locks, with 20 keys suspended from the ceiling on chains. The hallway trap is brutal yes…but if you did your mapping and exploration you would see it is directly over the room with nothing but Barbed Wire in it.

A light sprinkling of supernatural elements add spice to the exercise. A hard to find room holds an enchanted painting of an elephant, and can conjure a shadowy version to wreak havoc on the players and possibly crash through the floor. Characters pursuing one of the passages from the cellar might end up in a nearby lake and have their hand bitten off by a cantankerous one-eyed trout. There is the aforementioned alien space wizard to free but the way the encounter is written it is engaging, the screw-baggery of early Raggi has been filed down to a razor’s edge. It hurts just right.

I suspect the inclusion of the various guests, besides providing a staple for possible replacement characters (as the adventure notes), provides for a bit of levity and prevents the adventure from becoming monotonous as do the finite number of berserk manservants and guarddogs. The guests are also formidable enough that attacking and killing them in a fit of rage might just inflict enough damage to seriously hamper the character’s ability to survive the ordeal of finding the traps, an additional conceit.

It is now time to grumble dutifully. The Pun-o-metre clocks in at a fearsome 2.0 Kelvins [2], heavy even for the new and improved Kelvin Green. The jokes are quite good this time around, but the problem is that making them in room keys makes those rooms harder to scan during the game, causing the two to be at war. Perhaps we can reach some sort of agreement where the jokes are curtailed in areas that require study beforehand and mostly kept out of keys that will be scanned during play? Please? 83 pages for a one-shot is on the chubby side, something we have come to expect from Lotfp but in its defense, there are a good many illustrations, cheatsheets etc.

It would be good to see some more long form adventures, a campaign setting or god forbid a high level adventure from the revenant Lotfp [3] but for 2022 Strict Time Records Must Be Kept is quite good, exudes a sense of menacing fun, strikes a balance between spectacle and gameplay and contains ample handholds that render the whole easier to play. It is good to see Lotfp striking out again after a period of essentially coasting. If you are trying to be Not Your Grandfather’s DnD, you must illustrate what Not Your Grandfather’s DnD is about, and STRMBK does so with confidence, gusto, and charming malevolence.

A deserved ****. Well done Kelvin Green. Can be checked out here, or the Lotfp website for a physical copy.

[1] This variant struck me as unlikely, perhaps consider putting it in the appendix of the work
[2] I calculated the ratio by taking the amount of puns within the first 6 pages and dividing it by the page number. So it’s Forgive us: 1.0 Kelvins, Fishfuckers: 1.0 Kelvins, More then meets the Eye: 1.0 Kelvins, Midvintr: .5 Kelvins, Green Messiah: Hard because there is an index that counts as an extra page so probably 1.0 Kelvins and Terror in the Streets: 1.0. If you are reading this and have developed a superior version of the Kelvin scale, please do not email me.
[3] A fellow internet user pitched me an intriguing module synopsis for a sort of weird tale version of Isaac Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage called ‘Into Dracula’s Asshole’ for levels 7+ that I believe deserves to see the life of day and I expect to see him given all material aid he requires to fulfill his vision of a terrifying and beautiful new world.