[Review] Qelong (Loftp); A snail crawling along the edge of a straight razor

Qelong (2013)

Kenneth Hite (Lamentations of the Flame Princess)
Level 4 – 6

I‘ve seen horrors… horrors that you’ve seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that… but you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror… Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies! I remember when I was with Special Forces… seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn’t know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it… I never want to forget. And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God… the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment! Because it’s judgment that defeats us.

When I first read the premise behind Qelong I knew I was hooked. The premise resounds within the chambers of my inner soul like the March of the Valkeries. The name Kenneth Hite brings awe and dread in equal measure. The newcomers and pretenders to the elfgame throne are swept aside to make room for this legend from the distant past.

Qelong is a 47-page hexcrawl/campaign setting set in what is essentially Fantasy Vietnam; a land of ancient pagodas, great rivers, thick jungles and rice paddies dragged into a nightmarish conflict between two god-like creatures from neighboring lands (think the thaumaturgical lovechild of WW1 and the Thirty Years War). Now once placid Qelong is stricken by the horrors of war; plague, famine, rampaging mercenaries, cannibalism, stray sorcery and ant-controlled shock troops. Sign me up.

The introduction sets the stage, and outlines the premise behind the hecrawl fairly well. A single magical artillery shell from the titanic conflict has landed in the Qelong Valley and is leaking Aakom (an arcane toxin) into the valley, fucking everything up.
You have your factions, a column of rogue hive-mind shock troops, the slowly awakening monstrous spirit of the valley (the ley lines keeping her in check were fucked up by the war), ruthless foreign mercenaries (always a great addition to any warzone) seeking to harvest the Aakom and a strange cult of not quite buddhist monks that has voluntarily submitted to the alien will of the Lotus. There is a lot of weird. Terrifying, alien, horrific weird. It is good!

Hite devotes a page to explaining this adventure and this section could have used an editor. Short evocative description is used to set the mood for this ‘wet, poisoned sandbox.’ but the whole comes across as a little incoherent and rambling, as though Hite had been hitting the bong. The gist of it is that since this is an environment based adventure and thus we get more hooks and seeds in lieu hard-coded locations because whoooo knooooowwwwsss hoooooowwwww the adventuuuuuurrrreeeee wiiiiillllll goooooooo?!? I’ll give you a sample to illustrate my point.

 Wherever they come from, story elements, once introduced, become part of a narrative in the players’ minds; Referees and players will find themselves almost unconsciously weaving further encounters into the ongoing story. A picaresque adventure – a series of dangers and incidents on the way to somewhere – is the likely result.

To contrast with:

Dogs whine over the carcasses of their masters, then tear out the intestines to feed themselves. Men kill each other for a handful of rice, or for a woman who can be beaten into cooking it. All around, sorcerous echoes and explosions ripple the skies, but as a constant drumbeat of vile thunder, not as anything aimed at anyone in the same country.

Still breezy and on the edge of creative writing 101 but very useful and immediately evocative. And of course the obligatory: the referee is free to change anything he doesn’t like yadda yadda. Let’s throw in a bit of metagamefaggotry.

I call this Prince’s Law of Published Adventures. I suspect the majority of GM changes to published adventures fall into 2 categories:
1) Arrogant buffoon with delusions of artistry changes perfectly functional adventure to satisfy petulant demands of manchild players or satisfy own ego/obsessive compulsion, making the end result slightly worse. Then again if you have that sort of GM you should burn down your game and walk away anyway so in a way you had it coming you slut.
2) Talented GM improves/salvages otherwise broken adventure that he insists on running for inexplicable reasons (time constraints?) in lieu of running a personalized session that is probably more satisfying to anyone involved anyway.

The rationale being that if you knew what you were doing better then the designer you would be making your own adventure instead of running a pre-made one. Furthermore, based on this law, I extrapolate the following axiom.

Prince’s Axiom of GM Creativity;
In general GMs will fall into 2 categories. Those that relentlessly convert and tinker with everything they use (everyone does this to a certain extent mind you) or those that strive to run the adventure/campaign as faithfully to the original source material as possible (in those instances where the campaign setting is a big selling point, e.g Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Warhammer 40k).

Ergo, the percentage of times you need to inform the GM that he is free to meddle and tinker with a campaign setting or adventure approaches zero as n approaches infinity (or n approaches five) where n signifies elfgame adventures.

Of course Qelong forces you to customize it by leaving things very open by their very nature, a design decision I don’t like. Campaign settings generally give you a firm foundation with plenty of nooks and crannies to give your own twist to shit (I am of the opinion that if you use a pre-made campaign setting it should be one that allows you to run whatever type of adventures you find satisfying without altering half of it), adventures are best constructed so that you may run them with a minimum of preparation and self-assembly (B1 excused for specifically being made as sort of a training/introductory module) but Qelong strikes an odd balance between toolkit, adventure, hex crawl and campaign setting. Its too narrow and well defined for extended campaigning and too vague for an adventure (e.g it requires significant preparation/customization before running) to the detriment of a great premise with some good hooks, bits, concepts and ideas.

The Macguffin in Qelong is the magical cylinder, which provides (or at least CAN provide) a motive for adventure. Plot hooks to follow: Lawful dudes can try to reactivate it and save the valley (or what is left of it anyway), Chaotic dudes are after prying off the rune-magical panel and selling it to chaotic wizards at terrible cost to the valley, Neutral dudes you can kind of guess. Acceptable in a ptich. A paragraph is devoted to suggesting that players might make goals for themselves, then gives suggestions what kind of goals the players might make for themselves. Hite hits the bong again.

Next up is a rumor table. d50 rumors baby. Everyone gets one randomly and you can get as many as you like for the extortionist price of 20 sp (the equivalent of gp in Loftp). While most of them are in fact true, enough of the rumours are misleading, false or useless to satisfy the sadistic GM and add much needed uncertainty.

The section on exploration has some cool shit. A note on weather gives details on weather effects and the heat and gives plenty of crazy suggestions about magical weather n shit. Random table with list of effects plz! Take the fucking 10 minutes to scribble and codify some of those suggestions on a napkin so I can use it in my game. The suggestions are good but it feels rushed and unfinished. Suggestions and half-baked ideas are for blogs, this is a product people pay money for (or alternatively borrow from a close and personal friend). Contrast with Slumbering Ursine Dunes (Thank you for those flowers Chris!), effects properly codified, means given to increase influence, random tables provided etc. etc.

The disease section is developed properly in a paragraph or three, disease really adds to the warzone feel Qelong is going for. Nothing says Fantasy fucking Vietnam like a horde of typhus-ridden refugees begging for rations. By far the most interesting environmental hazard is Aakom poisoning; a substance ‘somewhere between plutonium, azoth and mana.’ Aakom is the type of stuff even demons don’t lightly fuck with, thus it is both very precious and extremely dangerous to possess. Everyone in the valley accumulates Aakom as he eats infected food, drinks the infected water, breathes the valley air and takes damage from creatures within the valley (and neglects to cauterize or sterilize the wound). The effects of Aakom poisoning are slow and insidious. Disorientation, weakness, disrupted magic, nightmares and a slowly creeping insanity that takes the form of nihilism and self-destructiveness. Poisoned individuals have a chance of re-animating after they have fallen. A percentage of the afflicted are cursed with an uncontrollable magic touch, hence the practice of removing the hands of Aakom infected in Qelong. Reversing Aakom poisoning is extremely difficult and requires that one study the cylinder that it originates from though a Cure Disease can delay and temporarily mask the effects. Mention is made of the golden lotus fields whose ground up petals are restorative for the body and provide protection against Aakom poisoning but at the cost of becoming permanently in thrall to the Golden Lotus if one is not careful. The Aakom poisoning adds a very interesting ticking-clock/resource management element to adventures in Qelong and is to be commended. It also gets across how fucked up Qelong is since pretty much EVERY villager is under the effects of Aakom poisoning.

Next up is a list of the different types of terrain one encounters on the hex map in Qelong, each provided with a short description and several encounters or plothooks. Most of these are very interesting, and I suspect Hite to be a master of the two sentence encounter art-form, allowing him to pull memorable encounters from a stray shirtsleeve with seeming effortless grace.  All the encounters work really well as random encounters, running the gamut from encounters with disease-ridden refugees, cannibal villagers worshipping a crippled myrmidon, strange hallucination-like effects, mundane terror, supernatural terror, cursed temples and so on. Nearly all of them hit the bullseye and this section really helps set the mood in Qelong, good job.

The fun does not stop, every type of terrain is provided with its own random encounter table, which is contrasted by the encounters given above in that it is fairly sparse and does not go beyond just a number and a monster. Amusingly, Monsoons and Ruins may be encountered alongside things like Cannibals or Elephants. I like that. Natural hazards add something to the feel of a wilderness adventure and this provides abundantly. Notes are complete enough to allow you to run or randomly generate villages on the fly, and provide enough context to convey the exotic atmosphere of Qelong.

Monster section is great. Alongside such mundane threats (that are absolutely necessary in a jungle adventure) like Tigers, Elephants, various carrion eaters, packs of wild dogs, bandits and Cannibal villagers, we are confronted with myriad creatures drawn from south-east asian myth. Strange, fucked up ghosts, possessed animals, a lion thing with an elephants trunk, the myrmidons, the 4 headed avatar of the naga spirit… the list goes on and on. This is a very good monster section (the rape-nagas that also drown people somehow fit seamlessly into the fucked up atmosphere of Qelong. The mundane threats are not just expected but necessary in a humid jungle crawl in fantasy vietnam, and the supernatural creatures are appropriately disturbing. Qelong, as it is portrayed, is hell on earth. Super special awesome hell.

The map/setting proper is well done. The entryway into Qelong proper is the porttown of Qampong, filled up with aakom-poisoned refugees, criminals, mercenaries and greedy spice merchants. After that we get a massive cop-out where the capital city of Xam has been replaced with a strange rock plateau with a strange environment of the GM’s own divising. But hint hint Carcosa monsters work here. Fuck you. Write a paragraph hinting at it or something. We paid you to make the adventure goddammit.
The other locations are atmospheric enough; the NPCs are given sufficient context for us to run them properly (though unfortunately while they have motivation, the relationship with other factions does not get any more complex then I HATE YOU).
Another gripe is the treasure. The Cylinder is wondrous and exciting but all the loot is just boring old gold or silver with the occasional orchid-robe thrown in to make sure you are still paying attention. Qelong is exciting and full of horrors and wonders and Lich-elephants with morning-star trunks but the spoils are kind of lame which is a disappointment (tiny fragment of philosopher stone and mithril stilletto notwithstanding). I get that Loftp is low magic but even mundane treasure does not have to be boring (hint hint SUD hint hint hint). Its not terrible, its just not particularly exciting. Disarming or looting the Cylinder proper itself is handled well, obstacles need to be overcome after its discovery that require one to travel and explore further before moving on, and of course, proximity to the Cylinder massively increases one’s exposure to Aakom.

When I began reading Qelong I was ready to proclaim to the world that it was a work of overlooked genius and in some ways this is true, yet I do not love Qelong. It has an interesting premise, good concept, good atmosphere, decent design and overall a very solid, workmanlike execution but I feel some parts needed more elaboration. The creativity in designing the antagonists should make for a very memorable expedition to the far south. Overall, a solid outing with a some great bits that needed just a bit more time to raise it up to true greatness.

Bottom Line: Fuck it, for anyone interested in a nightmare haunted surrealist horrorshow in fantasy fucking vietnam I endorse it. It should make for several evenings of blood-splattered entertainment.

Final Verdict: Napalm in the morning! 7.5 out of 10


22 thoughts on “[Review] Qelong (Loftp); A snail crawling along the edge of a straight razor

  1. I still fail to see the point of a Vietnam-inspired setting that is not designed for Extreme Vengeance.

    On a more serious note, since I know this blog is no place for wisecracks, there was a laudable attempt at a story-game about real soldiers by an actual Blue Helmet who served in Bosnia and is now a prolific publisher. It’s called Shell Shock and there is an English version here : http://livresdelours.blogspot.fr/p/in-english.html

    What did you think of 3:16 Carnage… by the way ?


    1. Shite, i know neither Extreme Vengeance nor 3;16 Carnage (beyond the fact the latter is a sort of tactical space boardgame with mild roleplaying elements).

      I’ll give Shell Shock a look though I must say real life warfare inspired rpgs have always seemed a bit impenetrable to me. It has been a while since i have read a story-game so I might give it a chance, even though I do not like storygames.


  2. Extreme Vengeance is the quintessential Beneluxian-American RPG, in the sense that it blends early Van Damme with full-on Verhoeven in a Chuck N. Magimix. It’s supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, but with a tongue so big it doesn’t quite fit. It’s also the only “funny” RPG that actually delivers, when you are to dumb to play Paranoia (I never did, but I guess I am).

    3:16 is indeed a sort of tactical space boardgame with mild roleplaying elements. It may entertain someone who has the Book of Lorgar tattooed on his scalp, but no-one else (and certainly not a princely crafter of genewolfian background flavor text).


    1. Extreme vengeance sounds like the way I run every Dark Heresy session, only with more grimdark. I can recommend Paranoia for maximum lulz. I think your insecurity regarding your intelligence comes from the fact that you are french, but if you were to play Paranoia with other frenchmen, your handicap would dissapear over night (I am Dutch and have to deal with the opposite).

      Ah a book of Lorgar reference. Does that mean you have started checking out the Horus Heresy mon petit cherie? Do tell if you liked it.


      1. A close and personal friend lent me HH and yes I started reading it. I like it so far, but I feel it is still too early to assess whether it will leave a lasting mark upon this outstretched cross-section of Western pop culture that is my ageing mind, or if it will end up just colorful shreds of enjoyable nonsense like any FPS scenario I’ve ever waded through. Being a man of my word (usually a 4-letter one) I will indeed tell you.

        Playing Paranoia with frenchmen is definitely possible (there were several official french editions of the game) but the difficulty arises from the fact that your fellow players will probably be real-life communists or the like (most “rôlistes” are), and you’ll have to hide your own opinions or turn to solo T&T – that’s too much self-control for me.


  3. Actual communists, my dear Frog, or merely positioned somewhat to the left of your own good self? (Despite the implied sneer, this is a sincere question – in my experience gaming tends to attract the under-motivated neo-nazis in their droves and the occasional armchair communist in much less frequency, with the leftist majority being mostly composed of good-hearted liberals who are too embedded in the world as is to do more than loosely advocate for real change… but I am intrigued by the idea that French gamers might fall elsewhere on the spectrum.)



      And bloody well so, since most of the euro/american hard left is filled with psychopaths, anti-white racists, identity-warriors and general nutters. SOOOO TRIGGERRED RIGHT NAAAAWWWRRR.


      1. I consider the majority of these people to be gobbing off about a system from which they tacitly benefit and have no real intention of changing, for a variety of reasons. I am, of course, included in this category, which is partly why I am resolved to do less gobbing off in future.


    2. @Von : a short answer If your ongoing bromance with Prince leaves you any time to climb up this thread. Yes, back in my gaming days several leading figures of the “scene” were bona fide anarchists, and others were also involved with the Communist Revolutionary League (LCR), which despite its name was a respectable groupuscule. It was impossible to have a “realistic” D&D scenario published if your kings and clergymen were not utterly decadent and corrupt. In fairness There may have also been a few Satanists / neo-nazis at the very fringe of the hobby but I never met any.

      Of course the above applied mostly to university students and not to me and my high-school friends who were plenty happy to kill monsters and stormtroopers for the greater glory of the universal Good.


      1. Huh. No gods, no kings, no dungeon masters, eh? That’s a thing. Interesting inversion of the tabletop culture I know and loathe from the UK (although there are a goodly share of red-or-dead types, as you might expect from a subculture that produced me).

        I do not have a ‘bromance’ with Prince, ongoing or otherwise. He may think otherwise but he is a Netherese pervert and we shouldn’t indulge his fantasies any further than necessary.


  4. I wonder if Qelong isn’t best suited to the DM who likes (or is only able to rally players for) a short-term campaign with a defined ending (if you haven’t recovered the cylinder after ten sessions, you have failed in your adventure). That would make the most of the narrow focus and the implied teleology (if I understand you correctly, you’re saying that it has an adventure-like structure – go in, achieve X, get out) and the openness of it (the actual route taken by the players will pass through content created session-by-session by the DM with this book as their guide, rather than through a series of planned environments as in an adventure module). I might be persuaded to give it a whack if faced with a group who have gotten lives and can thus only be persuaded to give up the odd Sunday for elfgames.


    1. Long time no see man.
      The cylinder is given as a possible motivation, though of course you could simply go in there and loot shit (in which case the cylinder is still going to be the motherlode and thus your players will be drawn to it like flies or Kent to a steaming horse-turd). As a short term campaign it should work, I am reminded somewhat of Dwellers of the Forbidden City (though I consider the latter to be a work of superior merit).
      The only problem is that it is for levels 4-6 and thus you would have to commit the unpardonable sin of letting players start at <1st level, thus opening the gateway for the unwashed narratavist hordes and before you know it you will be playing Polaris or Kingdom of Nothing and that, as they say, will be that.


      1. I’ve been ill. And conventioning. Mostly ill.

        It probably offers further possibilities than mere looting. Colonialist exploration springs to mind – “you, the players, are outsiders tasked by your {governing body} with exploring and mapping the Valley of Qelong”. Travelling through the place to Xam on a mission (of diplomacy or religious conversion or trade) would also be a legitimate usage, although the copout of leaving the city empty is an invitation to slapping an Orientalist filter on Vornheim and we all know where that might end up.

        I don’t consider starting PCs at a given level or within a given level bracket to be a sin, provided they have opportunities to gain XP and levels within the course of an adventure and not end up over-levelling it. To me there are at least four discrete levels of play, within which PC level distinguishes the experience at that style of adventuring. 1-3 is for short encounters and hierling work as part of a dungeon crawl instigated by others, 4-7 is for heading up one’s own expeditions and being trusted emissaries of some greater authority, 8-10 is of course the domain level at which we are kings among men and 11 or more is ‘beyond the fields we know’ shit, transcendence and myth abound. If I might refer to my host’s most recent Carcosa adventure in which a group of first-level vermin contemplate the seizure and maintenance of a fortress – it is right and proper that some event expel them from that fantasy at the first opportunity, as indeed was the case in your report. Even in the event that they manage to hold it, these persons will not be taken seriously by the domain-level NPCs of whom they fancy themselves contemporaries.

        I believe there to be a step between going full storygamer and creating characters of an appropriate level for a particular adventuring context. It would be an ill world if we had to trudge through level-appropriate content as a gatekeeping process every time we wished to try out a new product. That smacks of the MMO and surely such things are a greater sin than storygaming, which at least takes place around an actual table.

        Christ almighty, I pack the blog in and scarcely a month passes before I find something to say again…


      2. [illness]
        Vibes! Exercise, sleep, powdered rinoceros horn, contemplation of Yuche and hatred of foreigners is the best medicine. I read that in a North Korean flyer somewhere. Maybe it was a dream.

        [colonialist exploration]
        Possible but the presence of westernish mercenaries and the previously civilised nature of Qelong makes that one less preferable imho.

        [Level bracket]
        True is true. I’m actually following an X/B/C/M model, with hex crawling taking the place of dungeon exploration. Should be getting around to finishing my first Carcosa dungeon, the Lost temple of the Serpent Men, anytime now. Pack out your blog!

        [More level bracketing]
        Yes, but with new players it is vital earlier levels are trotted out so players learn shit properly and the option fatigue does not kill them. Nothing breeds boring gameplay like a handholding GM and entitled gamers that need training wheels and fiat to pull them through. The contemplation of running the Illithid adventure trilogy (levels 7-9) with men unfamiliar with the system and Dnd as a whole is nightmarish and unpleasant in the extreme.

        Pack out your blog!


      3. [illness]
        Exercise is a bit off the cards at the moment – or rather, ‘standing up and tottering about on my stupid crippled legs’ is about as much exercise as I can manage.

        [colonialist exploration]
        What difference does the previously civilised nature of Qelong make? The coloniser cares not for the existing culture of the colony. Or… wait, you’re not saying you have an actual Scruple regarding this matter?

        [Level bracketing]
        Depends how much complexity a level offers in terms of options. Your argument has merit in a modern elfgame where levelling up adds a page to the income tax return masquerading as your character sheet, or if the players are new to the concepts of both dungeoning and dragoning, but for experienced hands I believe it’s both possible and wise to skip ahead and arrive at the desired content with appropriate levellage under the belt. From my admittedly tainted WoD-fancying perspective, it would be awfully frustrating to go through the whole “how is Sabbat formed?” stage for EVERY new PC in EVERY game purely as a matter of principle.


      4. [Exercise]
        Lift Weights, armwrestle with your nebulous significant other(which, contrary to slanderous bonapartist rumours, is in fact not myself), play JAGS or get heavier dice.

        [Colonialist expansion]
        Its a make-pretend game and therefore my objection stems not from the moral side of the table (see also Terra Incognita proposal, note to self write more spotlight related nonsense and resist the siren song of quasi-relevance). I mean I have contemplated running Dark Continent at least once. The expedition vibe works better with primitive undiscovered territories imho, otherwise it becomes a different sort of exploration, more Marco Polo then Dr. Livingstone. Still interesting, but not the type of game i would pick for DnD (unless I would, in which case the terrible Republic of Darokin supplement and its marginally better companion-piece, the Minrothad Guilds, may finally be turned to a noble purpose). This also springs to mind; what Dread Empire would gaze through its faceted lenses at the cataclysmic arcane warfare blazing above the valley Qelong and consider it a region for expansion? This remains a question of personal taste though.

        [Level bracketing]

        I think we disagree on that point, but this is a matter of playstyle. High level gaming in ye olde DnD presents a host of tactical and strategic options to the players in the form of not only increased wealth and thus equipment (this does cap out rather quickly though) but also spells! spells! spells! In a similar fashion, the opposition becomes harsher, with novice players logically ending up unprepared for the horrors that await them. The ability to utilize spells effectively is one of the most important skills to acquire if one desires to survive in the perilous and often byzantine world of high level DnD. Seasoned veterans familiar with a myriad of sorceries and some lore should be able to pull through.

        I agree with you that the first part should not be mandatory afore the real fun may be had for all to enjoy but then again I have had different groups that are usually new to the particular game when they start out and even if they do not those low levels help instill in the prospective adventurer a paranoia and caution that will serve them well in the perilous heights of high level dnd. I understand that if one wants to run a particular scenario, one is not going to go through the trouble of levelling up first afore the fun can be properly had (though if one wants to play, say, Tomb of Horrors it is probably advisable to do a few low level adventures first to sharpen the rudimentary survival instinct).

        Also, overly high level differences are of course a perfectly valid excuse for starting new PCs out at a level that is higher then 1st.

        Liked by 1 person


    One of the ones engaged in said cataclysmic warfare? One which has looked upon this hitherto unconsidered territory and seen resources and artefacts, or potential allies, even strategic advantage (in the current military context) to be had there?


    1. [Of Empires Dreadful]

      The ones engaged have such powerful weaponry at their disposal that the mere proximity to their conflict has transformed Qelong into a horrorshow. Those factions best remain distant and vague so as to be all the more intimidating and alien. It is certainly a possibility and I am not saying it cannot be done so as to maintain versimilitude but I think it would make them less unfathomable and their conflict less incomprehensible. When gods go to war, men should cower.


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