REVIEW: A True Relation of the Great Virginia Disastrum, 1633

A True Revelation of the Great Virginia Disastrum, 1633 (hereafter Disastrum) by Ezra Claverie may well be the definitive product for Lamentations of the Flame Princess. I say "may," because my assessment depends heavily on just you want out of an LotFP product. If what you're hoping for is a clever and, in the best sense of the word, modular adventure scenario you can easily drop into an ongoing old school fantasy campaign, Disastrum is probably not for you. If, on the other hand, you're looking for looking for an imaginative and well-presented event-based scenario/hexcrawl set in 17th century Virginia, then Disastrum is exactly what you need.

Consisting of three clothbound A5-sized hardcover volumes, Disastrum gives an LotFP referee almost everything he – or should I say she, in keeping with the game line's style guide? – needs to run a lengthy and challenging scenario set in and around the Virginia Colony in the midst of an immense spatiotemporal accident caused by castaways from the Fifth Dimension. This accident has deformed both space and time, warping the landscape and its inhabitants, as well as creating portals to alternate times and realities. 

Anyone with prior experience of LotFP will immediately recognize a trio of familiar elements in Disastrum: a 17th century locale (Virginia in 1633), an incursion by nonhuman "aliens" (the Fifth Dimensional castaways), and the unnatural consequences of their presence (the Warp). Taken together, these elements are the foundation of many (though by no means all) of LotFP's best-known adventures, so much so that I think it's become something of a joke among LotFP fans: "Oh, no! Yet another invasion of historical Earth by beings from another dimension and whose very presence poisons our world and fills me with dread!" I bring this up, because, while true to some extent, these elements can nevertheless can still be used to great effect and so they are in Disastrum. 

Volume I is entitled Jamestown and Environs. At 96 pages, it provides useful information needed by the referee to begin the adventure, including an overview of the events that led to the Disastrum and a timeline of the Virginia Colony, from its founding in 1607 to 1633, when the scenario begins. What sets this volume apart from others of its kind is how practical it all is. For example, five pages are devoted reasons why the characters may have come to Virginia, each of which offers a different frame for subsequent events. There's also an overview of Jamestown, its buildings, and inhabitants, along with random tables for generating colonists, news/rumors, Scriptural citations, plantations, native villages, and more.

Random tables play an important role in Disastrum, as one might well expect, since a large part of the scenario involves traveling through the wilderness of Virginia. Volume I describes the terrain of the region, both natural and unnatural. The latter includes the Warp, where the effects of the Fifth Dimensional Incursion are strongest. For each region, there are keyed encounters, described in Volume II, as well as "omens and oddities" of various sorts – strange objects in the sky, objects falling from the sky, and "disastrumous hazards," which is to say, bizarre phenomena resulting from the Warp, such as gravity bubbles or time speeding up or slowing down. 

Volume II, Lo! New Lands, is the biggest of the three books at 192 tables, describing all twenty keyed encounters in Virginia and twelve alternate worlds or realities accessible through the Eye of the Warp. The keyed encounters vary in both length and strangeness. Some, like the Escapees' Camp, consisting of indentured servants and slaves who've used the Disastrum as an opportunity to flee their masters, are relative simple and normal. Others, like the Speaking Swamp or Factory Fungus, are given great detail and are exceedingly weird – products of five-dimensional beings attempting to interact with a three-dimensional world and only partially succeeding. All of the encounters are compelling, whether simply by presenting the players with an aspect of 17th century colonial life or by challenging their wits against a consequence of the Warp.

Descriptions of the twelve alternate realities, called "spacetimes," take up about half of Volume II. Like the keyed locations, they vary in length and strangeness, though all are fairly strange. For example, there is the Post-Ant Empire, a spacetime ruled by biomechanical ants that displaced the dinosaurs. There's also the City of the Crawling Blood, an alternate London overrun with a strange sickness and the Wilder Wilderness, an alternate Virginia populated with megafauna, among many more. All but one of these is a side trek, a place of interest and danger but without any larger significance to the scenario. However, the Corpse City of the Western Gate, located in 18th century China, is ground zero for the cosmic event whose repercussions are felt more than a century earlier and a hemisphere away in Virginia. It's here that the scenario climaxes, one way or the other, as the character contend with extradimensional beings whose activities have the potential to doom the Earth and everyone on it.

Volume III, Prodigies, Monsters, and Index, is 128 pages long and, as its title suggests, focuses on the strange and unusual effects of the Disastrum. Thus we get more than 60 new monsters, most of them unique (as Raggi intended). Many can be encountered in and around the Virginia Colony, but others are the inhabitants of the various spacetimes to which the characters may travel. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Volume III presents random tables to enable the referee to create his own "new people," the name used to describe the fabricated three-dimensional bodies of five-dimensional beings and whose appearances and properties are quite surprising. It's all wildly imaginative and, as I said above, practical. With these three volumes, the referee has nearly everything he needs to run a memorable and demanding weird fantasy adventure.

Disastrum is exceptionally well done. It's the Masks of Nyarlathotep of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, in that it takes all the usual ingredients of a LotFP adventure and sharpens and heightens them to such a high degree that, after playing this long, open-ended scenario, you'll feel as if you've done LotFP. There will undoubtedly be excellent LotFP adventures in the future, but Disastrum has, for me. crystallized the game's essence and unique take on fantasy in a way that will be hard to top. Thats not say it's perfect. The scenario has a lot of moving parts that put a lot of weight on the referee's shoulders, even with all the random tables and examples provided. In addition, the standard edition lacks the foldout hex maps included with the deluxe slipcase edition. The hex maps aren't absolutely necessary, but I imagine most referee's would find them useful. Likewise, all editions (with the exception of the PDF version) are pricey, which might be an impediment to some prospective purchasers.

In the end, none of these mild criticisms should be held against A True Relation of the Great Virginia Disastrum, 1633, which is as close to a definitive LotFP product as you're likely to get. It's imaginative, well-written, and well-made and, despite its length, I found myself reading it almost compulsively. The combination of a nicely realized historical setting and fantastically weird encounters and situations seemed, to me, to be a near-perfect fulfillment of what Lamentations of the Flame Princess has, in recent years, striven to be. It's truly excellent. My only regret is that I don't presently have a place in my gaming schedule to run this adventure. I hope others who buy and read it will be more fortunate than I.