Review: Obscene Serpent Religion
I am taking a slight detour from reviewing the 2018 GenCon Lamentations books, but for good reason. Today, I am reviewing Obscene Serpent Religion by Rafael Chandler in advance of Jeff Reints' Obscene Serpent Religion 2. Rafael has also written No Salvation for Witches, which is an excellent module for Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Let's find out what they have in store for us in this slim little supplement.
What you get: The booklet comprises 32 pages, plus cover. The first three pages are taken up with front matter and table of contents, and the final page lists Rafael's other work. There are eight full-page pieces of artwork, leaving 20 pages of content. Available from Lulu in softcover for $6.66 (about £5.50) or in PDF from drivethrurpg.com for $3.33.
Summary: Inspired by the sound of black metal, this is a 32-page mini-supplement for Lamentations of the Flame Princess. These random tables will generate a cult of serpent worshipers, including details like holy quests, sacred sites, and special abilities granted to worshipers. Utterly and completely NSFW, by the by.
Obscene Serpent Religion presents a bunch of random tables to help GMs create their very own cult of snake worshiper, making them into a believable religious faction and supplying a variety of adventure seeds for characters who are either working for them or, with a little modification, against them. Billed to work with Lamentations of the Flame Princess, as with most OSR products, this will fit in relatively seamlessly with your game of choice.
The Good: There is a ton of flavour within this small supplement that will help you flesh out your snake cult of choice. The first three sections (The Way, The Goddess and The Tenets) all provide ideas for the belief systems that underpin your cult, providing a skeleton to be fleshed out in more detail. The ideas they provide are very good, especially as they avoid the completely evil snake cultist route and instead provide a series of beliefs that are at times understandable and not entirely farfetched. For example, one possible tenet is to kill all ophiophages (i.e. things that kill snakes), such as hawks, mongooses etc. Should you come across someone how uses one of these creatures as a banner or part of their name, instead of just killing them straight away, you should first persuade them to stop.
The more overtly evil aspects—and again, there is a little blurring of the lines here, but not much—comes with the quests that worshippers can undertake to advance themselves in the cult. These can involve performing surgery on strangers to understand anatomy, desecrating an enemies gods and framing them for it, inserting a snake into an enemy in front of their followers in order to kill them, and so on. It is all delightfully grim stuff to flavour your games with, even if players do not wish to join the cult. What do they do when a snake cultist assaults a high priest of an opposing religion outside their temple before forcing a serpent down their throat, thus choking them to death?
The adventure seed, NPC and encounter tables and the list of sacred sites provide more interesting flavour to spice up your adventures and game world, while the bestowed powers provide an interesting and not overpowered list of abilities for snake cultist NPCs and PCs alike. Overall, there is a wealth of interesting little ideas here that gets the mind thinking almost immediately.
The Bad: The main issue with the booklet that I have is in its presentation of a series of random tables. Each section is designed to be a random table using 1d6 (or occasionally a different roll of dice) to help build the cult. Sometimes this works, for instance in determining the goddess the cult worships, or the sacred site that PCs must visit. However, in other tables, it doesn't. And this is because some of the information appears to have been written as a whole and then subdivided afterwards. For example, in the tenets section, entries 5 and 6 deal with two aspects of essentially the same thing. Still, this isn't a major issue and you can simply pick and choose the ideas from the book, all of which are good, to build the cult that you want. Indeed, you could build a cult on the fly at the table with a few rolls of the dice if needed, but I'd prefer to use the supplement to construct something in my prep time instead.
The art is the only other quibble I have. Some of it is a little amateurish, but this fits with the overall style of OSR products in general. It is, of course, not safe for work, with almost every piece featuring breasts or a phallus. Thematically it fits, but only two pieces appeared to correspond directly to the text. The others are all overtly grim depictions of snake cult goings on. While this adds to the overall black metal feel of the product, the art didn't quite marry up to the believable snake cult religion that the book tries to sell, despite their generally evil undertones.
The Verdict: Obscene Serpent Religion provides a neat little toolset for creating a semi-evil snake-worshipping cult for your OSR game. While presented as a series of random tables, it finds far better use as a collection of ideas which can be pulled together in a variety of ways to form a skeleton from which you can hang your own set dressing and make a religion to entice the PCs into joining or become one of their more interesting foes. The art is classic OSR with an overtly adult edge that, while thematically appropriate, doesn't always gel with the text.
Style: 3 Substance: 5 Overall: 4