Wishy-washy Wizardry: a Brechewold Review

The Yellow Book of Brechewold (Lamentations of the Flame Princess, 2023) is a RPG adventure that revolves around a wizard school, its dungeons, and surroundings. It's mainly based on T.H. White's Once and Future King, with arthurian lore as background.

At the begginning of each session, players pick new tutorials from school teachers. Then, the teachers reveal secrets that works as adventure hooks. Tutorials have titles like Binding Spirits, Reanimation, or Dwarven Runes, but they don't offer any description, nor mechanical effect. For a game about a magic school, we expected more substance and impact into the gameplay. It never felt as the alumni were adquiring new and unique magic or knowledge from some lessons.

We had three problems with secrets: sometimes, they were already known to the party, since they discovered them exploring the dungeons or surroundings; or, they were useless being tied to random encounters that never happened; or, there were not secrets at all, when a third player took the same teacher (9 tutorials, but 7 secrets).

Dungeon crawling was good and levels were interesting, with some hard to understand or dull rooms here and there. My players were very motivated by loot and cool stuff. They had many fun discusions about what trinkets to preserve and what to trade for money and experience. I would like the rooms to have the standard square grid and exploration rules from LotFP, but the hand drawn maps were really nice (as the rest of the art of the book).

My major gripe has been with encounters tables, it was very irritating to roll and look for the table to just discover it was "No encounter" at 53–100 or 54–100. Even, you had "No encounter" at 18–20, why?! that entry was annoying, the designer could add those 3 at the end of the table: 50–100, and standarize every season and dungeon to that number, so I could know when 50+ was rolled, then no encounter happened. 

Anyway, some encounters were cool: the Green Knight, "Grisly remains of a serial killer’s victims", or "A lion and unicorn fighting over a crown"; some were uninspiring and hard to use: "The ghosts in this room like to play practical jokes", "Theatre troupe of mice put on moving renditions of Shakespeare’s tragedies, though they won’t be written for centuries", for example.

I love hex maps, and Brechewold had a good one, its contents were intriguing, but they could benefit from more connections between them and encounter tables could helped to create those links. Overworld movement was too fast (roads, open terrain and horses) and rolls too few. Tables need more entries and probabilities around weather changes, other parties movements, faeric phenomena, but above all: factions and political dynamics. You had King Lloyd, Lord Cynefryfh, the druids, witch coven, Lady Cadworth, the muttiny inside the school, Ambrosius, and Nimue, all with their own agenda, but the world felt static since there were not mechanics to move them forward ("off scren"), or when Ygraine town or the Holy Cheesse Chapel only existed when they were visited by players.

As conclusion, I expected the book to offer me better tools as a GM to create a more alive Brechewold world, and a more impactful school setting, reflected into the player progression system.

A Yellow Land

I bought The Yellow Book of Brechewold because I like yellow color. And, considering almost every book in the LotFP line has a black spine, it helps it makes my shelf prettier. Nice.

But, the book picked my curiosity and I read it. It has a lovely premise: an arthurian school of mages and an structure that I dig: small hexcrawl, discrete mega dungeon and a central hub with rumours. As a result, I bring it to the table.

As now, we have been running a little campaing around Brechewold. The dungeons has been interesting, they work. Each level has its own secrets and the layouts are very friendly and navigable. It does not have that oppresive and lethal feel of other LotFP modules (like Veins of the Earth). It's more light-hearted and safe.

My only gripe has been with random encounter tables. They are very underwhelming. Some encounters are a bit flat and I hate when after rolling the dice and flipping the book you read: no encounter. Ugh. I have some problems understanding some sections like those vertical dream rooms in the fourth level or the Mars sub-level. But, I guess my english is not that fine.

At this point in the campaing (7th term), some teachers secrets are useless, because the players already discovered them by themselves, but I use them to give them more information or clarify some obscure matters. Other thing that happened: my players were very interested about Ygraine, its dwellers and events, and I liked to be more prepared for that, with more lore to answer their curiosity. The good point is that they are very interested in the world and the emerging rebellion in the school and surroundings.

In my real life country, in politics, yellow means a shallow, lukewarm, and ambiguous safe position. I feel that Brechewold has been something like that. It's good! it's decent! but, it's too safe and lacking here and there. Vornheim has helped me to fill some gaps, but maybe I will need more work.

A Rawer Zombie Apocalypse

 We played two sessions of Zombie World. The group liked it, but we made some tweaks, here they are:

The Survivor Deck was unconfortable due to its constant shuffling and circulation around the players. In the second session we implemented bags with color tokens, each player with its own bag, using the same results distribution: 1 Gold = Triumph, 1 Silver = Opportunity, 3 Green = Edge, 6 Blue = Miss.

Edge results felt more "fail" than "sucess", and that's a good thing, because in Zombie World system you 're-roll' the PbtA 2d6. For example, if the move tell you to Draw Savagery and you have 3 in that Stat, you roll 3 times 2d6 (without reposition) and take the best result. A companion could Mark Stress and give you 1-3 extra re-rolls (=Draws).

Players discovered that Stress wasn't bad at all, and used it indiscriminately. Sure, you take 1 new Trauma when fill you Stress Track. But, Traumas didn't feel 'traumatic' enough (negative).

When promted with the decision: "Mark Stress or Draw from the Bite Deck" or "Mark Stress or Suffer Serious Harm", they always marked Stress. And since Stress and Traumas weren't bad, they never used moves to clear Stress.

So, in the second session, we made an experiment: everytime you Mark Stress, a Stress token (Red color) was put inside the bag, until you clean it. A Stress token is equal to a Miss. This solution created a better economy, interesting interactions between players, a sense of urgency to 'fix the bag' before danger came, and a more tense apocalypse.

The Cursed Chateau "Bad Ending"

The Cursed Chateau has an interesting background story that I wanted to reveal to the players. I think that places and NPC details that are in a book but can be playable, are almost a waste of time to a Referee.

I have no advice for an experienced Referee. Everything went like a regular roleplaying where the you recreate NPC actions and dialogs to make sense in the emerging context, and PC makes guesses, suggestions, and ultimately they discover the story behind (or not). Sometimes, they create new details and are convinced about them, and that makes the recap even better, in our case: they concluded that GUILHÈM was MIQÈL and YSABEL son, and the old JÒRGI was trying to create and escape for the mother when everything went nuts.

Our adventure ended at the SANCTUM, since players had to go to their homes, and I wanted to close the scenario. So, we checked how much Joudain's Fun they have: 77. They touched Joudain's ring trying to claim it's domain possession rolling 1d100 for 77%. Sadly, they failed and they were consumed by the curse and became undead.

I was very pleased with my own ruling and enjoyed the adventure a lot.

Entering The Cursed Chateau

So, I'm running The Cursed Chateau for Lamentations of the Flame Princess. This has been my experience introducing the module to my group, who are very goal-oriented type of people.

First: I bought the book because its black / golden printed colors, and thinking it was similar to Akumajō Dracula (Castlevania), or Val Helsing, you know. After reading it, I could find some vibes to my own expectations, then I liked it.

Following book advice, I introduced the PC with an old relative to the Ayarai family. In this case: Jôrgi Ayarai, a dweller from Las Chòtas village. Las Chòtas had a better past, but now it is almost abandoned, and restoring the Ayarai state to its rightful heir, could help to revive the region (according to Jôrgi).

Jôrgi gave them an strange artifact with the shape of a tarrasque, and three digits in rounds similar to those briefcases with key. This artifact function is to reflect in the game world, the current result of Joudain's Fun. The number is transparent, but how they go up or down, not. Later, the PC will discover that "The Tarrasque" updates everytime they leave a point of interest (keyed area).

Players looked compliant with the goal, but looked for more infor,mation in an abandoned chapel in Las Chòtas, where they found an out-of-place pseudo-religious Ysabel paiting with a Joudain's dedication on its reverse. They were intrigued and they left for the Chateau in the morning.

Now. I expected the first session to revolve around the Hedge Maze, and that was the case. It was a pain in the ass to be drawing the labyrinth in a graph paper as the progressed. Keeping that in mind, next time I'll try to do it smoother. Barbarian (reskinned Dwarf) player was leading the group, so he was tasked to roll 1d100 to recieve a result from the Encounters table. Fighter-Mage (ex-Elf) was notating when The Tarrasque digits changed.

PC were curious about the statues and the corpse from the explorer from Las Chòtas, so I made a puzzle on the fly around the statues heads pointing four cardinal points. They had to find the head from the headless statue to complete the puzzle.

I was surprised how clever were the players to cope with the undead, specially when they tried to rob Ysabel grave. Let's see if the keep their spirits high next session.