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Text © 2020 Gord Sellar
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issued under exclusive license to

www.lotfp.com
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First Edition, First Printing

Printed in Finland by Otava Book
Printing Ltd., Keuru

LFP0067
Print ISBN 978-952-7238-41-7
PDF ISBN 978-952-7238-42-4
F ER MENT V M NIGRV M
D E I S E P V L T I
BLACK YEAST OF THE BURIED GOD

AN ADVENTURE FOR CHARACTERS OF

THE FIRST THROUGH THIRD LEVELS

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FOR LAMENTATIONS OF THE FLAME PRINCESS

CONCERNING AN UNTIMELY PLAGUE OF

A MOST ANTIQUE WICKEDNESSE,

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WHICH, HAVING STRICKEN
THE UNFORTUNATE ABBEY,
SHALL BE MET BY ARMED SOULES
HOLY, VALIANT, UNWISE, FOOLISHE, OR MADDE

SCRIPTOR: GORD SELLAR REDACTOR: JOSHUA BLACKKETTER

ILLUMINATOR: GONZALO ÆNEAS COMPOSITOR: JACOB HURST
CHOROGRAPHUS: ALEX MAYO RECTOR: JAMES EDWARD RAGGI IV
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A D M A IOR E M F ER M E N T I GL OR I A M
E X O F F I C I N A J A C O B I E D U A R D I R A D I I I V, L U D O P O L A E
No. 8 -10 SE M I TA OR I S , H EL SI N K I , F I N N I A

L A M E N T A T I O N E S
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P R I N C I P I S S A E
F L A M M E A E
MMXX

Blood an
thi s—how cadnbon es of C hri st, th e scri
th a t beck on s a we con tend wi th thi s p tur es say n ot hin g of
t every sl eepi fou
n g and walnkies s in th e dep th s
n g hour?
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A Diſtillation of the D eſigner’s
Contents of this Tome
N otes Expounding Upon The 4
A Brief and General Diſcourſe Upon That Moſt Bleſſed of Locales,
The A bbey of St. C hriſtopher , At Which the Action
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of the P roceeding A dventure is Fated to Occur
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+ AP reliminary Explication of S tr a nge G oings -O n There 8
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+ AC Upon That Moſt Perfidious and Inexplicable Foe
ommentary
A bbey K nown as The B l ack B ar m , and Its Secret,
of the
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Wicked Nature, K nown to But Few

+ SA n Expoſition of the R ules of I nfection for the 12

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ickneſs Plaguing the A bbey

+G
AB I Obſcure Truth of Both the
16
rief nveſtigation into the
ärunger That Horror of Which they are the Accurſed
and
Fruit, Viz. The B l ack R ock Which Glowers in Darkneſs

18
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A Brief Diſcourſe Upon the Subject of What M ay be R eadily

A pprehended by Thoſe A pproaching The A bbey

A n Excogitation Upon What M ay Be Diſcovered Within the Walls of

The I nn of the Monaſtery 21
A n Account of Thoſe Events Which Unfold When the A bbey
Falls in a Conflagration of the Moſt Tragic and Menacing Nature 29
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A Tabula (i.e. M ap) of The A bbey G rounds Accompanied By
a Detailed Inventory of M ajor L ocales to be Found Upon Them 30
A Concordance of Locales Within The M ain C omplex
of the A bbey, Including the Cathedral, Dormitorium, Cloiſters,
Ædificatum, Neceſſarium, etc.
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The Myſteries That Roil In Black Ferment Within The Walls of The
B rewery, Accompanied by a Finely Detailed Tabula (i.e. a Map) 44
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A Detailed Commentary Upon the Subject of W eaponiſing
the B rewery For use against all trespassers 46
A n Explication of the Terrifying, Secret, and Unholy Contents of
The C atacombs Accompanied by Detailed Tabula (i.e. Map) 58
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A Thorough Accounting of the Complete Memberſhip of that Party

K nown as The C ompa ny of the S calded S hield :
Their Sins, Poſſeſſions, A ppearance, and the Terrifying Condition
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Binding them to Theſe Terrible Events
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A n Exegeſis of the Evil Hiſtory, Accurſed Secrets, and Terrible

Nature of all M agical Items That M ay be Found At the A bbey 69
R atiocinations Upon the Implementation of the Preceeding in
F urther P l ay as May Be Deſired by the Purchaſer of this Text 79
A n assortment of I nfection C ards detailing the symptoms,
both miraculous and unsettling, to be suffered by the afflicted 81
Can you hear
promising thinit? I hear it mut ring
gs to me tha t onte in the darkness,
ly a god coul d gr an t..
 4 Designer’s Notes

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I f only every monster in the world could be clubbed to death and looted. Some
adversaries, unfortunately, are too insidious to be overcome that way. They resist
and overcome us by being everywhere we turn, by infecting both us and the world
around us, by rewriting us from the inside. That’s what Fermentum Nigrum Dei Sepulti is
all about.
Designer’s Notes

S
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ure, it’s wrapped up in an exploratory dungeon crawl packed with beer and
intelligent space-yeast and Cistercian monks and the fallout from a horrible
revenge story, but this adventure is really about an elusive antagonist that hijacks the
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protagonists, changing them in ways that leave them complicit in its monstrous acts
and mired in the shadowy, ambivalent place where their free will used to live.

Iam genuinely interested in hearing how this adventure plays out with your group.
Feel free to email me at gordsellar@gmail.com and tell me all about it.
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For more inspiration, check out:

+ H.P. Lovecraft’s classic story, “The Color Out of Space”
+ The films Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing
+ The late great Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose
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+ Watts’
For insight into how the primary antagonist sees humanity, check out Peter
short story “The Things,” available online at the Clarkesworld website.
(clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/)

On
 Designer’s Notes 5
On Beer Terminology:
I f there’s a beer geek in your gaming group, this may come up. Yes, the terms are
misused: in Early Modern Europe, “ale” and “barm” are British English. German-
speakers have their own terms for these things. (“Altbier” and “hefe.”) However, in
reality historical beer terminology was a bafflingly messy patchwork of local (and
sometimes regional) conventions, and plenty of the types of beer popular back in those
days are extinct or only now being resurrected. Ultimately, this is an adventure game,
not a beer history gab session; feel free to remind your players of this, if need be.

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Onandtheweird
other hand, if verisimilitude interests you, or you want to use the Black Barm
beers on a bigger (campaign-sized) scale, here are some helpful resources:

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Blogs:
+ historical
Shut Up About Barclay Perkins! (barclayperkins.blogspot.com) Deals with
English (and German) brewing.

+ Zythophile (zythophile.co.uk) Martyn Cornell’s beer blog. See also below…

Designer’s Notes
Books:
+ 1731).
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A vade mecum for malt-worms: or, A guide to good fellows, by Edward Ward (1667-
A wonderful early 18 -century pub crawl guide, written in verse. PDFs
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of the complete text, scanned, are available free on several sites, and could be
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printed, scribbled over with cryptic adventure hooks, and distributed as a player
handout. Find it, among other places, at archive.org. (https://archive.org/details/
vademecumformalt00warduoft)

+ homebrewers,
Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher. Actually a guide for experimentally-minded
it has plenty of weird stuff—fungal beers, toxic bittering herbs and
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additives actually used in history, and more—that could be fun to include.

+ the
Beer: The Story of the Pint and Amber, Gold, and Black by Martyn Cornell. Some of
best beer history out there, by the same author as the Zythophile blog.

Acknowledgements:
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S pecial thanks for feedback, advice, support, language consultation, and/or help
with playtesting: Ahimsa Kerp, Justin Howe, Christopher Alex Ginn, Carlos
M. Dieguez II, Erjo Coscolluela, James Edward Raggi IV, Joshua Blackketter, Jeremy
Duncan, Jacob Hurst, Rebecca Isbill Davis, Praveen Boppana, Nahid Taheri, Haein
Chang, Rowan Chadwick, Ian Lynch, Sven Purrmann, Soyeon Jeong, and especially,
Jihyun Park and our son Noeul.

il, it fla she s

in my head—I fear it isastheif dev
Ac h, thi s str an ge voi ce befo I wi ll never die!
ies re me , ma kes me feel
vis ion s of naked bod
gr av e an d ter ri ble sin, an d ye t I write on, hopin g to
It tempt s me to !
dispel evi l thr ou gh du tif ul work
 6 The Abbey of St. Christopher

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F ermentum Nigrum Dei Sepulti is a visions, dreams, or mysterious spiritual
The Abbey of St. Christopher

short, open-ended dungeon crawl visitations all could build suspense.

set at an imperiled brewing monastery. Perhaps you could even prepare the
The text has Germanic flavoring, but only Infection Cards a few sessions before
slight modification should be necessary you intend to run this adventure, and
to insert it into any rural location within allow for the possibility that a character
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any of the brewing cultures of Early
Modern Europe; with a little more work,
it could be retooled to almost any fantasy
who drinks a beer from the Abbey could
develop a mild infection weeks in advance
of the events described in this book. (For
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or historical setting, even an ancient one. more on the aforementioned infection, see
(The temples of the Mesopotamian beer The Black Barm, page 10.)
goddess Ninkasi were sacred brewery-
brothels, for example...)
A lthough it can backfire—as it almost
did in one of my playtests—a good

T his adventure can easily be used approach is the bait-and-switch: characters

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either as a one-shot, or integrated end up stopping for the night at the

into an ongoing campaign. In the latter monastery while on the road to someplace
case, it’s best if the Inn of the Abbey of else, and wake in the dead of night to an
St. Christopher is a recurring locale—a unexpected, bizarre adventure. That said,
pit stop favored by the PCs en route from characters could be drawn to the Abbey
their home base to various wilderness in a number other ways:
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adventures, dungeons, or ruins. This

will give you time to get the characters
familiar with the locale and invested in + Abbey’s
as burglars, hoping to rob the
famously rich coffers
the local NPCs, increasing the likelihood
they’ll choose to get involved in the
events to come. It will also allow you + on
by stumbling onto it for the first time
the way back to civilization from
an early start on making dramatic hay some calamitous misadventure
regarding the monastery’s beers: strange

bay e, et p rès, je le p rie, de drawn

de l 'a b
Nous sommes petrèsde ses bières, et l 'hist oire dans .le.
t rouver le secrun soupçon t rop ét range et grave.
livre me donne
 The Abbey of St. Christopher 7

+ drawn by curiosity, after finding a

potent healing beer “potion” during T he Abbey of St. Christopher is
famous in the region—and likely
some previous adventure, wrapped in known at least by reputation to the PCs—
a note identifying it with this Abbey as a producer of excellent beer, as well
as for the tavern/inn it operates, which
+ sent
as a Papal commission (or its guards)
to investigate the Abbot’s claims
offers travelers a safe, clean place to sleep.
It is located about a day’s ride from the
of an ancient evil in the Catacombs nearest large city, and is in the immediate
vicinity of (i.e. about ten minutes’ walk
+ assimply

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a group of random strangers who from) a small, commonplace town.
happened to be lodged at the Inn
on the fateful night of the Abbey’s fall
F ounded sometime in the high
Middle Ages, it is a Cistercian Abbey

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W hatever the setup, the PCs’ desire
to escape should be low at the
beginning, and climb very high near the
that sustains itself by brewing, growing
its own barley, and raising pigs. However,
beer revenues have enriched the Abbey

The Abbey of St. Christopher

end... but their desire to escape will also considerably. Those beers are available
be inversely proportional to their ability throughout the region, including in the
to escape, which grows increasingly nearest big city. In the sorts of places
difficult with each passing hour they frequented by adventurers, entire casks
remain at the Abbey. of the stuff are consumed in a night, and

F or those with no idea where to set

the adventure, in my own campaign
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corked bottles—decorated with distinctive
paper labels depicting a grinning monk,
an unusual practice for a brewery in
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world, the Abbey of St. Christopher is a this time period—are also sold for those
day’s ride west of Bad Aachen, a city with provisioning themselves for travel.
a fascinating history and much to offer in
terms of adventure hooks.
I t is common for adventurers to
mention having passed through the
Inn, and they compare notes regarding
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the latest rumors circulating there.

Outside of adventuring circles, the beer
is also well-known, but for a different
reason: popular (if factually mistaken)
stories about the beer’s ostensible
holiness, and the many miraculous
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healings and wonders attributed to it by

the superstitious, make it beloved of those
who pray and drink with equal fervency.
The ominous truth about the ale’s
wondrous effects—and the terrible conflict
secretly brewing at the Abbey—are known
to only a few even within its walls.
 8 Strange Goings-On

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S everal weeks before the events taking
place in this adventure, tensions
began to develop between two groups of
found there was the stuff of far worse
nightmares. They entered through a
hidden passage within the Church (C1
monks within the Abbey. see B page 37), and were immediately
Strange Goings-On

confronted with a small—but still

I t all began when the Abbot, an elderly bizarrely violent—cluster of plant roots
monk named Reiner, woke from
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a haunting dream one night. Neither
prophetic nor particularly eventful, it had
(belonging to the previously-sessile, but
now dangerously restless Hopfenwürger
plants growing in the Hopyard directly
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simply involved a dark hole in the ground above where they stood). Fighting past it
beneath a sky full of shimmering stars. (and losing one brother to its strangling
From the hole, a terrible sound echoed grasp), they pressed on through the damp
out into the night air, filling the sleeping tunnels beyond, until they reached the
Abbot with dread. On waking he felt catacombs proper.
it must have something to do with the

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catacombs beneath the Monastery, where here, they discovered all manner
the bones of the dead lay in disorder, of dreadful horrors: incorrupt
disturbed time and again over the corpses both human and inhuman, some
Abbey’s long history. Most monks feared of them resurrected by unspeakable
to trespass into those dark tunnels, and forces, their noses and mouths foaming
had taken to burying their dead in graves black froth; walls clad in strange molds
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in a small cemetery plot outside the and even stranger drawings; and in
Abbey’s wall to avoid going underground the bowels of the place, a room that
at all. The catacombs had lain in neglect was clearly a chapel—one evidently not
for too long, he decided. consecrated to their God, but rather
to a strangely patterned chunk of black

S o Abbot Reiner resolved to inspect

the catacombs. What he (and
the brothers who accompanied him)
rock, which they took to be a pagan idol.
The rock filled their minds with horrific
visions. These horrors convinced the

Abbot
C urs e t his wicked
me here, and curs e pl
t
ace, and curs e my mot her
he w ho s ent
and curs e every brot her Abinbot f or let tin g us abide here,
agains t me, t his pl ace w ho is pl ott ing