Friday Fantasy: Bee-Ware!

If you suffer from apiophobia or hay fever when the pollen count is particularly high, or just hate bees, then Bee-Ware! is not a scenario for you. It is though, a scenario, where the inhabitants of Ambersham are happy with the bees and can actually transform into bees, producing a highly regarded mead that has mild restorative effect. Ambersham is a small village in the county of Kent—as default—and it is home to an infestation of giant shape-changing bee monsters that actually, are not on rampage, represent no active threat to anyone, and would just like to get on with being giant shape-changing bee monsters and making mead. However, this is a scenario for Lamentationsof the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying, published by Lamentations ofthe Flame Princess, and written by Kelvin Green. Which means that once again, that some poor, small, English village is going to get it in the neck. Kelvin Green really, really hates poor, small, English villages and delights in inflicting horrible situations on them. In this case, the horrible situation that Kelvin Green is going to inflict on Ambersham consists of the Player Characters. Once the Player Characters start poking around, the bee-people of Ambersham are going to react. This can be as benign as offering the Player Characters bribes to go away or even a stake in the mead-making business, but the lesson behind Bee-Ware! is that if you poke the bees’ nest, the bees are going to poke you. Or in the case of Bee-Ware! sting you. There fifty such inhabitants of Ambersham and their poison has an effect of forcing a Save versus Poison—or die. Most of the bee-people will die too, of course, but fifty giant bee-people with lethal stings? How many times is a player going to have to make such as Saving Throw before his character is killed?

Bee-Ware! has no actual real starting point. It has suggestions that can be used to get the Player Characters involved. These include their being hired to investigate the Ambersham mead, to look for a missing person, checking on the health of the village’s priest who has been heard from in some time, going to loot Lady Ambersham’s manor after rumours of her death, and even spot a bee-person attacking someone in a crowd and then fleeing, leaving the victim to whisper something intriguing as his dying words. Once the Player Characters reach Ambersham, they find it a quiet, bucolic place, with lots of wild meadows and flowers, bees buzzing around, and villagers going about their business. From the outset, as soon as the villagers spot the Player Characters, they will be telling them, “We don’t want your kind round here.” They will at least get a pint and a meal at the village tavern, The Dog & Bastard, before being told the same.

Further exploration will potentially reveal two buildings of note. One is the manor house, home to Lady Ambersham, now transformed into queen bee—quite literally—and containing rooms filled with honeycomb and furniture drenched in honey. The other is a ruin, which once they gain entrance, the Player Characters will find out what is really going on—if they can negotiate its multi-dimensional structure it has had since the owner unsuccessfully cast a spell forty years earlier. Not only is the owner still in the house, but so is the extra-dimensional swarm entity which gives the bee-enhanced lady Ambersham her power and her hold over the rest of the village and the parts of the scroll detailing the spell that was cast and thus the means to reverse it.

The situation is monstrous, but benign. The Player Characters could walk away and nothing would really happen. Or they could go on a monster-killing rampage—if they could survive the potential anaphylactic shocks, that is. Then again, as much as a monster as she is, Lady Ambersham is not entirely monstrous. She will negotiate and it is possible for the Player Characters to walk away with a good deal, whether that is money in their pockets or a stake in the mead business. There is also a quartet of youthful hotheads who will give the Player Characters more trouble than telling them simply to get out of the village and then is also the ridiculously named Captain Adamski Rimsky-Korsakov and Professor Gottfried Bosch, a pair of monster hunters reminiscent of Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, who both believe that the village is infested with lycanthropes and are there to gather intelligence and then kill everyone. If that includes the Player Characters, well, they were probably lycanthropes too. Plus, they refused to get tested. Of course, the other reason they are there is to cause chaos, get the action going, and mess up whatever it is that the Player Characters have planned so far. It depends on how the Game Master wants to use them.

Physically, Bee-Ware! is black and all shades of grey and honey. The artwork is cartoonishly entertaining and the cartography is excellent.

Bee-Ware! is set in roughly 1630, in the Early Modern period, the default period for Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying. Its isolated set-up means that it is easy to shift it to other times and settings, but it is easy to slip into a campaign anyway. Otherwise, Bee-Ware! is a classic ‘Kelvin-Green-village-in-peril’, or rather it is a classic ‘Kelvin-Green-village-in-peril’ with a twist, and that twist, is the Player Characters. They are effectively the monsters in the scenario, they are the ones whose presence will trigger a slaughter—theirs or the monsters. Which is absolutely great, but the benignity of the situation in Bee-Ware! also extends to the set-up and the Game Master will need work hard to get the players and their character motivated to Amersham. If she can, then the fun and weirdness can begin.