Veins of the Earth Lamentation of the Flame Princess Review

[Campaign Setting]
Veins of the Earth (2017)
Patrick Stuart & Scrapprincess (Lamentations of the Flame Princess)

Here we are at concluding. The ultimate arts and crafts meets its ultimate practitioner. For years I have waded through all the creations, terrible and sublime, that Lotfp could throw at me. I have seen wonders that would non believe. I accept witnessed colorlessness and banality that would scar your sensibilities. Now at concluding I am prepare to grapple with their sublime achievement.

Veins of the Earth is the Underdark, extrapolated, distilled and recast. Stripped of familiar trappings, Stuart and Scrapprincess endaevour to show us the essence of the Underdark, the ideal platonic, in a mode that the traditional Underdark, burdened by decades of familarity, metaplot and pop-civilization, no longer tin. Deep time, fringe biology, paleontology and science-fiction are mixed with the distilled essences of D&D to produce an alloy of strange and wondrous property.

Where to begin? The kickoff and arguably most important office of VotE is its Bestiary. It has long been my contention that nothing serves to define a entrada setting so much as the creatures that inhabit it and Stuart & Scrap deliver for us 150 pages worth of monstrosities of the Utter Depths. Gone is the creative simply somewhat meandering efforts of Fire on the Velvet Horizon.

Instead the limited scope provides a laser-focus, the creatures all the more terrifying and bizarre for it, Patrick's at times flowery prose has expanded to embrace entire geologic lexicons nevertheless is simultaneously trimmed down in length to J.M. Harrisonian levels of zen-master poetry, each sentence a fucking koan, Bit's scribbly efforts, frequently scornfully derided on this weblog, have emerged from their cocoon to reveal the aeons-former otherworldly horrors of the farthest depths in gorgeous contrast, their abhorrent nature expressed in every primal marker-stroke of deep arterial cerise, black and purple blue.

Behold.

THEY Come up OUT Crawling. They judder and autumn like an old human being escaping from a crashed automobile, only fast, similar skipping low-res recordings. It leaps but has forgotten how to stand. The shaking steps collapse. The fossilised stone skeleton of a precambrian vampire. Cracked and deranged by its entombment. The skull is twisted in a Munch-Scream warp. The eyes burn down with an ancient second nighttime, ultraviolet coronal rings that hang on eclipsed moons. Limbs rolled and bent in sedimentary stones. The ghosts of opalised organs moonwhite in central mass. Shining pyritised teeth. Soil and ash falling from its joints like rain. Utterly totally insane.

Witness.

The sting of the atomic bee is and then deadly that the death it brings briefly outstrips time. Like a gunshot skipping on a lake. Your cells are annihilated at such speed, and with such violence, that you are plunged through nearby wild dimensions as y'all burn. What this looks like to observers is a victim called-for, turning to ash, and being defenseless in a vehement unseen, unfelt wind, all at once as they flickerstop in and out. The wind of your extra-dimensional fall volition plaster your ash to a nearby surface. You leave backside Hiroshimascar remains and an agonised radioactive ghost who has briefly seen outside time and space. Communicating with this ghost is incredibly deadly only can supply weird understandings

Encounter.

Alkalion

Anti-Phoenix

I remarked at FotVH that information technology was a task half done. I was right. Making mechanics for your monsters allows you to grant them backdrop of much greater depth then mere descriptive language allows. Rules describe their place in the fictional eco-organization, their place in the order of things, it forces yous to consider a thousand factors beyond aesthetic preening. Nowhere is this more apparent then in VoTE'southward bestiary. Mechanics are an integral role of the flavor.

Stat blocks are prepare out in highly readable bullet point format and incorporate two power scores that will be off immense importance in the utter depths. Nearly all creatures take a climbing score and some might exist Blind, which affects how they respond to light-sources in the lightless chasms and pits of the Veins. Important in a lightless place, every creature has a Sound and a Olfactory property.

SOUNDS like a faint sizzle like a fizzy drink. Distant half-musical plinks, like heating metal cooling in the cold

In his introduction Stuart explains his conception of the Veins every bit something towering and vast, erstwhile far beyond human pre-history, much larger so all the countries of human endaevour, and containing creatures strange and powerful beyond mortal reckoning. About every brute in the bestiary reinforces this theme in some mode.

Mythological horrors are endowed with bizarre traits from deep cavern biology and prehistory. Everything is ancient, Cambrian-Explosion, Ice-Age, Fungal, annalidian nightmare. The inspiration drawn from the distant and long-extinct corners of the animal kingdom infuses the monsters with an alien feel that cements the Veins equally a Lovecraftian place where flesh is only an interloper. Some are possessed of a terrifying versimilitude, similar packs of Bioluminescent Dogs or a raptor-like turtle creature whose slow metabolism tin can be hyper-accelerated just i hr before it must either feed or dice. Others are incomprehensible, terrifying extraplanar predators that imitate familiar shapes only to ensnare. The Angler-Lich is such a one, a 2-dimensional caricature of an evil undead necromancer, in actuality simply the extraplanar lure of an extra-catholic predator that feeds on heroes. The other near a herron, a monster that attempts to seize and pull men into a hyper-dimension using a hooked simulacrum of its prey.

At that place are lions dripping with universal solvent, and deep mineral men that live within volcanic vents and harvest the tachyonic honey of Atomic Bees. There are warm-blooded predators too, some simply unnerving like the hyper-mobile Gigaferret, others reminiscent of Deep Time, drawn from Pleistocene Times, Immortal Golems of Mud and Bone raised in a time before speech, or the shamanistic criminals of the Neaderthals, who tin tease the spirit animal from your bones, or remake your flesh with a song. There are well-intentioned deep-core visitors of super-heated metal that can destroy you past mere advice. There are collective hallucinations and flying, dreaming whales guarded by their incarnate nightmares. Everything, from nuisance vermin like the Sonic Pig to Hidden Powers that tin can get you an audience with the Gods, makes an appearance.  This is one of the richest bestiaries that I take ever seen.

fifty pages in I went to Lotfp.com and made an account to order a hardcover. Unfortunately I would have had to pay 30 bucks in shipping, atop of the 66 bucks. I instead went on dutch amazon and ordered the whole for 58 bucks. Deplorable Raggi.

These are great entries executed with perfect attention to usability at the table. Valuable torso parts are marked every bit treasure, beautiful dialogue options are provided if the monster is more likely to collaborate. Witness here the koans of the Tachyon Troll, who ages backward and forwards in time, enlightened to the Tao of Troll by its supra-temporal existence, seeking to swallow the PCs with serene content.

"Will you teach me a fire sermon? Or is your path upon my natural language? Your Tao
between my teeth?"
"Do not sorrow for this ripped blood-asset. Its new home is within me. I anoint
you!"
"I am a Throne of Life, consumed and endlessly renewed."

Veins encompasses a vast spectrum of time, infinite, and dimension. Creatures are drawn from higher dimensions, the distant past or literally unfathomable depths. Giant Hermit crabs lair in the Skulls of Vanquished Titans, waiting for a distant time across time when they tin can restart the catholic cycle. Mantis Shrimps co-be with Fungal Zombies or hordes of the infected, kept alive by the disease that consumes them. Something of the goofyness of Fire on the Velvet Horizon is cushioned by the baroque coherence of the whole.

At times it is difficult to piece together the meaning backside some of the entries, but ever they come together in the end. Y'all will perhaps interruption as you ponder the nature of the perpetually stage-transitioning Igneous Wrath or struggle to decipher the riddle of the Ignimbrite Mites. The stellar entries in the kickoff hateful that the end of the section can feel a little underwhelming but information technology doesn't matter.

A skilful monsters often trigger bouts of creativity and ideas every bit you read them. Good entries inspire the GM to come upward with encounters or adventures or entire campaigns centered around them. Veins does this. My heed is brimful with narrow tunnels and soaring chasms, lit by sputtering pin-pricks of lantern-light or vast bioluminescent fungal forests, of mineral gardens tended by alien crystal men then hot the lungs eddy. Of predators of condensed moonlight and strata of fossil vampires awakening slowly to rampage through the darkness and the silence. Of the cruel Knotsmen who have offered the souls of their children in exchange for succour from some ancient peril. Of subterrene gardens lit past the mortiferous but beautiful luminescence of the Ultraviolet Butterfly.

A stellar bestiary. Familiar concepts similar Golems or Oozes occasionally turn up to exist recast as something bizarre, disturbing and exciting. I could spend hours lovingly going over each entry but nosotros must printing on. A fantastic offset.

Stay tuned for office II.

kellgrately.blogspot.com

Source: https://princeofnothingblogs.wordpress.com/2020/07/26/review-veins-of-the-earth-lotfp-pt-i-final-boss/