Reviewing All Eight New Lamentations of the Flame Princess Books: Part 1

Review #1: The Book of Antitheses

I recently decided to go through and review all eight of the new Lamentations of the Flame Princess books in order, starting from my most favorite and ending in my least favorite. This first review is for my absolute favorite book of the release set, The Book of Antitheses.

Brief Summary (WARNING—Spoilers):

The first half of the book is a series of essays about using occult techniques for running your games:

• The book starts with a very thought-provoking essay about the Satanic Panic, magick, the concept of play, and D&D from the host of the excellent Weird Studies podcast.

• Next follows a section on Astral Projection (essentially meditation) using some guided meditation and tarot. In this section, Jobe insists that the game world (called shadow earth in the book) is as real as anything else you encounter in your daily life—the purpose of the astral projection and meditation is to serve as a sort of conduit or bridge from our world to the game world.

• There’s a few descriptions of various rituals—an initiation ritual (for devoting yourself to magickal precepts), a banishing ritual (for removing the influence of malevolent demons), and a binding ritual (for evoking right before a game with your players).

• There’s an interesting section on generating encounters on the fly using tokens or “bones.”

• There’s a section on a simplified version of gematria (turning words into number). Interestingly, Jobe uses gematria to tie Gygax’s name to the same three entities that he uses for the banishing ritual.

• A section on the magickal properties of dice and how to charge them.

• A section describing player characters as spiritual entities and how to use character sheets to summon these spirits.

• A section on sigil magick using gaming miniatures.

• A large, encrypted section. I feel like Lamentations of the Flame Princess might be the only publisher on earth that would publish a book with huge sections that are encoded! Even if you don't get a chance to decode this middle section, it still looks aesthetically very cool. Beyond this encoded section, there are a number of other codes sprinkled throughout. I don’t want to spoil the coded stuff too much, but I will say that some of the most challenging (and interesting) content in the book is encrypted. The two primary codes aren’t particularly hard to crack (I found it a pleasant way to spend an evening), but if you give it a go, keep in mind that you’re choosing to read something the author felt was best left hidden. There are a few other codes only used for a sentence or two that are much harder to crack and do require a bit of research. I won’t talk about the encrypted content in this review since I feel that it’s something that the reader has to come to on their own, but I will say that, months after decoding it, I still think about these coded sections and discover new things about them.

The other half is an adventure set in early 17th century Hanau about rescuing a young girl from the clutches of Satan himself. The plot seems very much inspired by The Book of Enoch—as the party investigates, they find that demons are trying to create a race of human-angel hybrids called “Nephilim.” Meanwhile, Swedish forces are pillaging the village. The party has to uncover The Book of Antitheses to act as a portal to hell to confront Satan. The book describes an old church abandoned to evil and a mine stuffed with demons.

Once The Book of Antitheses has been discovered in-game, players can use the circular hole on the cover of the physical book to pass items to their player characters in-game! I'm sure players would have a great time with that.

There are some great NPCs along the way, including a witch (who uses neo-pronouns! Leave it to Lamentations of the Flame Princess to have a non-binary NPC using ze/zer pronouns and NOT advertise the fact), a completely badass rabbi, and a demon prince.

"Adult Content" Spice Level: Extra Hot--if this were a hot sauce, it would be an artisanal ghost pepper sauce. Tasty, but very spicy.

The Art and Design:

The book is wonderfully illustrated throughout in stunning, high contrast black and white by Benjamin Marra. Marra’s figures tend towards stiff poses and exaggerated features, giving the characters a dreamlike, Jungian feel. In fact, when a figure is meant to represent an archetype rather than a specific character, the art indicates this by darkening the figure’s eyes—such a cool, dramatic touch. Marra uses harsh lighting and little shading, so the work feels quite expressionistic.

The art is also functional. Rather than traditional dungeons or random encounter tables, Jobe uses something he calls “resonances''. The resonances are flowing, surrealist art pieces that take up the left side of the page with a list of possible encounters on the opposite page. The idea is that the GM reads the encounter ideas before the session, but during the session they only look at the art (like reading a tarot card), using a pendulum to guide the encounter if necessary. Each image is filled with different ideas and figures, but they flow together and cohere in an organic, dreamlike way—like an accretion of coral. I really love this idea, and I hope that more adventures try out this format.

The last section of the book is just demon body parts, with the idea being that you can make your own demon by jamming the parts together. I have a feeling that Marra had a lot of fun with section, since the designs are weird and kind of Bosch-ian in character.

The layout by Alex Mayo is well done. The typefaces, especially for the encrypted sections, had to be tricky to wrangle. The middle, encrypted section especially looks very cool—even if you never get a chance to decode the section, it still looks cool. It has this aura of danger that is hard to describe. Layout for a book is a bit like editing in a film—if it’s done well, you don’t notice. The layout flows smoothly and never draws undue attention to itself.

Review:

If the world is fair, this book will become the Next Big Thing in the RPG sphere.

I was raised in a very religious church. Even in the mid 90’s, the last vestiges of the Satanic Panic still held sway in my small religious community of my childhood. If any of my pastors from back then could read this book they’d probably parade it around as proof that they knew D&D was satanic all along. It’s everything that they thought D&D was—a gateway to the occult and a (literal?) portal to hell. In my earlier interview with Jobe, he mentioned Damien Echols—since then, I’ve read Damien’s book High Magick and watched the HBO Documentary series Paradise Lost. I thought that I had experienced a taste of the Satanic Panic in my childhood, but after watching the documentary, I fully grasp that what I experienced was a mere fraction of the utter insanity of the period. TSR at the time over-corrected, banishing demons, devils, and boobs from their books—to this day, the RPG community is a little erm,... resistant to anything more "adult" than, say, your average blockbuster film. Vestiges of the panic still echo in the RPG community. The Book of Antitheses does not hide its edgy content away—it wants the reader to engage with it and it wants the reader to feel a little uncomfortable.

Jobe writes, “It may be simultaneously true and false that we exist.” To adapt his sentiment, it may be that The Book of Antithesis is simultaneously sincere and satirical. Jobe’s prose style in the book is heightened in a way that I have to feel is exaggerated, satirizing the absurdity of the Satanic Panic of the 80’s. Calling miniatures “idols” and inscribing them with sigils, using gematria to give the six character attributes new occult names, casting spells on dice to achieve petty revenge—it’s completely absurd and absolutely the type of logic I recognize from my time in Christian schools. There are parts where I feel that Jobe is deliberately being deliberately misleading with the intention of luring the reader down an occult rabbit-hole.

At the same time, Jobe is so earnest in his writing that I can’t help but feel taken into the world he describes. His prose is direct and fierce, with great imagery and a lot of power behind his words. The essays in the beginning are truly helpful—even if you don’t believe in astral travel, meditation genuinely is the best and most consistent way to get writing ideas; even if you don’t believe in demons or banishing rituals, setting aside a few minutes of your day to acknowledge there are things in your life holding you back is truly helpful; even if you don’t believe in the divinitory power of throwing bones, the method Jobe describes is truly useful and interesting way to get quick ideas. I have to admit that this book was the start of something of a spiritual journey for me in the past few months since I read it—a journey worth undertaking.

If the first part is revolutionary, the second half of the book describing an adventure is similarly so. Jobe does not give the GM a complete layout of how the adventure should go. It starts by describing the NPCs and gives a rough guideline of possible events, but after setting everything up, Jobe gives very little guidance. The “resonances” are the meat of the adventure, but each resonance page only gives a list of possible encounters—the idea being that the GM will use only the accompanying art and improvise encounters based on the image and their memory the text. The module focuses more on imagery and mood rather than laying out a plot. There are no maps, no timelines, nothing like a typical adventure would have. If I ran this module for you, it would be totally different than if you ran this adventure for me, even though characters, locations, and concepts would be the same. Investigative modules are often accused of being railroads—The Book of Antithises sidesteps this whole problem by giving the GM bits and pieces of the adventure, leaving it to the GM to weave them together at the table. The module relies a lot on improvisation, but leaves the GM with a lot of material to work from. I love this approach, but I have to admit that it would require a GM of some skill to pull off this adventure.

This is not just my favorite book of this release. It's not just one of my favorite RPG books. The Book of Antitheses is one of my favorite books of all time—I suspect that I will be coming to this book again and again for inspiration.