Friday Fantasy: Winnie-the-Shit

Kelvin Green must have had a horrible childhood and it must have taken place in a small village. After all he seems intent on twisting and destroying one toy or characters from childhood after another and inflicting the consequences upon some poor settlement of innocent villagers. It was Superman with Green Messiah and it was the Transformers with More Than Meets The Eye: A Short Adventure with Lots of Tentacles and it was… well probably best to even think about it with Fish Fuckers – Or, a Record, Compil’d in Truth, of the Sordid Activities of the People of Innsmouth, Devon. The latest addition in the author’s programme to destroy, or at least besmirch, everything about his childhood—let alone our childhoods—is Winnie-the-Pooh. Yes, the loveable, yellow-haired, honey loving bear of very little brain, which Disney has been bringing us… Or not. Because the bear in question is Winnie-the-Pooh, but not the one that everyone knows and loves from the silver screen. No, this is the Winnie-the-Pooh of creator A.A. Milne, whose U.S. copyright expired at the beginning of 2022, meaning that Disney no longer held the exclusive copyright and other creators could thus make content based on this version of the character. Very quickly, the British slasher-horror film, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, appeared as a result of that. It is also why we now have Winnie-the-Shit.

Winnie-the-Shit is a scenario for Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Designed for Player Characters of between Second and Fourth Levels, it is set in the roleplaying game’s default period of the seventeenth century, the early modern era. Specifically, Sussex, not far from Town Littleworth, the location for Green Messiah, before the English Civil War. So, Winnie-the-Shit could be run before or after the events of Green Messiah, and the author suggests ways in which this can be done. Other ways of getting the Player Characters involved include their wanting to contact, study with, or simply rob the Magic-User rumoured to be active in the area, find out why he has imported a live bear from Europe, their having been paid to deal with some recalcitrant commoners in the area, or simply even because they are just passing through and spot something odd. Although that said, the author really, really hates that last option.* Another is that agents of Doctor John Dee—the seventeenth century equivalent of the Men in Black (doublet and hose)—have also heard of the new weirdness going on in the area and want it investigated.

* So the last thing you do as the Game Master is use this option and you definitely do not tell him about it on social media.

The scenario is a sandbox, a wooded area known as Lancaster Great Park. A wizard recently arrived in Lancaster Great Park and began a series of experiments that resulted in the creation of human-animal hybrids he called ‘New Men’. Believing them to be better than humanity, he planned to replace mankind with the superior New Men, a plan that was wholly embraced by the newly created creatures and saw the wizard himself being imprisoned for his inferior humanity. Now, the New Men, led by the brutish Edward Bear, a creature small of brain, big of ambition, small of attention span, and lover of mead, have taken over the area, captured anyone who has not fled, and are looking to expand. Progress is slow, primarily because despite their teachings and their regularly updated laws, the New Men are not all that superior and Edward Bear is bloody lazy.

Edward Bear’s sense of lassitude runs throughout Winnie-the-Shit. Thus, whilst there are factions within the New Men of Lancaster Great Park, they are not particularly adversarial in their attitudes towards each other, but rather have their own interest. Edward Bear enjoys the trappings of power, he gets bored with the responsibility too easily; Owl is primarily interested in learning since he is the only one of the New Men able to read; and Rabbit, the very busy messenger of the New Men, is distracted by treasure—especially the treasure he has found in a Roman villa below the woods and secreted in the tunnels he has dug connected to the villa. Then there is ‘The Ass, Not Complaining, But There It Is’, who is as depressed as you think he is, such that the Player Characters are likely to have a hard time deciding whether they want to pity him or kill him. Although monstrous, none of these New Men are the true monsters of Winnie-the-Shit. That would be Allain Alexandre Moreau—or A. A. Moreau—experimental wizard and eugenicist, currently being held prisoner by Edward Bear so that he can daily cast the spell, The Ascendant Synthesis of the New Man and so create one of the New Men. He is, though, the most sociable of persons to be found in Lancaster Great Park, though that should be tempered by the fact that he is an actual sociopath. How the Player Characters decide to deal with him potentially affects the fate of the world…

Physically, Winnie-the-Shit is decently presented in red and orange because it is Winnie-the-Pooh-inspired. The artwork is suitably inspired by the drawings of E. H. Shepard. The cartography is serviceable. The scenario also includes numerous comments and sidebars by the author, some of them helpful, most of them simply informative.

The inclusion of A. A. Moreau points to A.A. Milne as being not the only author whose work inspired Winnie-the-Shit. The other, of course, being H. G. Wells and the work being The Island of Doctor Moreau, here transplanted to leafy Sussex and the equivalent of the Hundred Acre Wood. The resulting combination is disturbing and unpleasant, and certainly not as clever as Green Face or as Fish Fuckers – Or, a Record, Compil’d in Truth, of the Sordid Activities of the People of Innsmouth, Devon. At the same time, it is also absurd, the congruency of the Player Characters hunting for monsters when they are suddenly confronted by an axe-wielding bear bent on bloody violence! This where it is at its strongest and perhaps the realisation upon the part of the player and their characters that the monsters in woods are not monsters. If they go down to the woods of Winnie-the-Shit, the Player Characters are definitely in for a big surprise!

—oOo—

DISCLAIMER: The author of this review is an editor who has edited titles for Lamentations of the Flame Princess on a freelance basis. He was not involved in the production of this book and his connection to both publisher and author has no bearing on the resulting review.