Initial Thoughts: Veins of the Earth

Veins of the Earth
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Buy this product. In print if you can afford it, in PDF if you can't.

"Dungeons are puddles of darkness. This is the sea."

I have a standing policy that I will buy any Lamentations of the Flame Princess book immediately upon release. This policy has not generally let me down; the products are top notch. But I can't say that it has ever been vindicated as strongly as with Veins of the Earth.

I've admired Patrick Stuart's work for a while now; his previous collaborations with Scrap Princess, Deep Carbon Observatory and Fire on the Velvet Horizon, have been automatic Lulu recommendations for some time. And just last year he released Maze of the Blue Medusa, a collaboration with Zak S. So I was hopeful that Veins, his first Lamentations project, would be up to the same level of quality.

It isn't. It's better.

As much as I like the content and ideas of Maze, it seems like you're cheating by cribbing a better referee's dungeon, fully imagined and laid out for you. His other work is impossible to fit into some other vision or campaign without dominating it completely. Veins of the Earth is raw vision, but presented as a toolkit to create your own underworld and use it as a basis for games that are still ultimately yours.

Cave systems are uniquely generated, as are larger systems of caverns and routes through the underworld. It is a vast darkness that is inhabited by strange and incredible things. Light is the resource; hunger and cold and strange death threaten at all times. There are civilizations, cities, art, things of beauty and wonder and horror. There are different types of darkness. Madness lurks.

None of that is why you should buy this book. I mean, they're all good reasons. There are over a hundred pages of new monsters. Each is described, including sound and smell. Each is illustrated. But beyond that, each of them is written. And I don't mean the kind of dry technical writing that you see in RPGs. Patrick evidently never got the memo that this was meant to be a sort of exercise in presenting stripped-down utilitarian monsters. He puts ideas, and feelings, in his monster entries - things that haunt you, that amuse, that make you wonder how you never thought of them before. They are beautiful and horrible.

The writing in this book is good writing. Like, that wouldn't be ashamed to be in a book that wasn't an RPG book. Writing that kicked my ass several times reading it. Patrick is able to impress his ideas on you when you're reading a monster section. And when you're reading about darkness, or cultures, or items. And the art by Scrap Princess is deeply evocative.

I haven't even read a third of the thing, skipping around to find impressions of it and meeting amazing content at every turn. It's a monstrosity of a book, 375 pages of PDF. The book is the longest that LotFP has released. And from what I've read so far it may be the best.

My initial thoughts? Jesus. It's love at first sight.