• Home
  • About
  • TABLES!
  • Gods
  • Monsters
  • Reader Requested Content
Rolang's Creeping Doom

Micro-Review (spoiler-free): The Monolith from Beyond Space and Time

August 13, 2012 3:42 pm / 3 Comments / Chris
Print Friendly Version of this pagePrint Get a PDF version of this webpagePDF

I am not often moved to review modules because I think there are far more well-read bloggers out there who do review things and a lot of what is published is not to my personal taste and therefore better addressed by someone else.

But every once in awhile something comes along that makes me say “Damn, I really wish I’d made that.”  The Monolith from Beyond Space and Time, an adventure by James Raggi IV and published by his company Lamentations of the Flame Princess, is one of those things. I backed this in its indie-gogo campaign earlier this year and was both nervous and excited to see the payoff. It became available as a pdf this morning.

To start, you have to get the party to explore a mysterious valley. Caravans have disappeared, adventurers are missing, locals say there’s something fishy… whatever reason. And the players willingly step into the quicksand, perhaps expecting the usual wilderness hex crawl. What they get combines the weirdness of LOST with the ominous tone of 2001.

This adventure reminds me most of the painting in the cabin in Death Frost Doom. That was a set piece that defied player’s expectations of what could happen in a game. When I ran it a few summers back, the players spent a good half hour trying to figure out if it was safe to touch, was magic, an illusion or sellable. It was, for me, the highlight of the afternoon because the grizzled vets of the New York Red Box looked stumped. But that was on a small scale.

Monolith is packed with situations that defy players’ expectations but with far greater consequences. I can’t give any for-instances without spoiling, but I can tell you some of this stuff is just brutal and mind-bending and the sort of thing that, as a GM, you would WANT to see happen because it would be so damn cool to see  the looks on the players faces when they happen. I don’t mean insta-death stuff. This isn’t a death trap, necessarily. And luckily, there’s enough of these crazy things where at least some of them have to happen.

This is one of those adventures that, as a GM, you want to run right away, but you have to already have a campaign going. I don’t think it makes sense as a one-shot. I think it really needs to be run in an established campaign. If you run it in the beginning of a campaign, it would be hard to top later on. If you run it as a one-shot, the life and game-altering effects of the adventure would be lost if your characters have no future.

It’s one of those adventures your players will talk about for years.

Share

Related posts:

  1. Review – Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role-Playing Boxed Set A recent issue of Fight On!, dedicated to Paul Jaquays, quotes his classic Judges Guild adventure, The Caverns of Thracia: “Nothing seems to...
  2. Give Rolang Free Stuff I contributed enough to get pretty much all the adventures that have a chance of funding in the LotFP mega-chaotic indie-go-go. So...
YARPP
Posted in: legacy D&D, review

3 Thoughts on “Micro-Review (spoiler-free): The Monolith from Beyond Space and Time”

  1. Chris on August 13, 2012 at 3:51 pm said:

    Basically, if you like my stuff, you’ll love this because it’s better.

  2. Chris on August 13, 2012 at 4:17 pm said:

    POST EDITED to mention the premise.

  3. shortymonster on August 13, 2012 at 4:35 pm said:

    Always looking for new horror games and new ways to freak out players. Something tells me you might have some ideas of your own.

    http://shortymonster.wordpress.com/2012/08/13/some-advice-on-running-a-horror-rpg/

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Post Navigation

← Previous Post
Next Post →
Creative Commons License
This work by Rolang's Creeping Doom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
zombie nerdnyc religion elves classical vornheim rethinking clerics recess lotfp wf rpg meta tables death frost doom labyrinth lord familiar magic items Norse santicore rules dcc hydra classes ettin magic-users urban table swords and wizardry mundane npcs content Freamon story-arc art monsters kids undead humor spells Medusa Greek poison halflings gods Metropolitan Museum bring it

Recent Posts

  • Santicore 2015
  • DCC Magic Items to playtest
  • Side Hustle – Bandits and a Wizard
  • Simple pleasures are the best
  • One Day Left to Get in on Santicore 2015

What People Said

  • Emmy on LotFP Illusionist Class: Please Help Me Kick the Tires
  • Chris on Side Hustle – Bandits and a Wizard
  • Powder Miner on Random God Generator
  • Len Brennan on The RPG Hydra
  • Chris on Random Hermit Generator

Suggested Reading

  • Ancient Vaults & Eldritch Secrets
  • Blog of Holding
  • Dreams of Mythic Fantasy
  • Giblet Blizzard
  • Grognardia
  • Jeff's Gameblog
  • Lamentations of the Flame Princess
  • Lord Kilgore
  • Old Guard Gaming Accoutrements
  • Planet Algol
  • Playing D&D with Porn Stars
  • Sea of Stars
  • Swords & Wizardry
  • Swords and Dorkery
  • The Mule Abides
  • The Society of Torch, Pole and Rope
© Copyright 2021 - Rolang's Creeping Doom
Infinity Theme by DesignCoral / WordPress