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Super cool, and unlike anything I've had before. This book really got my brain working!
If you ever thought running an adventure or even an entire campaign in a city would be too hard, you need this book
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originally published at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2012/02/22/tabletop-review-isle-of
-the-unknown/
I fucking hate Tolkien. More concisely, I fucking hate the role-playing game legacy of Tolkien. I have no use for grandiose magic hurling wizards, polymath elves, and stand-offish rangers with roguish gruffness covering hearts of gold. That so much of the RPG community spends their precious imaginations and time retracing the ponderous path towards Mt. Doom breaks my heart.
What I want from a fantasy setting is the exact opposite of the Hobbit. I want a world that Dio would sing about. Give me demons who fly about on leathery wings and towering giants who stomp whole villages to dust on a whim. This is my desire, my dream, my wish. Too much of the D&D community is stuck with gnomes and anime scale swords. Spare me.
Lamentations of the Flame Princess have thus far proven to be reliable purveyors of fantasy that lives outside the elves and longsword +1 paradigm. The Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role-Playing Game is a witty, strange take on the 70’s style D&D I grew up on and it has quickly become my favorite system. Carcosa topped the Grindhouse edition of LOTFP with a setting that can only be called bracing. Wind-swept, chaotic, and blasphemous, Carcosa is a world apart from Forgotten Realms dreck I have grown to loathe. Then came Isle of the Unknown.
As with every other LOTFP product, the cover is eye-catching. Ghostly colored, with an eerie glow, the cover painting is quite unlike any I have ever seen. Cynthia Shephard really out did herself with this piece, as it is evocative without being as blatant as most RPG book covers. The blue figure playing the harp may only be a statue, but it gives the impression that on the Isle of the Unknown, even this can be a startling encounter. It becomes very clear from the outset that this is not a bunch of happy companions striding to the Shire.
The front and back cover interiors are festooned with hex maps of the Isle. What really makes the Isle of the Unknown come to life is the interior art. There are over 100 monsters and each of them is given a full color illustration. This is a far cry from the days of the Monster Manual, when only a percentage of the monsters where drawn and all the art was black and white. There are several full page paintings, as well, and each is as good as the cover. The colors are often lavish and bright, which some might not care for, but I find the saturation refreshingly different.
It might go without saying, this being a Lamentations of the Flame Princess book and all, but the binding, paper, and production values are amazing. The paper has a nice heavy feel and the spine is well sewn. This is a book that is made to last. It is the same size as Carcosa, though it is a much slimmer volume. This is the third product of theirs I have reviewed and each has been made with extreme care. In an era when RPG products are increasingly either digital downloads or made for short edition cycles, it is a pleasure to encounter books that are built to last.
The actual gaming content of Isle of the Unknown is quite different from anything you may have encountered prior. Each and every one of the hex panels on the map is described, some with a couple sentences, others warranting fairly long paragraphs. The encounters each hex contains are beyond varied, drifting from brutal combats with fairly normal opposition to Dadaist situations that play like a D&D version of a Dali painting. There is no over-arching meta plot to be explored in the next book, no sensitive portrayals of the life cycle of orcs. This is old school encounter style gaming.
Much will be made of the more madcap monsters within the book. Yes, there is a pyramid shaped eagle monster that resembles a bird that swallowed a four sided die. Why wouldn’t there be? This is the Isle of the Unknown, after all. If fighting a 24′ tall deer monster isn’t what you want, go play Greyhawk or something.
Gaming use for the Isle of the Unknown is an interesting conundrum. There is enough weirdness and verve to fill a whole campaign, but I have a hard time imagining someone using the Isle of the Unknown as a full time setting. In my humble, and largely irrelevant, opinion, the best use for Isle of the Unknown is as a setting for a handful of adventures, be it a one off or a short story arc. By reducing player exposure to the Isle, the otherness of the monsters and setting is maintained.
Ultimately, the value of Isle of the Unknown is as a source of inspiration. This is a work of fantasy in the vein of my high school notebook, a genre I quite enjoy. This is 128 pages of madness and fun with no peer. For the enterprising and creative DM, this is a rich resource that can be mined for years. If you want something off the shelf to drop into a campaign whole cloth, this Isle might be a bit too Unknown for you. Every time I turned the page, I expected to see Dorito dust fingerprints on the page. Few OSR products truly evoke the spirit of 70′s D&D, but Isle of the Unknown is as close as I have come to those halcyon days.
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Vornheim is a work of genius! It concisely creates a wonderful sense of place, while at the same time sharing a wealth of advice on how to create your own unique and interesting city adventures. The philosophy that a "campaign book" does NOT need to catalogue every denizen or locale really fits with my own style of play. Vornheim is easy and entertaining to read, and the images are fantastic (I love the maps!).
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Originally published at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2012/01/18/tabletop-review-carcosa
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Violence is only notable in RPGs when it is either absent or overwhelming. The threshold for sex being notable is lower, but not so much as it was pre-Vampire: the Masquerade. When I first encountered the name Carcosa, it pertained to one small element, the presence of torture, rape, and human sacrifice. Based entirely on reputation, one would expect Carcosa to be something horrifying and soul-crushing along the lines of F.A.T.A.L. With a little research, it became obvious to me that this was simply not the case with Carcosa. When Lamentations of the Flame Princess sent me a digital copy of the new edition of Carcosa, I made a pact with myself to approach Carcosa without prejudice and to rate it on its own strengths and weaknesses.
Honestly, I find much of the controversy about Carcosa‘s content to be hypocritical. Black Sabbaths and dark rituals have always been an implied part of classic fantasy, even if the trappings of such rituals have been left intentionally vague. I have yet to play a fantasy RPG that did not involve hacking and slashing sentient beings to bits with assorted and sundry instruments. A D&D session without bloody combat and staggering amounts of carnage would be the exception, not the rule. For players and DMs to suddenly get squeamish about ultraviolence in their campaigns strikes me as more than a little hypocritical. I have personally witnessed holocausts in the name of staying in character, with nominally good characters massacring humanoids because of differences in culture and skin tone.
Carcosa is not a rulebook. In fact, it is assumed that you will use it with your preferred flavor of D&D. In my case, that means Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying Grindhouse Edition, but it really is fielder’s choice on this one. There are rules, many of which are interesting, but you need the girding of a full rulebook. The first edition of Carcosa bore the full title ‘Supplement V: Carcosa’, indicating that this book could slide right in alongside the classic first four volumes of D&D. I can just as easily see someone using Carcosa with OSRIC or even GURPS. There are monster stats to adapt, but otherwise Carcosa is light on crunch and is very adaptable. Using it as an alternative Dimension Book for Rifts would require a couple hours of hunting and picking through the Conversion Book and maybe Aliens Unlimited. Damn, that sounds like a fun campaign to run.
Carcosa is not a fantasy setting, at least not one like you might be used to. Carcosa takes place 153 light years from Earth and has as many science fiction trappings as traditional fantasy elements. While not post-Apocalyptic in the traditional sense, the world of Carcosa feels more like Conan meets Gamma World than Forgotten Realms. There are no elves here. The lack of clerical and wizardly spells alone makes Carcosa stand out from the bulk of RPG settings. There is a palpable pulp science fiction feel to the whole book, content and artwise. Treating Carcosa like John Carter of Mars or Hyboria makes a lot more sense than trying to shoehorn it into the modern fantasy milieu, of which it is obviously not a member.
Carcosa is not for the faint of heart. The content that started the shitstorm in the OSR scene four years ago, when Carcosa was first published, is still here. No matter what you might say about Carcosa, you can’t deny that Geoffrey McKinney is unflinching about his writing. Whether that turns you off or not is a matter of personal choice. I hate to belabor the point, but human sacrifice and the pursuit of power at all costs are not new tropes in fantasy role-playing, but they may seem out of place in this more sanitized era. Forcing a party to choose between the lives of a few innocents or an untold multitude of potential victims is a tantalizing plot point, but also a plot that may make some uncomfortable.
What Carcosa is, exactly, is a bit harder to put a finger on. Carcosa is a world with no clerics and no magic-users. Even thieves, Specialists in Lamentations of the Flame Princess parlance, are not present. The common fantasy races, the elf, the dwarf, the Halfling, are all unaccounted for. What Carcosa is, really, is a completely different animal from the majority of fantasy settings. When taken in small doses, Carcosa feels disjointed and odd. Taken as a whole, however, Carcosa is a truly fascinating setting. The character and flavor of the place must be seen from a bird’s eye view. There is so much going on that I fear many will get lost in the individual oddities instead of seeing the whole clockwork of madness presented.
The only two character classes are the Sorcerer and the Fighter. Fighters are the same combat workhorses as usual. The Sorcerer is a conceit of the Carcosa setting, the only people who can use magic in Carcosa. They fight like a Fighter, but they also speak the language of extinct Snake-Men and can use the Rituals that made this book so famous to begin with. Since they fight the same as a Fighter, you may wonder why a player would bother playing with a Fighter. The only reasons I can think of involve player motives instead of character concerns, as some players will be put off by the Rituals of the Sorcerer. Actually, I take that back. The Sorcerer is a lot of character for a player to handle and I completely understand choosing the Fighter for character reasons. As the first chapter points out, there is no reason not to insert the thief/Specialist class into Carcosa, though I would use them in moderation. I like the idea of using a Fighter who adheres to the limitations of the Cleric (no bladed weapons), but lacks the magic powers. The beauty of Carcosa is that this is a perfectly acceptable choice for a DM to allow.
The biggest hurdle to jump when it comes to Carcosa is not the content. I suspect that anyone who has played D&D more than once has encountered scenarios as bad as or worse than anything in this book. I think the issue instead is a two-fold bit of cognitive dissonance. First, while human sacrifice and rape do occur both in fantasy literature and in many campaigns, they are rarely codified as they are here. Having them presented in a matter of fact way as part of Rituals that a PC may use is a difficult concept for many. Personally, I am not upset by this, but I am not thrilled by it either. Secondly, I think that marketing the first edition of Carcosa as a supplement to the original D&D, and this one as a generic supplement for OSR games, is a mistake. If Carcosa was a self-contained game, then the massive difference between Carcosa and the default D&D setting would be less obvious. Since so much of the bath water is thrown out, including the races and most of the classes, why not throw out the baby, too? Strangling and rending the baby with your bare hands is optional.
Using Carcosa as written, the races are the biggest change to character creation. Instead of the Tolkienesque archetypes, there are 13 different colors of humanity. Most of the colors are as you would expect, like Black, Brown, Red, Blue, and Yellow, but there are 4 that are a little different. Ulfire and jale are additional primary colors that only exist on Carcosa. Ulfire is described as “wild and painful” and jale is described as “dreamlike, feverish, and voluptuous”. Dolm is the described as the green to jale’s red, but no other description is given. Then there are the Bone men. Bone men are transparent, save for their bones. Yeah, I’m not sure how that works, either. Not that it really matters. The Races of Men in Carcosa do not get much in the way of description, aside from appearance. It is said that they distrust each other and that they never interbreed. Otherwise, you are on your own.
Psionics, the redheaded stepchild of D&D powers, is more common in Carcosa. Based on their Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma, each character has a percentage chance of being Psionic. The Psionic system as presented here is much smoother and easier to use than the old school one. Even if I never use any of the other rules presented in Carcosa, I will be stealing the Psionics system.
Then there are the Rituals. The Rituals are what has given Carcosa its infamous reputation and are the biggest break from D&D norms. Instead of memorizing spells and casting them, ala Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series, Rituals are elaborate combinations of chants and actions that can be used to conjure, bind, or banish the Old Ones. It is the conjuration Rituals which require human sacrifice. This is where I think the Carcosa shitstorm is overblown. Conjuring ancient evil into the world is rarely the action of a PC group, but instead is something to be prevented. I would not be comfortable with a player group gathering 63 humans to sacrifice unless there are outrageously extraneous circumstances. On the other hand, if the PCs wander into a settlement and discover that an 11 year old girl has been abducted, the Sorcerers in the group would know that a rival Sorcerer is attempting to summon a group of Amphibious Ones into the world.
The bestiary is one of Carcosa’s real strengths. The various Dolm Worms, Mummies, and Space Aliens fill the world of Carcosa with danger and weird. Combined with the monster creation rules in Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Carcosa provides a nice spectrum of monsters for PCs to slay, banish, and bind. Any world that needs stats for Cthulhu and dinosaurs is a world I want to play in. Once again, there is plenty here to steal for other campaigns.
The bulk of the book is taken by the Hex Descriptions. For every ten mile wide hex on the map, there is a description of what occupies it. These encounters vary widely, from villages full of orange men to skulking cultists seeking to conjure their fallen god. This is where the real spirit of Carcosa lives. This is a sparse, deadly world, one where danger is in the wind and ruins are crawling with shadows.
There are no magic items of the traditional sort. Alien devices fill the role of magic items and do so with aplomb. The random appearance of hand grenades or cyborgs in a game that is nominally fantasy instead of science fiction is something I greatly appreciate. While there are only a couple of pages dedicated to the gadgets of alien nature, there is plenty to use. Much as with Lamentations of the Flame Princess, I appreciate the space given to DM imagination instead of having everything written as canonical law.
The Introduction is very clear that Carcosa is a living document and that the DM is not handcuffed to any one aspect of the setting as written. Don’t like the Rituals as written, disregard them completely or tone them down. Hell, make the Sorcerer class exclusively NPC and the Ritual issue goes away. For DMs who really want to challenge the limits of their players, there are definitely ethical questions to be explored in the world of Carcosa. Whether or not someone is comfortable with the implications of this world is for them to decide.
The first thing I noticed was the interior art. Rich Longmore is responsible for all of it and the results are fabulous. The whole book feels consistent because of this. Longmore’s languid ink work maintains the classic D&D aesthetic of Carcosa. The robots are suitably bug-eyed and strange of limb and proportion, the aliens appropriately weird. There is much to admire here, with details hidden in every illustration. My only regret is that my copy is a digital one, as I would love to have the hardcover to throw in my bag alongside the Lamentations of the Flame Princess boxed set and Vornheim hardcover.
Ultimately, I think comfort and offense have nothing to do with appraising the worth of Carcosa. What matters is the quality of the material presented. On that criterion, Carcosa is a very troubling product. If one wants to run a game of D&D completely divorced from the tropes that practically define D&D, then Carcosa is about as far as you can go. There is much worthy content here. The Psionics and Monsters and Alien Technology sections justify the asking price alone. Personally, I would love to spend more time in Carcosa, exploring a world rife with conflict and mystery. The only content that could be considered offensive is contained within the Rituals and the implementation of those Rituals is a matter personal choice. For my money, Carcosa is an experiment worth participating in.
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Simply put, Isle of the Unknown offers a wealth of ideas suitable to drop into any fantasy campaign. The isle can be used as such, but creative GMs can also use this resource to pepper their existing world with various encounters, rumors, and adventure location incentives.
The isle is divided and numbered by hex, with various encounter descriptions described with just enough detail. The creatures have a non-typical twist to them, giving the isle as a whole, a weird-fantasy vibe- not too dark and not too whimsical.
A very pleseant product overall. I highly recommend it.
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Something with the title Isle of the Unknown conjures up an island far from the outposts of civilization, shrouded in mystery, brimming with strangeness and wonders. In this case, only the first aspect is untrue since the island in question is 35,00 square miles in size, broken up into 330 land hexes (each 86 square miles), and each hex is keyed with a central point of interest which includes a number of towns and one city (ruled by a king). But there is mystery, strangeness and wonder aplenty on it.
The island in question is 35,00 square miles in size, broken up into 330 land hexes (each 86 square miles), and is described in much the same way that the Carcosa sandbox setting was -- each hex is keyed with a central point of interest.
Comparisons to Carcosa are unavoidable because Isle of the Unknown is written by the same author, published by same publisher, and is presented in roughly the same format (which is not a bad one) as Carcosa, though it does lack the extensive hyperlinking. So let's take a look at what some of those similarities are.
Like Carcosa, the hexmap is numbered -- each numbered hex corresponds to a location or entity of interest. Like Carcosa, Isle of the Unknown is not a sourcebook that deals in minutae, but provides sufficient information for a GM to flesh out (or even run a fast-and-loose game, since Hit Dice, hit points, and other key information are provided without resorting to stat blocks).
Unlike Carcosa, however, Isle of the Unknown is less concerned with emphasizing the non-standard nature of the setting. On the contrary, Isle of the Unknown takes great pains to allow easy slotting of the setting into an existing campaign -- the culture and political structures of the cities and towns and churches are tackled with the lightest of broad strokes.
Instead the book focuses on three primary types of encounters / hexes of interest scattered throughout the island: magic-users, statues, and creatures.
* The magic-users are clearly non-standard ones: they tend to wear armor not normally associated with their kind, have special innate abilities above and beyond normal mages, and tend to enjoy painted full-page, full-color depictions (which are quite evocative).
* The statues are strange, powerful, and attired in clothes and armor evocative of a fallen Roman Empire (though clearly, one can insert the attire of another great fallen empire appropriate to one's campaign) and can grant abilities, aid or curse visitors, or attack them outright.
* The creatures are primarily chimerical creatures, ranging from larger versions of normal animals (a 6' tall roadrunner), twisted versions of normal creatures (an 8' tall humanoid swan with sleeping human faces on its torso), and -- of course -- mix-and-match combinations of creatures.
Taken individually, these encounters can be used as a magical rogues gallery, a statue encounter list, and a large monster's manual. Together, it suggests something else: perhaps the last flowering remnants of a vastly powerful empire, or a land touched by forgotten gods. The magic-users as described and depicted evoke the feeling of Greek or Roman gods, playfully skirting direct analogues and clearly being less powered; the statues smack of powerfully wrought enchantments that once served some greater purpose, and the creatures seem like echoes of an age when rampant magical experimentation on creatures was the norm.
There are, of course, other types of encounters, but the preponderance of these three suggest that a campaign geared towards exploring the unknown nature of the island would do well to focus on these elements.
Isle of the Unknown wraps all this up with the keyed map, printable Player and GM maps, and appendices that list the locations of all magic-users, all statues, and even provide a visual listing of all the creatures grouped by HD rating.
All in all, a rich setting with a lot of usable material the could have perhaps benefited from a few more hints on the origins and nature of the mysteries of the island -- without necessarily setting it in stone, of course.
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LotFP is a unique gem among the retroclones. Many of them are trying to emulate one of the older editions of the world's first fantasy roleplaying game. LotFP is different: it only uses them as a starting point, then goes in refreshing new and interesting directions, where others don't dare to. LotFP embraces the elements of horror and weird fiction. The book is full of unsettling images, both in art and text. If D&D is metal, than this beast is some kind of totally wicked death or black metal. Someone said once, that Warhammer FRP is the game, where the players think they are playing D&D, while the DM thinks they are playing Call of Cthulhu. Bullshit. This is that game.
While LotFP is old-school in spirit, many of the mechanics are modernized, some of them being downright innovative. If you won't ever play the game as written, you might still find many useful elements of the system that you could steal - like the encumberance rules, the skill system and so on.
While I don't think I'm ever going to run a longterm campaign with this game, it's still a quality product, a great game and a huge eye opener. Those, who are getting bored of the repetative nature of the OSR, will find this refreshing - if they aren't disguisted by it's style. LotFP dares to be different, which is it's greatest strength and enemy too.
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I don’t remember when I first heard about Carcosa. I think someone mentioned it on Twitter or I discovered a link to some preview somewhere. But I was immediately intrigued. Carcosa is a weird science-fantasy horror setting by Geoffrey McKinney and published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess.
There seems to be some controversy around this product. I have to admit I haven’t bothered to look deeper into this, but I believe one reason is that Carcosa is not what you would consider family friendly. Like LotFP it doesn’t hide the fact that it is for adults only. Among Carcosa’s inspirations the author lists the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E.Howard, Lin Carter and Michael Moorcock. And a setting inspired by the writings of these people can’t be all bad. And trust me, it isn’t.
While the cover is nothing special, the interior artwork of the 143-paged book is pretty awesome. Even though it’s black & white artwork only, the style used fits the setting perfectly.
The layout, fonts and artwork really make you want to leave through the book all day. Some drawings are so detailed you can spend quite a few minutes discovering new stuff. But let’s now have a look at the content itself.
Carcosa is a planet about 150 light years away from Earth and home to thirteen races of men. There’s no common fantasy magic, but characters may have psionic powers and Sorcerers may use rituals to summon entities right out of H.P. Lovecraft’s nightmares.
The setting was designed for use with Lamentations of the Flame Princess or some other D&D retro clone in mind, but you could easily use it for other games or just as an inspiration for your own campaign. The setting is not as detailed as for example the Forgotten Realms or some other classic D&D settings, but there’s enough material to run a game set in the world without being bogged down by the minutiae.
What I realized pretty quickly is that Carcosa was not designed as something you can play out of the box. A lot of descriptions are kept rather vague to make it easier for the GM to mold the setting to his or her wishes. But since it’s meant for fans of old-school gaming this should be no big issue.
But the building blocks you’re provided with are just awesome: Space Alien Technology, Artifacts of the Great Race (yes, the one from Lovecraft’s stories), Psionics, Sorcerous Rituals, really cool and unique monsters and more. The book also contains a hex map of a portion of the planet with descriptions of every single hex on that map. That’s an instant sandbox right there.
In my opinion Carcosa is a very interesting product, well worth it’s price. If you are into old-school gaming in general and weird science-fantasy settings in particular, you’ll definitely enjoy using Carcosa even if it’s just for cannibalizing ideas.
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This PDF edition of Carcosa is apparently a compilation and revision of material that has appeared before -- material I'm not familiar with in detail, but have passing familiarity with from the OSR blogosphere.
In a market that often seems to be divided between super-slick hi-resolution imagery and sadly amateurish attempts at passable gaming material, Carcosa manages to stake a claim for solid gaming bang for buck on its own terms.
As stated in the Introduction of this sourcebook, Carcosa is not a sourcebook that will drown its readers in setting minutae, but will give sufficient information concerning the setting that will allow GMs and players to use the material any way they wish -- even if they wish to cannibalize the material for monsters, ideas, rules, and adventure seeds.
Fortunately much of that material is very good, despite my misgivings about the 'mature nature' of the setting and the Weird Science Fantasy label is well-deserved -- it somehow manages to merge legacy alien technology, macabre sorcerous rituals, and a decadent, decaying, dangerous world filled with terrible creatures and awful gods into a uniquely setting that comes across as both challenging and interesting to adventure in.
The art is excellent in that it captures the weirdness of the setting, and evokes the feel of the sourcebook as an old-style travel guide or almanac for a foreign land. I would go as far as saying that the linework and the composition tends to connote its subject matter more than denoting it -- they have the feel of being "artist's interpretations" of people, places, and things that are real and were lifted from an accomplished artist's sketchbook.
The PDF has the following sections:
* Introduction -- does much to frame the understanding and use of the sourcebook
* Men and Magic -- describes rules such as dice conventions, allowed character classes, and building characters in this setting
* Sorcerous Rituals -- talks about nature of rituals in sorcery; extensively hyperlinked to the appropriate Monster Descriptions
* Monster Descriptions -- the monstrous menagerie of Carcosa; externsively hyperlinked
* Hex Description -- there's a Hex Map of Carcosa with number hexes; you can find the descriptions of each number hex here; extensive hyperlinking to monster descriptions and sorcerous rituals
* Fungoid Gardens of the Bone Sorceror -- a short sample adventure that takes place in one of the Hexes
* Addenda -- lots of good stuff here for the GM
The PDF also sports features like a default two-page spread, a handy table of contents sidebar, and meticulously hyperlinked text. That last bit, by the way, is what pushed this product from a four-star product to a five-star product for me -- it may not be as slick or flashy as some other sourcebooks, but in terms of content, design, and utility it was a winner for me.
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This week I am reviewing Vornheim the Complete City Kit by noted artist, gamer and porn star Zak Sabbath. Sabbath’s first claim to fame is his blog, titled “Playing D&D with Porn Stars.”
Sabbath games with people like Mandy Morbid, Satine Phoenix and even with Sasha Grey – which means he has one of the coolest gaming groups ever. To my knowledge, no actual pornography has happened during one of his group’s session. Pornography. From an ancient Greek term translating as “naughty scrolls and vases I have to hide from my parents.” Where was I? Right. Zak Sabbath’s made waves in the hobby and continues to make waves, via his blog. His approach to art, gaming and apparently having sex on camera is restlessly innovative.
In 2011 Sabbath worked with James Raggi, the man behind Lamentation’s of the Flame Princess, to develop his thoughts and the play mechanics Sabbath created for gaming in an urban setting. This led to the creation and publication of Vornheim the Complete City Kit. The work in available in hard copy and PDF – this review is of the PDF version.
Vornhiem is also the name of the principal city in Sabbath’s home game and the book nominally explores the setting. Nominally is a good term as Sabbath is not interested in providing a level of detail on the city for GPS coordinates for all the local cult sites and a map of the regular bus routes and their stops. He does not so much disparage the usually tropes into which fantasy city RPG supplements fall as simply dismiss them. These books are, as Sabbath rightly points out here and elsewhere, are too often too similar to each other even when supposedly about different cities and are too often too dense with inflexible information. If you have read about one fantasy city’s sewer system, you pretty much have read about the sewer system of all fantasy cities. For that matter, too many fantasy cities are not particularly fantastic.
The details he does provide about the city of Vornheim and its world are fascinating – his riff in the book about the skin of reptiles of all kinds is one of the best passages I have ever read in any RPG supplement. An always snow city, Vornheim consists largely of great, dark towers, which are often connected by bridges. There is a strange, timeless and dreamlike quality to the city – more than Waterdeep, Greyhawk or Sharn, Vornheim feels fantastic. You have to go to Sigil to find a city as surreal and interesting as Vornheim.
On his blog, Sabbath writes he lives in L.A. and so many of the people he hangs with are in the sex entertainment industry. One wonders where in L.A. he happens to live, as it seems unlikely porn stars and strippers populate the entire city. It would be interesting to know how living in that city influenced his gaming philosophy.
While Sabbath does provide details on the city of Vornheim, most of the book is about running a city game by making it up as you go. Sabbath employs the book to assert a GM does not need an exhaustive guide to a city to run one properly and having such a guide from the outset can be counterproductive.
Much of the book is devoted to interesting game mechanics including some great tables. For example, Vornheim the book provides a table for determine aristocrats on the fly – you can roll on the table multiple times, mixing and matching surnames and given names and disturbing quirks for the NPC in question. The items on the table for what maybe discovered when going through the pockets of the corpse range from the silly to plot hooks to the comically sad. The item on the table where the party discovers an engagement ring, and a earnest though semi-literate draft of marriage-proposal speech will elicit laughter from most players, especially if their PC are the ones who killed the man. None the less, it is a good table. Those are also the more standard mechanisms in the book – unusual ones includes special pages upon which dice are rolled and where on the page the dice stop is as import as the results of the dice for determining combat result, the size of a tower, the cost of goods and similar results. Some of my favorites are the table on vile tavern games, a diagram for working out NPC relationships and the table on fortunes for the party. And kudos to Sabbath for writing that the GM master and the players and may determine the fulfillment of a prophecy.
Vornheim employs some D&D game mechanics in some places, but only loosely – these are changeable to another edition or even a different game system with minimal effort. Most of the tables and mechanics suggested here is system neutral.
Sabbath’s actual job is an artist and he provides the art for this book, which is stylized and abstract. Normally I dislike this style of art, but Sabbath imbues the art with a vitality and sense of story stylized art usually lacks. Some of the best pieces are the medusa on page 14 and depictions of the Eminent Cathedral and the Palace Massive. To keep the price down the book is black and white, and while not a strike against Vornheim it is unfortunate because elsewhere Sabbath use of color is striking.
This book possesses flaws. First up – and this is a subjective matter – there are almost no appearances from elves, dwarves or other fantasy races. Except for a few scant mentions in some of the tables, the fantasy races make no appearance in the book. However, this is easily fixed and the nature of the work means it can easily become about a city of elves, goblins or something else.
A more severe problem is the interior arrangement of Vornheim, as a book, feels random. This is somewhat ameliorated by a good table of contents, but there is no discernable pattern to the sequence of sections in the book or how one sections leads to another. There are good ideas here – some brilliant ones – but difficulty in getting to those ideas hobbles the books utility.
Vornheim, as a book, is not a fictional tour guide to a place the players cannot ever actually visit. It is about running urban games in a quick and energetic manner, where the rules and text do not hold back the flow of the actual game. In that it is succeeds quite well.
I give Vornheim the Complete City Kit, a 15 on a d20 roll. It is quite good at what it does and is valuable for accomplishing its goals and what the book offers gamers. However, it is held back somewhat by a singular focus on humans and an organization that feels slapdash at times. Still, it is worth the purchase price and is available at the D&D with Porn Star site and at the Lamentations of the Flame Princess sites.
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Originally Published at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2011/09/06/tabletop-review-lamenta
tions-of-the-flame-princess-grindhouse-edition/
When I was FIVE, my family went to the TG&Y to do some shopping. I remember the trip vibrantly because of a record I saw: KISS! I asked my mother who they were and she replied curtly, “Some scary clowns that make loud music!” That was the end of the conversation. In those pre-Internet days, I could only wonder what these black-garbed miscreants in facepaint sounded like. They were surely harder and louder than Black Sabbath and Ozzy, who I heard through my teenage Uncle Reed’s door! I imagined them to sound like the gates of Hell opening and Satan himself stepping out and jamming on a guitar made of scorched human remains, the wind blasting through his enormous mane of hair. Then, one sad day, I actually heard KISS…
The video for “Let’s Put The X In Sex” debuted on MTV when I was nine. I was not prepared for what I saw. There were no flames, nor any screeching guitar solos, no, this was a bunch of skeazy old dudes singing about sex in a way that even a nine year old could tell was juvenile. This was not what I wanted, no sir. A little piece of me died that day. From that point on, I have judiciously avoided hype. If someone wants to sell me on how awesome something is, they better damn well prove it to me.
My D&D experience was much the same. I was told numerous times how bad it was, how sinful. This did not deter me from ogling the advertisements I saw in the “ten for a dollar” Marvel comics I read. Gammarauders! Star Frontiers! The Forgotten Realms! I longed to explore these worlds. I imagined D&D to be a dark, frightening game, on par to holding a séance with Ghengis Khan’s spirit while listening to a band that sounded like Kiss looked.
When I finally got ahold of the D&D Red Box, my parents had mellowed on the conservative Catholicism they practiced in the early 80’s and were more accepting. I played it with a group of long-haired metal kids, military brats like myself, though I was never allowed to wear my hair long. D&D was fun and cathartic, a place for me to be an epic hero or a cunning thief without the fear of death or imprisonment, at least any permanent variation of either. D&D gave me a place to go and friends to hang out with, a common language and written tradition. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson birthed a great thing into the world, a thing that, no matter what Chick Tracts said, was anything but dangerous.
I have not played anything that could be remotely called D&D since the late 90s. I have played Rifts and some other one offs in the interim, but D&D just sort of died for me when TSR did. I recall the day my fellow players showed up with copies of the 2.5 Edition books and being put off. They were bright and colorful and packed with illustrations. They managed to be safer and cleaner than even the sanitary 2nd Edition, the one with the charging Jeff Easley horseman. I did not want this. Edition 2.5 begat 3rd edition, which begat edition 3.5. 3.5 edition branched into Pathfinder, with its manga art and handholding style, and 4th edition, which seems like World of Warcraft with more paper. Each version got further from being a game I would actually want to play.
Lamentations of the Flame Princess pretends that the last thirty years of D&D did not happen. By ignoring the move to Advanced D&D, Lamentations of the Flame Princess has the feel of someone’s house rules in published form. Unlike several other products that could be described the same way, James Raggi’s house rules actually make sense. If 4th Edition is D&D flavored by anime and MMORPGs, then Lamentations of the Flame Princess is D&D flavored with stoner metal and Michael Moorcock novels. There are no builds or templates, no points systems or feats. This is D&D as a guy who listens to Mercyful Fate on vinyl would want it: bloody and bleak and fun as Hell.
Before I get into the guts of the thing, and these are books with actual guts in them, I do want to issue a disclaimer, of sorts. When we started reviewing RPG products, Lamentations of the Flame Princess was on the first list of items I wanted to review. I had read the reviews, added the excellent Lamentations of the Flame Princess Blog to my RSS, and made my desktop background a rotating gallery of art from the Grindhouse Edition. Without reading a word of it, I was a fanboy. As always, I will point out flaws as well as strengths, but do know that I am pretty smitten with this product. Besides, Alex let me put this review behind the Age Gate, so I can say motherfucker. Also, I put up this picture of a swollen and distended fertility goddess birthing a demon through her vagina whilst another demon suckles from her teet and a warrior is sacrificed by nude maidens. I am only posting this particular piece because I like it and not for any sort of artistic reason. This is why I love Lamentations of the Flame Princess: it is over the top in its excesses, terrible in its fury, and completely unapologetic. If you aren’t interested in a book that contains such filth, this is where you should take your leave.
If the artwork above does not give it away, Lamentations of the Flame Princess Grindhouse Edition does not adhere to the same artistic guidelines more mainstream RPG products do. When the art credits include the guy who does Cannibal Corpse album covers, you should know what to expect. There is blood and gore and nudity, all things I would expect from a product labeled “Grindhouse.” Grindhouse does not mean Quentin Tarantino making movies for Disney under the auspices of Miramax. No, Grindhouse means watching Cannibal Holocaust in a dark room that smells of sweat salt and soda sweetness and the base scent of cum. Grindhouse is stale popcorn and people yelling back at the screen. That is where the Grindhouse in Lamentations of the Flame Princess Grindhouse Edition comes from.
The art, and there is plenty of it, is evocative and puts the “Weird” in the subtitle Weird Fantasy Role Playing. The most eye-catching pieces are the paintings on the cover of the box and the three books inside. The box cover, which I think is the same as that of the previously released Deluxe Edition, is of a redheaded female warrior in clothing that would not look out of place in a Thanksgiving play fighting a topless snake woman. This image of a steely-eyed fighter, completely clothed, with a determined look on her face, is sexy in a way that Larry Elmore’s barely dressed damsels never could be. The only nudity in the painting is decidedly unsexy, unless you have a predilection for snake women. Excluding the crimson of the Flame Princess’s hair, there is naught but grey and black on the cover. The tone is set here, on the cover, and it continues within.
The Tutorial book has an equally striking cover image, though it is memorable in a completely different manner. A man in arcane attire is either assembling or disassembling a corpse on a table as a creature looks on. The man looks a fair bit like Sid Haig, which only makes the Grindhouse nomenclature even more apropos. The creature brings to mind a seahorse given human form, a vile chimera that evokes the debased folk of Innsmouth. The colors are off in a most peculiar and appealing way and a sense of dread permeates the grotesque proceedings.
The Rules and Magic book, the thickest and most important of the three, also has the most impressive cover. A familiar looking redhead, this time much younger, is pointing a sword at an unseen source of terror. Tears stream from her eyes; a dead man and a terrified woman with a baby are behind her. Her garb is decidedly chaste and has an almost clerical feel, perhaps she is a novice nun or the equivalent. The scene evokes the “Final Girl” trope common in slasher movies. Whether intentional or not, the chaste, presumably virginal, female taking up a phallic weapon against evil personified is a powerful archetype to draw upon and this painting does so with aplomb. Honestly, this painting, even more than the box cover, captures what I imagine that James Raggi means by “Weird Fantasy.”
Finally, we come to the cover of the Referee book. A bright yellow creature, looking like a cross between a moth and a Japanese sentai monster is perched amid an inky black background. The verve and action of a first encounter with an unknown and unknowable monster hangs off the page. I am reminded deeply of my earliest dungeon crawling exploits, when githyanki and even kobolds can seem new and exciting. While it is the weakest of the four covers, I would snatch up a book on the shelf bearing such a cover, no matter the utility or cover price.
I could espouse the art for several more pages, though I doubt that would serve this review well. The interiors are lined with interesting pieces, illustrations that give form to the idea of a pitiless, senseless world that is rife with adventuring opportunities. A series of illustrations depicting a duel comes to a surprising end when the female sword fighter comes out on the losing end, the obvious victim of a critical hit. As Something Awful’s review of Grindhouse Edition so eloquently put it, the illustration of the Dwarf class, “is like the recruiting poster for dwarfs,” an almost comical amount of carnage with a one-eyed stunty in the middle. There is a color insert in the Rules and Magic book, with several paintings as powerful as the covers.
One such piece, of what appears to be the end of the Flame Princess’s life, is as good a place as any to slay one of the hounds that has snapped at Lamentations of the Flame Princess’s heels: the charge of misogyny. Rules wise, there is no difference between male and female characters. There are no sex related rules, so push all of the hyperbole about F.A.T.A.L. and the ilk out of your mind. As far as the art being misogynistic, the males in the paintings are being equally abused. The feminine fertility creature birthing a demon is not exactly what I would call “humanoid.” That very same drawing has a man being murdered by what are very plainly human women. Yes, the female duelist loses, but so did all of the males beneath the dwarf. Female characters in RPGs die, just like the male ones. It is more insulting to make them unassailable than it is to show them losing on occasion. I suspect that a combination of the “Internet White Knight” instinct that many young men suffer from mixed with exposure to the sanitized D&D of the last twenty years has led to much of the chastisement sent Raggi’s way.
The physical components of the box are as follows. The box itself is a thick one piece box that feels like it can handle the travails of being tossed in my knapsack. The three books are of similar dimensions to the LBBs of D&D and the Vornheim hardcover, but each is much thicker than those slim volumes. There is a stack of character sheets, though I do prefer to photocopy my own so that they bear the familiar smell of Xerox toner. The final bit is the one that you will need to keep the closest eye on: a small bag containing the smallest set of polyhedral dice I have ever seen. So wee and adorable are these game randomizing plastic baubles that I can easily see them being swiped in a heartbeat. Mark my words, more than one set will be drilled through and worn as necklace beads or earrings before long.
The first book, appropriately titled Tutorial, is an interesting item. For one thing, I can scarcely imagine the Lamentations of the Flame Princess Grindhouse Edition boxset being someone’s first exposure to roleplaying games. Between the price, the limited print run, and the obscurity of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, it seems odd for it to be conceived as a starter product. With that in mind, what makes the Tutorial book interesting is that it is such a fine introduction to roleplaying games as well as being a fine primer for the experienced player. It would be interesting to play with players introduced to gaming via this book, as I suspect they would be different from the bulk of us who picked it up ad hoc. Of the three books in the box, however, the Tutorial book is the one with the least amount of use. The solo adventures, while fun, are simply not going to be played through more than once or twice.
The Rules and Magic book is a whopping 160 pages and contains the real meat of Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Basically serving as a player’s handbook, Rules and Magic has all of the rules to create a character, fight a combat, and cast a spell. While the bulk of the rules feel familiar, there is real refinement here.
There are four human classes and three demi-human race-classes. The Cleric has no innate abilities in Lamentations of the Flame Princess, with powers like Turn Undead taking up vital spell slots. The upside is that weapon limitations are imposed by GMs setting and discretion. The Fighter is familiar, changed more by the lack of combat skill improvement by the other classes than by a change to the class itself. The Magic-User is as you would expect, though the Magic-User spells in Lamentations of the Flame Princess are a shade darker than you might recall them being in D&D and the more extreme spells, like Wish, are nonexistent in this world. Taking the place of the Thief is an odd specimen called the Specialist.
The Specialist is tied to Lamentations of the Flame Princess’s fairly novel skill system. Non-combat skills, like Climbing and Searching, are resolved by rolling a d6. If the player rolls a 1, then they are successful. Thus, even a Fighter can try to pick a pocket or build a trap. The Specialist starts the game with 4 points that may be allocated to the skills as the player chooses. This means a Specialist can be a pretty bog standard Thief, if one so desires, by putting poinats into Sleight of Hand and Open Doors. As well, an Assassin is possible by putting points into Sneak Attack and Stealth. Languages and Architecture could make for a scholarly type. By simplifying this often unwieldy class, Lamentations of the Flame Princess makes the Rogue style character both more balanced and more viable.
Race classes are an interesting anachronism. The convention of races being a class instead of an additional choice is a definite throwback to the original D&D. Some will argue against it, but I have to confess that I am for it. For one, race classes increases the number of human characters in a party, since playing a demi-human is more limiting. It also reduces min-maxing, though Lamentations of the Flame Princess is not likely going to appeal to the min-max crowd. Besides, it makes sense to me. Dwarfs and Elves and Halflings are an uncommon sight in human dominated lands, so it stands to reason that the most commonly encountered amongst them would be fairly stereotypical. Besides, how often do players actually want to play a dwarf cleric?
The Dwarf is similar to the Fighter, though he does not benefit from the ascending attack bonus. A Dwarf player can look forward to an epic amount of hit points at later levels. The Elf has the ability to cast Magic-User spells, though the Lamentations of the Flame Princess Elves are stranger than most. They must be Chaotic, since magic is inherently so, and are more fey and alien than they are in a setting like the Forgotten Realms. Halflings are as you would expect them and I would expect to see them played as often as they appear in the artwork, which is to say not at all.
The third, and final, book is the Referee book. The essential value of this volume falls on whether or not it can prepare a GM, or Referee, for running a game in the Weird Fantasy tradition. Ultimately, this is a very subjective matter. James Raggi’s philosophy of Weird Fantasy hinges on a simple idea: remove player knowledge from character knowledge. This is achieved with a couple of techniques. There are no established monsters in the book, save an example Vampire. This removes the age old problem of players knowing exactly what the clues the GM is leaving will lead to and how to deal with it and the characters magically having this same information. Making the GM create his own monsters makes the players stay in character in order to find a solution. An interesting side effect is that I suspect this will lead to an overall decrease in monster density in adventures, which keeps monsters special and unique. The best example I can think of is from G.I. Joe. When the B.A.T.S. first appeared, they were a frightening robot army that seemed invulnerable. Lasers bounced off of them and the Joes could not defeat them. After that initial appearance, the B.A.T.S. became so mundane that they exploded with a glance from Sgt. Slaughter. The same principal has applied to D&D from time since the LBBs.
Magic items get a similar treatment. There is no Sword +1 factory in the world of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, no sweatshops churning out wands and scrolls. Each magic item in a game of Lamentations of the Flame Princess is supposed to be unique and dangerous. The trick is to think more in terms of cursed items from a horror story than the “Gee, whiz!” party favors of D&D. This chilling effect means that when a magic item is the impetus for a quest, characters are more likely to put up with a magic item having a downside to match its upside. Even the money system leans towards a more hardscrabble existence, with silver as the standard instead of gold.
What all of this means is that a Weird Fantasy game is a lot more work for both the players and the GM. The players cannot coast on the inherent power of their characters and the builds they find on the Internet. Each encounter carries more danger and each magic could be potentially murderous, since a Weird Fantasy world is an uncaring one. The GM must make every monster and magic item from scratch, which can either be freeing or agonizing. The black metal darkness that must be evoked to make the Weird Fantasy world come to life must be handled with care, lest it tilt too far into nihilism or silliness.
For my money, the Lamentations of the Flame Princess Grindhouse Edition boxed set does a good enough job implying the world it is set in. The art, the specifics of the rules, and the thorough Recommended Reading section do a better job of telling me exactly what sort of game I should be running and playing than I ever got from the classic D&D books, even the beyond thorough D&D Rules Cyclopedia failed to shape the world it took place in this well. For those who want a complete, hand-holding world premade from them, this is probably not the set for them. For the GM who wants to play in a Weird new world, and is patient enough to build the details himself, Lamentations of the Flame Princess is a breath of fresh air blown from a corpse’s mouth.
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Originally published at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2011/08/23/tabletop-review-vornhei
m/
I read gaming blogs voraciously. My RSS feed is filled with OSR blogs and science fiction RPG blogs, blogs about the 80’s games of my wasted youth and blogs written by new economy entrepreneurs selling their print-on-demand wares. Through my blog reading, I found Zak S. and his blog, Playing D&D With Porn Stars. Not having listened to the podcast I Hit It With My Axe, I had no idea who Mandy Morbid was and what exactly was going on in the city of Vornheim. I was ready to leave his blog and move on when I read an article, the exact one is lost to memory, and I realized something: Zak S. knows what he is talking about. Not only does Zak know what he is talking about, he has amazing ideas.
I apologize now for what may seem like excessive hyperbole. Before I held this book in my hands, I thought the exuberance other reviewers had towards Vornheim was unfounded. People were calling this the best RPG sourcebook in the last ten years, if not since the Golden Age of D&D. How could a 64 page book be deserving of so much praise?
Vornheim is the physical expression of Zak’s particular brand of genius. A slim 64 page volume, Vornheim is roughly the same dimensions of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess boxed set and the original Little Brown Books of Dungeons and Dragons. While it may not match your 1st Edition hardcovers, this is a well-constructed example of the bookbinder’s craft. There are no wasted surfaces on the book, and useful content drips from the pages. The slick, full color dustcover has a moody painting of a purple-maned warrior in combat with a gargoyle and a map of the city on the interior. As with all of the art and words in Vornheim, the painting is a product of Zak S.
Rare is the RPG book that needs a description written on the subject of its cover, but Vornheim is no ordinary book. The cover, sans dustcover, is white with black numbers and text. With a handful of d4’s and the key, which is also printed on the inside of the cover, NPCs, Creatures, Monsters, and Locations can be generated in a few seconds. The back cover can help run mass combats super-fast or just tell you where an arrow his. Without even opening the book, Vornheim justified a place in my gaming satchel. Yes, I carry a satchel.
The interior is split in half. The first half is a description of the cold, grey city of Vornheim. Unlike other city books, like the Volo’s Guides, this is not a street by street description, but instead a collection of facts and rumors, which seem to have equal weight in Vornheim. The richness of the ideas here are palpable. Reading snakes make perfect sense to me, after reading it here, and almost every idea presented is the same way. There is an easy, matter of a fact tone to the weirdness that makes even the blatantly ridiculous work. Flailceratops, a tribute to the oft snickered at Flail Snail, feels right in this context, especially when rendered in Zak’s Mike Mignola and Bill Sienkiewicz informed pen and ink style. That the GM is encouraged to run their own Vornheim and not subscribe to an orthodox continuity makes for a much more useful book.
The second half is a meaty selection of tables and charts. Did the party find a dead body? There’s table for what they might find on it. Searching a library? There is a table for that. Need to generate a floorplan for a building? There is a system for that so simple it makes me want to make a whole castle. Even if you are not playing in a city, the charts included have a use. More than a guide to a city, this is a guide to how Zak runs a game. For a GM who favors a loose, sandbox style of game, Vornheim is a treasure trove of methods for my madness.
In the end, the only negative I can think of for Vornheim is the name. This is not a book about a city, this is a book about all cities. I guess that would explain the subtitle being ‘The Complete City Kit’. Every GM of D&D style games who thinks they might ever have a party wander into a city should take a look at Vornheim. For my money, there is no more useful book for a GM to have in their satchel. Is there a more butch name for a satchel?
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As a GM, I personally find the creation of any settlement larger than a village to be a daunting task and published city settings to be often overwhelming with details. I appreciate the author's approach to fleshing out an urban setting on the fly. About half of this product offers information on the city of Vornheim which, although interesting, will not be of much use in my own games. On the other hand, the remainder of the book will serve as a very useful city creation tool kit. I would have granted an extra star if not for the pdf's hefty price tag.
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Excellent adventure. I ran my savage worlds group through it and they all thoroughly enjoyed it.
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Let me preface this review with noting that if one doubts how role playing has evolved over the years one may look no further than Zak S. The artist and writer behind Vornheim. Artist and writer being just two of the attributes blended here to produce a very different book. The DIY and indie ethos in the new game designers, GMs and players is making a vibrant and alive environment for RPGs. Whoever has said RPGs have gotten stagnant isn't really looking. Now on to the book...which (by the way) at the time of this review is nominated for an ENnie. This isn't the "exhaustive list of every steet city supplement" that your daddy used (hell maybe your used) back in the day. More so a fluid and free forming city building tool. Vornheim is the setting and some information on that city is included. However it is done in mostly sketchy write ups to impart a flavor or feel for the GM to build on. Really you could use these same techniques to build any city of flesh out the city your players are already in. What I liked most from the book is the shadowy artwork and the surrealistic descriptions. This city seems to have a old school fantasy Naked Lunch feel to it. It also has a almost noir like quality as well. If you like more sword and socerery and less Tolkein in your fantasy city this would be for you. Also appreciated is the target audience. The on the fly GM. Let's face it, most GMs have players assembled right after putting the kids to bed, getting off of work or friends calling asking for game out of the blue. If your party has finished the dungeon crawl early and it looking for place to heal and spend their loot you can: A) Drag out that dog eared other fantasy city supplement and mash that square peg into the round hole in your campaign. B) Make the city up out of thin air and deal with the unusual disasters that creates. Or C)...buy this book and make a city that they remember and may want to return to. Maybe even a city that could be the setting itself. For those GMs who have spent the last three months designing the prefect city (good for you if you got the time) this book can only help. Another reviewer stated that this book is really a good "how to book" in game design and I would agree. The novice GM could pick up a lot of tricks with just a casual read. There are also tons of other goodies for random generation crammed in as well but for that you'll need to do yourself a favor and buy the book.
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