Fish F*ckers by Kelvin Green

As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts go anywhere from a few weeks to a month after I’ve read them. I read this particular book last week, though! 

This is a module containing a seaside town called Innsmouth, where a cultist has set up a lucrative situation: Deep Ones are fornicating with villagers, bringing gold and offerings of fish. The villagers are conflicted about this setup, but they’re actually the abusers, while the Deep Ones are forced magically to do this, and dislike it. (The poor monsters want this magical binding to be ended so that don’t have to continue.) That’s… kind of it? There are a few unique spells, a couple of monster writeups, and some useful tables for  generating random villagers and an underwater Deep One settlement, some NPCs, maps, and a few described locales.  

The adventure is fine, albeit simple in the setup. The details are okay, but they’re not so far from what the average GM would come up with trying to adapt The Shadow Over Innsmouth into a village cult scenario. If there’s an innovation in the module, it’s the fact that the villagers are the villains while the the Deep Ones are the victims. (They’re not nice victims, but they are victims.)

The writeup follows the edict about preparing situations, not plots, but since it’s a village with one charismatic leader, there aren’t really different factions to choose between or play off against one another. (There’s a woman pregnant with a Deep One hybrid who wants to keep the baby, but that’s about it.) I kind of felt like if there were a little more of that—multiple subgroups in the village, each with its own secrets—it might be a little more interesting for PCs who are doing the social equivalent of a hexcrawl through the community’s tensions, rivalries, and disagreements. 

The adventure is in the more gonzo mode of later LotFP products, and the sexual aspect of the content feels like it’s designed to raise hackles: it’s the kind of thing Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons warned parents about back during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, except that this was published decades after B.A.D.D. ceased to exist. (I guess it’s a case of such adventures being the kind of thing that, if they didn’t exist, B.A.D.D. had to invent them… and then, unsurprisingly, Lamentations of the Flame Princess had to publish the real thing.)