Lamentations of the Flame Princess is…well. LotFP is “weird fantasy” and by weird, we’re talking old school pulp weird, Conan and Lovecraft, so horror. The idea is that the weirdness should be unique and stand out jarringly against normal reality and players should have no idea what they’re facing when they first encounter it. I find this kind of thing fascinating and was also intrigued by its promise to have easy character generation to make PC death a more pleasant experience for the one actually running things.
Now, when LotFP is mentioned on 4chan and its sister sites, at least one there will say it’s a misogynistic product by some guy who gets off on watching women die messy deaths, which should give you a good idea of the art. Now, it is absolutely true that there’s one where a woman is getting disemboweled by undead and there’s a zombie reaching for her guts through her vagina. This is literally a picture, in the core book no less. (There’s an artless free version, and thank god for that.) But there actually is lots of horrible stuff happening to men too, and the nudity is surprisingly equal opportunity as well. It also contains some of the only decent RPG art of women just doing stuff I’ve seen. But LotFP is a setting where horrible stuff happens to women. It’s got historically accurate style misogyny and not “historically accurate” misogyny, but the creator absolutely does respond to anyone asking, “Okay but so why so very much X?” with “BECAUSE IT’S SO FUCKING EDGY TROLOLOLOLO!” I can’t fully argue because curiosity about the slapfight was a reason I looked into it.
So let’s talk about the kinds of horror we get from the modules! What sort of Halloween goodness can you get from “weird fantasy”?