Weird New World

A sandbox setting booklet sold on its own or as one of the components of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess’s Weird Fantasy Role-Playing boxed set, Weird New World is James Edward Raggi’s “interesting experiment” intended to provide players with an adventure experience that, he states, “certainly won’t be the same as the Usual Assumed Fantasy.” In Weird New World’s Far North, Raggi IV has amply succeeded in his quest. The Far North is a maritime arctic wilderness of thousands of miles of wintry calamities, scores of harrowing encounters, and an infinite number of reasons for heroes to regret ever showing up in the first place. The brutal cold leaves the land an ice-scape of “ever-shifting mountains of frost” and the sea a valley of frozen waves a hundred-feet high; both remind champions of every level of experience just how small they really are. More chilling than the north wind or the dark of winter are the adversities scattered throughout the inhospitable clime. Drawn from a variety of literary, mythological, and cultural inspirations, the encounters lodged in the Far North’s snowy bosom range from the diabolically whimsical to the unthinkably horrific. To avoid spoiling any surprises, I’ll simply state that Raggi lives up to his reputation as a conjurer of Dark Fantasy, offering hooks, hints, and two fully-detailed adventure locales that will stir the imaginations of the players and leave the heroes of your games facing predicaments that the usual swords and spells just won’t help them to overcome. (HINT: Make sure your heroes “think positive” as often as possible. Trust me on that.) Some may complain that Weird New World's encounters offer no semblance of cohesion, that the "environment" of the Far North is a haphazard collection of weird concepts and random inspirations cobbled together more for the sake of weirdness than for any other reason. In ecological terms, I suppose that would be true. However, this is a work of fiction - a work of fantasy - and, as such, it is a creation that ought to be allowed to follow its own unique system of cohesiveness. To find that cohesiveness, a reader must think beyond the edges of the cool hex map included and delve deeply into the inspirations from which the encounters were drawn. What you’ll find is that a journey into the Far North is a journey into the mind of James Edward Raggi IV himself. With a refreshingly unrepentant sense of artistic liberty, Raggi populates the land with morsels of his own intellectual development, harvesting what must be some of his and his associates’ favorite influences from gaming, literature, and cinema. “The Golem” encounter is an invitation to take a classic novel beyond its final page; “Frozen Stonehenge” will bring champions face-to-face with things that probably don’t actually have faces but will still be recognizable; and the “Strangest Cave” is a place where…well, I really don’t know where that one came from. The end result of all of those elements is the coherency of personal expression that glows like a stained-glass window, segmented and multi-colored. One must “back up” to see the ultimate shape to which each fraction of glass contributes when assembled. To me, that final “shape” looks a lot more like the genre of horror than the genre of fantasy or even “Dark Fantasy.” When I first read through Weird New World, I immediately started seeing visions of a Gothic horror set against the backdrop of an unforgiving sub-zero landscape, rather than envisioning a snowy sword-and-sorcery scenario. With Raggi’s references to actual Gothic horror stories, it was easy for my imagination to run in that direction. More than that, the Far North is a place utterly devoid of hope. The whales are desperate, the elves eat humans, and the “Church in the North” – a place that sounds like a ray of light in the black of a months-long darkness – is empty and “there are no signs that anyone was ever here.” In the thousands of miles of expanse that is this place, Raggi has offered no viable salvation of any sort. Champions looking for purpose or redemption or a wondrous destiny are better off staying home, for the Far North embodies the worst horrors of human experience, the echoes of Death – the cold, the dark, the empty – all of which lead inexorably to despair, save for those with the greatest of spirits. Most of the monsters and adversaries that lurk in the 28-page booklet are not even themselves of the Far North, having fled another place or been lost en route to somewhere else. Thus, many do not “belong” and contribute to the disturbing and incongruous experiences of a curious explorer expecting the usual polar bears and snowmen. That incongruity and the somewhat indefinable feelings invoked by Weird New World put Raggi’s work squarely in line with what Douglas Winter, biographer of Stephen King and Clive Barker, once wrote: “Horror is that which cannot be made safe – evolving, ever-changing – because it is about our relentless need to confront the unknown, the unknowable, and the emotion we experience when in its thrall.” Raggi gives us plenty of the unknown and the unknowable, perhaps from his very own nightmares. Find out more about Weird New World HERE. Keep up with Lamentations of the Flame Princess HERE.