The Year of our Lord is 1216.
All of England is aware of King John the First’s public shortcomings as a king. His unsuccessful wars to retrieve English lands in France, paid for by an ever increasing tax burden on his people. How his impiety and refusal to play along with the church has got the Pope to publicly declare him an Atheist! His falling out with his Barons, who are at war with him after he annulled the Magna Carta, a mighty document of law to curtail his reckless spending, which they forced him to sign at the start of the summer.
As bondsmen of the Bishop of Norwich, a close ally of the King, you’ve also seen his majesty at his worst first hand at court. The drunken murderous rages and the blasphemous words that froths constantly at his lips. The pale faces of those who cross him when they know they are going to be ‘disappeared’ by his lackeys after spending a cruel night as his plaything. Whispers at court say he is in league with the devil, but you know he is willingly possessed by Satan!
Now your Liege Lord has has called upon you to serve him. So with heavy heart you prepare to take yourselves through dark pagan woods that surround the god forsaken port of Bishop’s Lynn, on the North Norfolk coast, where the King and his army currently camp. You suspect heavily that the mad bad king intends to take his army across the stinking marsh of the Wash to do battle with the rebel Barons in neighbouring Lincolnshire. It’s September now and the weather is turning bad. This will be an ill journey, where cunning, treachery, and baseness will have to be employed to keep body and soul together.
Bad King John is an adventure for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, a well oiled Basic/Expert D&D variant geared towards Horror and Weird Fantasy, in the vein of HP Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. As such a pile of spare characters will be at the Referee’s side for the inevitable death through violence and madness.