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.
I appreciate the review, Francisco. Just a quick note for why there are "no encounter" results in the 18-20 range on the wilderness charts: you're only supposed to roll a d20 if the party is on a road, and you roll d100 if they're off a road in the forest. That way, rolling a d20 can still have a "no encounter" result. I think it's important that there isn't always an encounter to keep the game moving, but I sincerely appreciate you sharing your frustrations. Something for me to think about.
ReplyDeleteHi Matt! Oh, you are right. Now it makes sense.
DeleteMy review was very critical, it captures some discomfort with the book, but I have to say that it was a very enjoyable campaing.
Last saturday, in a non-gaming meeting, my friends (players) were commenting how good was Brechewold, and the ending of our mini-campaign: an Elf PC took away the ring from a confused Merlin to revive another PC who perished fighting Mim at the doors of the Smoking Mountain!
One of the best moments was in the Abbey of Our Lady of Perpetual Obstinance, where the party was accused by Sister Glenda of the crime.
Thanks for your book.
I'm glad you and your friends had fun with Brechewold, even if you weren't completely happy with the book. It's so cool to hear stories from your campaign. I do genuinely appreciate you sharing constructive criticism that I can use to improve as a writer.
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