Review: Midvinter (2019)
A review of Kelvin Green's 2019 festive folk-horror adventure for Lamentations of the Flame Princess
Written and illustrated by Kelvin Green, with layout and design by Alex Mayo and editing by Matthew Pook. Midvinter is an adventure for Lamentations of the Flame Princess that takes a low level party to the South Swedish Highlands in 1630 for a twisted winter solstice celebration.
SPOILERS BELOW
The Story
The players are hired by a secret agent of a pagan cult to "rescue" his daughter Edwina from a village that is planning to "sacrifice" her in order to prevent the eternal winter. The twist is that the ritual actually requires the outsiders to kill the villagers, and they're staging an elaborate farce to trigger the players' inner murderhobo. Is that a human pie? Are these winter crowns cursed? Are those twins evil? No, but the villagers are more than happy to let the players assume so. After the players have snapped and 21 villagers have been slain, the ritual has been completed and the Fimbulvinter has been averted.
This is a Lamentations of the Flame Princess module, and it certainly lives up to the game's dark and edgy reputation, so consider whether this is something your table would enjoy. While it is entirely possible to run this adventure without any dead children, it also tacitly encourages it. If you want to run this but are uncomfortable with those elements, you could write around them—maybe the villagers have sent their kids away to return after the ritual and carry on in their stead, or it's forbidden to spill the blood of the next generation, something like that.
The Book
Midvinter's writing is precise and its layout is table-ready, which is half the reason I wanted to run it in the first place. I have a tendency to rewrite and re-organize large swaths of modules in my notes—to make my own mental map of the story and separate the wheat from the chaff—but I quickly decided that was unnecessary here. Despite its length (52 pages) this adventure can pretty much be run straight out of the book. A few details I appreciated:
Each location and leg of the adventure is condensed to a single page, and each paragraph concisely explains what you need to know. No purple prose.
The villagers are organized by family, keyed to houses, and listed under descriptive headers like "1. Mother, Father, Three Girls, One Boy".
Each villager—all 39 of them—has a brief interaction and a canned phrase they utter when they die. These NPCs are defined by their actions, not their easily forgotten appearance or relationships.
Green's art is charming and supports the darkly comedic tone and merriment of the villagers.
Even if you dislike the material here, I think there is a lot to take away from its presentation, especially if you intend to write or run an adventure with numerous NPCs.
Running the Game
I ran this in Old School Essentials as a one shot, and that felt like the appropriate length. My session was about five hours, but you can (and probably should) cut it down even more by starting players at the runes outside of town. The fun of this adventure lies in the villager interactions, not the approach to the village. Although, if you're planning on more than one session you could have a lot of fun with wilderness survival angle. While the book's layout supports those introductory interactions, I felt it could use a master villager tracker of some sort. I juggled them all pretty well, but once shit hit the fan, I started to lose track quickly. If I were to run this again I would design something like this:
This would allow you to roll for a villager encounter, track who the players have met, and whether they're dead or not. I think it's important that the first villagers to die be characters the players have already interacted with, otherwise their death quotes become silly non-sequiturs.
After Action Report
As GM, I felt confident in my ability to run this as is, but of course no plan survives first contact with the players. While the "What Happens If My Players Try to Break the Adventure?" section is extensive, they naturally zeroed in on the flimsiest of solutions as we moved into the final act.
What happens if Edwina is rescued before the ritual, and the characters try to escape?
The adventure suggests that Edwina will plead that the adventurers go back for other survivors. There's not a snowball's chance in hell that my players—who were mercs hired for a specific job and already sick of the villagers' shit—would have gone back, especially for the very real and kidnapped Geoff, who made a poor first impression. Fortunately, due to the spread of the characters in the village, I was able to have Bjorn and the other villagers subdue them one-by-one and have them awaken the night of the ritual (it was getting late). One of the villagers, pretending to be a guardian angel, "hid" their weapons under the table and cut them free to make their daring escape.
What if the characters refuse to fight the villagers?
The adventure suggests that the cult will literally attack the party to force their hand, and that's exactly what they did, but try as they might, the villagers were unable to provoke a complete murderhobo response from my players (probably a good thing). They whittled them down to 1 HP, but were stuck blocking the doors and waving their knives with menace because they didn't actually want to kill the PCs. Very confusing situation on the ground. Many still died, but the players eventually made it out of the long hall alive with the unconscious girl in tow, and fled into the woods. One player was then brained by a sudden log to the face as Geoff, who had been tormented by that player in his cell, got his revenge. The rest carried on as the villagers pursued, crying "WAIT WE'RE NOT DONE! COME BACK! PLEASE!"
As the players escaped down river on a boat, some villagers started jumping in the freezing water after them as others wondered: "Does that count?!". Another villager had a better idea: "THE BEARS! THEY’RE OUR LAST CHANCE!" and they all ran off to die. (Their deaths did not count). In the aftermath, my players declared themselves victorious, and with 20/21 of the requisite villagers slain—mostly by the single dead PC—the eternal winter set in.
Final Thoughts
Fun adventure, but I don't see it having legs beyond a festive one-shot, and I think it probably lives or dies on your players' ruthlessness. If I were to run it again, I might try to flip the script, and have the players be villagers staging an elaborate hoax to provoke NPC adventurers into slaughtering them. The content is definitely not for everyone, but there are good takeaways for those interested in writing and designing material to be used at the table. Personally, I will be running some of Green's other adventures soon. Good stuff!