Caveat Emptor: A Review of The Monolith Beyond Space and Time

 Are you a fan of Monolith from Beyond Space and Time? Fair warning: I'm about to rain all over your parade.

Are you going to be playing Monolith from Beyond Space and Time? Fair warning: spoilers ahead; you'd best go elsewhere.

Do you hate long blog posts? Buckle up, this is going to be a bumpy ride.

Lamentation of the Flame Princess is an imprint that prides itself on being brutal and uncompromising; it is in that spirit that I'm going to review The Monolith from Beyond Space and Time, the first of two modules funded by an Indiegogo fundraiser that are well over-due. Sadly, I can't report that the adventure was worth the wait. The short version, for those of you who skip to the end of novels and fast forward to the last scene of a movie, is that Monolith from Beyond Space and Time is a waste of Space and Time.

Fine, before we go further, I'll say something nice: the art is really good.

Monolith is a modern iteration of the worst aspects of 2e AD&D adventure railroads. For example, there are quite a few terrible Ravenloft modules that begin with this premise: “Hah, you got sucked into the Mists and now you have to go on this adventure!” Aping that awful convention, Monolith says, “Hah, you saw the Monolith, now you're FUCKED!” Yes, that's right, as soon as the characters so much as SEE the titular Monolith their brains are invaded by pseudo-Lovecraftian entities that fuck them up and cede a large degree of control over the characters to the GM. The players have literally no recourse to prevent this, to fight back against it, or to reverse it in a meaningful way without doing exactly as the designer has dictated.

Here are the relevant quotes from the text: "Anyone within 30' of the Monolith will see it clearly, unobscured by the mist. All such characters will automatically be invaded by such lightsurfing craft which travels into the character’s eye and through the optic nerve straight into the character’s brain. The craft will then receive all of the character’s sensory input and thought output. It will have the ability to control the flow of both of these, but these beings are here to study and observe (for now), not interfere. Unless of course, their mission is threatened."  -- so, you stumbled this thing and it takes over your character's brain, no questioned asked.  Is this bad and does it rob you of agency and put you on a railroad of the GM's devise?  Well, let's see what this brain invasion does: "From the character’s point of view, he will awaken in the morning to find himself surrounded by the mutilated remains of whatever victims were present (or who have come along). No one will be spared. The character will be covered in blood and gore; the violence is dealt out his with hands and teeth, not his weapons. When the characters return to civilization, things will get even worse. If within a solid structure such as a building, the possessors will reset their “kill” boundary to the walls of the structure instead of 100', but everyone within those walls has got to die. If the characters sleep in an inn, they will wake up to find everyone in the place slaughtered. It might be best dramatically to have no one outside the inn aware, although having someone start thumping on the front door shouting a hearty “Anyone in there?” after the situation sinks in would be particularly stress inducing (and therefore should be done!)." -- to me, this reads as the GM just took over your character, and here's what's going to happen because that's what the plot dictates.  You can't "play" your way around this happening to your character, it just does because your character happens to have eyes and the GM wanted this to happen.  

On that last point, I wonder at who this adventure is even aimed at. At best, I could see it working as a one-shot with a cast of disposable characters. However, if that was the approach you can bet that most of the horrifying elements will fall flat because the players aren't likely to invest in a bunch of crash-test dummies you're running into a wall of game-changing certain doom. At worst, this module is inappropriate for established characters in the middle of a compelling campaign. For example, if you ran this as a FLAILSNAILS game on Google+, congrats, you've likely just wrecked those characters for use in other FLAILSNAILS games. Frankly, this module would be better off it were written to be a storygame; as it is, it barely interacts with LotFP's D&D-ish rules, and the Monolith sections especially are more orientated toward both the players and the GM figuring out what happens in new “scenes” as the characters wander the Monolith.

Much of the “fuck you, that's why” stuff in this module is imbecilic. Don't believe me? Check out this possible consequence for fighting a giant fish: “if a time paradox does occur with the fish, the campaign world and all connected universes fold in on themselves ending everything. Not only is this game over, but the Referee in question can never run an RPG session again, with any system, because all their possibilities have been canceled.” Wait, what? If you were writing an adventure why would you even waste ink putting this nonsense to paper? (Yes, that's a real quote from the adventure; yes, it really is that dumb.)

Actually, I even question whether this qualifies as an “adventure.” It seems more like a thought experiment in game design than it does a developed scenario. (I am sure, however, that this aspect will be touted as “edgy” and “boundary-pushing” or some such.) You see, despite the Monolith being described as “an alien structure which phases in and out of time and space,” it's really just a long, white, featureless hallway. What was claimed to be “one of the wildest adventures your group will ever play” on the Indiegogo page is, in fact, an empty white hallway. Wild stuff, man.

Yes, that's right, no maps here. The players are expected to navigate and explore this blank canvas by apparently outright stating things like “I want to find treasure” or “I look for monsters,” and then things happen. Of course, there's no indication that this is what the players are supposed to do to explore the Monolith. And since that runs contrary to most people's usual mode of playing a D&D-derived RPG, I'd hazard a guess that they will spend a lot of time puzzling-out this non-puzzle. Oscar Wilde wrote that there is no such thing as good people or bad people; instead, there are only interesting people and tedious people. I think that can apply to games as well and unfortunately Monolith is of the latter sort.

The worst fault of this module is the staggering number of middle fingers it gives the players as they stumble around this nonsensical non-labyrinth. Most everything in the Monolith exists to fuck over the characters for no reward. I also wonder how modules like this fit into LotFP's version of the B/X rules; there is literally nothing to gain (in the traditional sense) from exploring the Monolith. It does, however, explain why this module is said to be suitable for characters level 0-infinity: character capabilities, as well as player capabilities, simple don't matter in the grand scheme of Monolith's utterly arbitrary “encounters” and effects.

I have nothing against difficult game scenarios, but the issue with Monolith is that it doesn't even have the decency to be a death-trap dungeon. Death-traps at least give you the opportunity to test your skill as a player against a fiendish and clever design. Since there is precious little design here, Monolith doesn't reward smart or innovative game play; rather, it simply punishes you for showing up. I don't know about you, but that kind of arbitrariness seems like a shoddy way to treat a group of folks who have ostensibly gathered to play an actual game. This is the Weird Fantasy equivalent of “Rocks fall, everybody dies” but worse because if your character was crushed by random boulders you could at least go home and not have to play through the rest of this mess.

Strangely, it's a mess that seems at odds with the advice on adventure creation given in the LotFP Grindhouse box, such as “A good rule of thumb: Ask yourself, “Are the situations the PCs will face a logical conclusion of the course of action they have chosen to take, or are they being put in these situations solely because I want them to do certain things?” and "Just remember that while there may be more important forces at work in the greater game world, the game as it is played at the table by the real people present is all about the PCs and the choices they make. So make sure they indeed have such choices they can make." This must be a case of “do what I say, not as I do” as Monolith completely ignores these two solid pieces of advice. Which seems to be the direction LotFP is heading in: modules to be read, not actually played. (Seriously, I haven't seen anyone say that Death Love Doom is actually good, just that it's an “interesting read, like a short story.”) (1)

And that's the crux of this module: it has nothing to do with the agency of the players gathered to suffer through it, as there is nothing they can do to solve the problems posed by the Monolith's presence. The players can shut the door to and from the Monolith only when inside it (and this would seem to doom them to an eternity within it), and simply leaving the door open means that the world is forever in danger from the Monolith's warping influence. What this means is that to escape the Monolith's effects, one of the characters has to stay behind to shut the door. (Alternately, if the characters have a hireling they can convince to stay behind and close it up, I guess that would work...good luck convincing them that they should sacrifice themselves though. Hope the party's magic-user has Charm Person memorized, I guess.) Any choices the characters make within it, as well as any exploration they do or any hard decisions made inside it, ultimately mean nothing in the end game. Downbeat endings are all fine and well, but unavoidable ones simply seem like lazy writing. And that, friends, is what this module is: a lazy writing experiment and not a particularly useful gaming product.

(For more on player agency and Monolith, do take a look at Brendan's fantastic review of it here.)
(Just noticed that there is a review of Monolith in the comments of this post that seems pretty much in-line with what I wrote here.  I agree with something on YDIS, what is this world??)

(1) Also, thanks to Brendan for looking up those quotes.