Friday Fantasy: Asterion

It is difficult to describe what Asterion is without being as direct as its author is. So not to beat about the bush, Asterion is a sex dungeon. Asterion is a sex dungeon for Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess. What it does is take the Ancient Greek myth of the creation of the Minotaur and turn it into a sex dungeon and combine it with a bloody meatgrinder. In the myth, Minos, King of Crete, prayed to the sea god Poseidon to send him a snow-white bull as a sign of the god’s favour and promised to sacrifice the bull to the god. When he did not, Poseidon punished Minos by making his wife fall in love with the bull and eventually she bore a child, a half-bull, half-man. Called Asterius, this is Minotaur. So inhuman and so ferocious was Asterius, that he would only eat human meat. After taking advice from the Oracle at Delphi, Minos had the craftsman, Daedalus, construct a mighty labyrinth to house the Minotaur. Into this, King Minos would cast his enemies. Asterion takes this myth and removes any references to Greece, enabling the Game Master to drop the adventure into her campaign, if, that is, she actually wanted to. Because remember, Asterion is a sex dungeon, as the Minotaur is not only wandering the labyrinth eating anyone he finds in there, he is also living out a priapic fantasy with anyone he finds in the labyrinth—whether they want to or not.

It should be noted that Asterion is written by the author of Beware the Mindfuck. That scenario carried an ‘18+ Explicit Content’ label on the front cover—and it deserved to. As does Asterion. Be warned. The language and the tone of Asterion is strong and of an adult nature and it deserves that exact same warning label. Unfortunately, it does not have one. In the meantime, some of the language and content in Asterion is repeated as part of the review where necessary.

After some immature posturing by the author about how he is not going to tell the Game Master how to run the adventure, how the adventure is not “…[F]or those that get easily butt hurt about touchy subjects”, and that the Game Master should run it if she has a “cool group”, he actually settles down and begins telling the reader what the adventure is about. The set-up is simple. The Player Characters are thrown into the Labyrinth, perhaps with a sword or a spear and some torches and then left to it. Accompanying them is a number of Zero Level tributes to Asterion, the Minotaur. The Labyrinth is described as a series of tight corridors crossed by many intersections, at which Bull Calves, the offspring of Asterion, will be grabbing them and attempting to eat them, have sex them—that is, rape them, take them back to their father, or a combination of all three. The Zero Level tributes are replacement Player Characters. So far, so bad. Fear not though, for it gets worse.

Instead of there being a map of the Labyrinth—the Game Master is expected to make it up—there is simply a table of twenty, increasingly detailed and unpleasant encounters. Screams, statues, mushrooms growing in cow dung, corpses, and so on, seem perfectly normal. Elsewhere an incredibly attractive, incredibly large woman demands sex in return for oracular divinations and will get extremely frustrated if the Player Characters refuse; a male dominant, dressed all in leather, invites the Player Characters to participate in his sex dungeon and attacks them with his handcrafted sex toys when they refuse; and a scene of bestiality. Plus, there are the scenes with the Bull Calves having sex with and/or eating the women imprisoned in the Labyrinth.

Running Asterion involves the Game Master describing the Labyrinth to her players, occasionally rolling for an encounter on the table, and when all of those are crossed off, she can run the scenario’s final scene in Asterion’s throne room. There are promises of freedom, but as the author makes clear in his ‘Wrapping Shit up’, “Everyone will die! Seriously. It’s a fuckin [sic] meatgrinder!” There are stats for the various monsters in Asterion, but that is about it.

Physically, Asterion is thankfully short. It is unpleasantly written and surprisingly, is illustrated with numerous images of statues and vases from Ancient Greece given that this aspect of the background to the scenario is ignored.

So, what you have in Asterion is a meatgrinder—in all senses of the word—one-shot in which the Player Characters are exposed to a lot of sex and semi-cannibalism, not expected to survive, and that is it, really. In fact, there really is very little for the Player Characters to do except wander around and fight. That is the extent of the agency they have. For the players, there is equally as little for them to do, little that is going to engage them or their capacity to roleplay, and ultimately, all Asterion does is expose them to the sexual fantasies of the author.

Asterion is repulsive, immature, and pointless. It does not deserve so much as an ‘18+ Explicit Content’ label, but an ‘Immature Players Only’ label.

—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 has no bearing on the resulting review.