Lamentations of the Gingerbread Princess: review.

Zzarchov Kowolsky has written some seriously good adventures for the weird fantasy RPG Lamentations of the Flame Princess, but this isn’t one of them. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good. It just isn’t serious, and nor should it be.

Clocking in at under 20 pages, this little gem packs in some serious horror beneath a sweet veneer of gingerbread houses and candy canes. The adventure kicks off with a request by King Connolly IV to find and return the halfling citizens of his kingdom (well, that’s what he calls it anyway; he has two dozen knights and a wooden keep).

So, what happened to our poor halflings? It turns out that the King is rather a nasty sort, who persecuted them and burned their homes. They ran off with most of their treasure, and now King Connolly is sad because he misses the revenue the industrious halflings generated. But, on the plus side, he’s willing to offer 1000 silver pieces to the players to return his persecuted beloved subjects to his backwater kingdom.

Tracking the halflings is easy, and their path leads straight into an enchanted forest. There’s a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed fairy and enough random encounters to make any player character wish they’d stayed home with a cup of tea and a biscuit.

Following the fairy’s directions or the halfling tracks leads to a mysterious hedge in a clearing. Crawling through the hedge leads to the land of milk and honey, a splendiferous and magical realm populated by brutal teddy-bear police, menacing cupids, and lots of terrified halflings. As I’m sure you’ve guessed, all is not well in the land of milk and honey, and nobody can ever leave.

Unless, that is, the players enter the Ivory Tower and get to the heart of the mystery. It’s pretty diabolical (and funny), but the GM is given various possible ways for the players to escape the land of milk and honey and save the haflings. These range from benign to super dark, and make it easy to tailor the narrative to suit your players.

There’s more to it than that, but that would involve me dropping worse spoilers than I have already, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Lamentations of the Gingerbread Princess is a neat and versatile little adventure that incorporates elements of humour, gonzo silliness, folkloric fantasy, and horror. The fact that you can choose a horror setting for the ending to suit your players is a nice touch. I ran this for a bunch of DnD players at a public event and the utra-violent teddy bears freaked them out, hard. So I was glad that I was given options to nerf the ending for them (and, yeah, I nerfed the hell out of it), and the game felt like a success. This little creation would make for an excellent Halloween or Christmas one-shot and I’m looking forward to running it again.

Get it at drivethrurpg.com: Lamentations of the Gingerbread Princess

If you’re interested in Lamentations adventures, take a look at Magic Eater, The Pale Lady, The Yellow book of Brechewold, or All dogs go to Hell (it’s free on Drivethrurpg).

Resource books include the Core Rulebook and Mayhemic Missile Method, and The Works of John Williams.