Index Of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory

[Mary Hargrove]

InCharlie and the Chocolate Factory (specifically the film), Mike brags (sort of) about the fact that he cracked the code for the Golden Tickets. He then explains that he hates chocolate. Why, then, did he crack the code? Is there any evidence that he liked other confectionary or was challenged by his friends to do it? I'd prefer a reason supported by evidence from the original book, then the 2005 film, and at last resort the original Willy Wonka film with Gene Wilder.

Given that we're shown his obsession with video gaming, it's reasonable to assume that he saw locating the ticket as an intellectual challenge on a par with the sorts of puzzles you get in computer games and nothing more.

And Mike TV because it was on the TV and he is intelligent enough and has no other things to do, as to solve the puzzle, which way in which store the tickets would probably take, and where he has to buy a chocolate. And by proofing his theory, he "accidentally" get one ticket...

I think he wanted to go to the factory. Then he figured out that the most likely way to get a golden ticket was to check the manufacturing dates. Since he was playing video games, he got smart and was able to think of that idea. He got so smart even that he felt like you could be smart enough to figure that out which was beyond the skills of the other 4 children who went to the factory and were probably normal people and still be a retard. I think they made it so that he hated chocolate and ending up getting only one to demonstrate how powerful that trick was.

The year is 1617, and the only thing on the minds of every noblewoman and aristocrat in Europe is chocolate. The act of eating this modest confection brings so much pleasure, it has become more prized than tea, spices, even liquor... and it all comes from one place: Lucia de Castillo's factory in northern Friesland.

This one businesswoman has Europe by the balls, and some will pay handsomely for the secret to her success. But Lucia's factory isn't what it seems to be. The horrors and cruelties that exist within its walls defy imagination itself. Nobody ever goes in... and nobody ever comes out!

This adventure comes out of the imagination of Kiel Chenier (Dungeons & Donuts, The Hell House Beckons), brought to life by the lurid illustrations of Jason Bradley Thompson (Mangaka: The Fast & Furious Game of Drawing Comics, Dreamland).

What you get: Your EUR 19,25 or equivalent will buy you both the print as well as the pdf version of Blood In The Chocolate, a 50-page full-colour hardcover adventure in A5 format for the Lamentations of the Flame Princess game line. The pdf alone can be purchased alone for EUR 6,99. The adventure does not specify a character level, even though the amount of combat it contains points towards the mid-range. The adventure was nominated for the 2017 Best Adventure Ennie.

Spoiler warning: As much as I am not going to describe, let alone detail the adventure, parts of the scenario might be revealed while discussing its strong and less strong points. If you intend to enjoy it as a player, stop reading now.

Contents: Blood In The Chocolate is, in its own words, 'an adventure about man's greed and capacity for cruelty outpacing the 'low evil' of sorcery and otherworldly creatures. Reducing things to just magic or madness will lessen this tone'. It takes place in northern Netherlands, any sufficiently cold and relatively hard to reach place however will do. Even though it takes place in a magical 17th century, the chocolate factory in effect produces 'a product not seen in real life until the mid-19th century', shedding some light on the industrial and mass production aspects of the adventure. Some of the heroes' enemies carry gunpowder and relevant weaponry. The adventure is location-based even though not a dungeon crawl, taking place in an enormous chocolate factory partially inspired by the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. A GM needs to know certain aspects of industrial chocolate making (something that the book readily explains), in order to run his players through the adventure's great mystery. How is it possible that the factory of Lucia de Castillo produces the world's most incredibly addictive chocolate in quantities undreamed of?

The strong points: Blood in the Chocolate is not so much about terror as it is about quirky unpleasantness and WTF situations wrapped in well-known and beloved surroundings. I mean, chocolate! Yet, after a point it is too much, it is disgusting, it is puke-inducing. This is the unholy child of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and a nasty dungeon crawl with the weirdness factor upped to eleven. Everything in the adventure reeks of unpleasantness, and I am recording this as a strong positive. There is an industrial complex out of hell bellowing smoke next to the unspoiled, if frigid, nature. A race of short, indigenous people straight from the Peruvian jungle has been forcefully relocated, is unrepentantly exploited, and worships the plump white woman of authority as a goddess. To this add evil ceremonies, psychotropic substances and a lot of raping and gore, and you get the point. The disregard for human life is brain-shattering, and especially since this isn't about non-existing fantasy races. The political commentary is not really hidden, it comes out as in your face, no matter the surreal stuff happening left and right. In epic fantasy one enters a dungeon trying to rid it from 'evol'. Here, one enters the factory and is likely to follow each 'for fuck's sake!' with an 'oh man not that too'.

Things don't make sense because they do not need to make sense; the adventure is utterly unashamed about it. There is a river of chocolate running around inside the factory for no reason whatsoever. When one superimposes the factory plan over the regional map part of the complex appears to be under a freezing river. The diseases, effects, and whatever have you are gross, gory and unpleasant, not to mention permanent. The Noxious berry curse makes you swell up to impossible proportions and explode in twelve hours, if you do not get juiced. The taffy skin disease makes your body melt as if you felt into a pool with toxic waste la Emil in Robocop. Irresistible smell makes you look like candy to foe and friend alike, not to mention yourself. Here is self-cannibalism, for the times standard cannibalism doesn't cut it. What is an orgy, when you can have a blood orgy around sacrificial mounds with men bleeding on them? The adventure holds the absolute element of surprise when it comes to how it can enervate and demoralize the players. I repeat: the players, not the characters.

Setting feeling and style aside for a moment, I enjoyed the adventure's content. LotFP is not that much about rules-related content but mostly about visceral imagery and feelings. Even under that premise however the module has a lot working for it. As much as it follows the golden standard of the isolated location where the players can wreak havoc in, it is actually extremely thoughtful about hero insertion and extraction. This is one of the first times where I see a logical follow up after the heroes dispose the main adversary, like keeping the factory and running it, turning it into a main part of their campaign. Like most of LotFP adventures, its consequences are as permanent as they are brutal. Don't expect to painlessly fling spells in order to rid yourself from its many curses and diseases. Only some can be cured, and the methods are always ad hoc and painful.

The artwork is fully in line with what the rulebook tries to achieve. It looks cartoonish and cute from far away, yet it is distorted, unpleasant, outright evil at times. There's all sorts of bloated bodies, tentacles jumping out of bleeding eyes, people puking fountains of chocolate, and all this in a style that is usually associated with candy bars, innocence, and fulsome family happiness. Clever referees will use the most of it while running the adventure. Expect a lot of 'you must be kidding me's and 'what the fuck's. Bonus points if you time them well.

The weak points: Fifty pages in A5 format mean that the referee will have quite some work to do. Locations are surreal, disturbing, and gory in one, yet they don't provide the referee with all the material he needs in order to transmit the unpleasantness to his players. This disconnect between what the reader perceives and what the players perceive is endemic in most RPGs, even more so however in Lamentations of the Flame Princess due to its edgy character. Its adventures need substantially more elaboration and description than other scenarios out there. Boxed, ready-to-read texts are old-school, yet this adventure offers none. It needs them, badly. Mixing cuteness and gore on the fly is not the easiest of exercises.

The adventure doesn't stand to close scrutiny in many cases, irrespective of whether it is examined from within the world it represents or through meta-gaming. The adversary is evil because in the 21st century unsustainable growth and the catastrophic exploitation of nature and man should not be tolerated. Within the context of her world however, Lucia de Castillo is not that different to Cecil Rhodes from our world, and that dude didn't need either weird magic nor blood-themed orgies in order to be off-putting. In that sense, the characters storming the factory in order to steal its secrets for other capitalists who would have no qualms about using them is itself wrong and immoral. A referee can nuance this as much as he likes, as things stand however it doesn't make much sense for good characters to be anywhere near there. That is clearly not an issue in Lamentations of the Flame Princess, yet then why does the book goes to such lengths to describe greedy Lucia as evil?

There are many things about the pacing that don't really work, like where Lucia is and when, under what circumstances she will encounter the characters and when exactly she might fight them, etc. Prepare it well so that it doesn't lose its meaning or end in an anti-climactic fashion. You might also need to interfere in non-sensical riddles to which the answer lies in meta and for which neither the players nor the characters will have any hints towards, and some other pieces of design silliness.

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