‘Winnie the Shit’ is “a mini wilderness crawl” adventure compatible with old-school DnD rules and modern games inspired by them. Written and illustrated by Kelvin Green, and published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess (LotfP), the new module pits a party of adventurers against “an utter bastard of an ursus, and his animal supremacist chums”.
The adventure is written for the LotfP system, itself a modernisation of the 1981 Basic/Expert edition of DnD, so it will need a little re-statting if you plan to use it with DnD 5e. Modern DnD players should have no trouble using LotfP or other old-school systems. Just brace yourself for some familiar systems to be simplified or missing: not all the DnD races are present, for example, and the remaining ones function as DnD class options.
A. A. Milne’s first Winnie-the-Pooh book entered the public domain in many territories in January 2022. It forms the core of the adventure, which is Green’s 11th published via LotfP. Green says that he adapted “maybe 75% of the original book”.
“I took the main idea of each chapter, game-ified it, and plonked it on the map”, Green says. “The introduction is very indulgent and is basically a copy-paste of the original text, with added jokes. I regret nothing”, he adds.
The adventure is set in 1600s Sussex, England, and blends in elements of The Isle of Doctor Moreau and Animal Farm. “I wanted Pooh to be brutal and nasty to earn the title”, Green says, but adds “I wanted there to be a reason [for his violence]. The starting point was Moreau; why did he create mutant animals? To improve on humanity”. Expect to face manimal-mutants throughout.
Green says that when players face the titular bear of very little brain (and very much brawn) he’s “going to be a murderer with an axe, but at least there’s a reason behind it”.
He points to another gory adaptation of Winnie the Pooh, absurdist slasher-flick Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. “There’s a danger of being obvious when you are trying to “twist” a more innocent concept, and I think they went obvious in Blood and Honey. I tried to layer in something more interesting”.
He’s particularly proud of the Woozle: “in the original book Pooh and Piglet spook themselves by seeing footprints and imagining that a monster is stalking them, and translating that into a sort of mini-game between the GM and the players is quite fun… I hope players have fun with it”.
Green’s illustrations for the adventure mimic the style used by E. H. Shepard in the original Winnie the Pooh books, albeit with a gory twist. “I think it works best when I’m redrawing one of Shepard’s original pieces [rather] than when I’m trying to do something new in his style, but overall I’m happy with it. I saw one review that suggested I’d lifted the art unchanged, which I take as a compliment”.
If you want to know more about the LotfP system, check out the video review by Bud’s RPG Review above.
LotfP has an eclectic and often profane library, including an adventure by the deceased lead-singer of metal band GWAR, a book masquerading as an actual occult manual worthy of the Satanic panic, and another inspired by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. For a safe entry point, try Green’s first LotfP book ‘Forgive Us’, which makes for both a great DnD one shot and the start of a zombie apocalypse campaign.