YMMV / Lamentations of the Flame Princess

• Broken Base: The game encourages some extremely suspect GM practices that constitute being a Killer Game Master, and many of the modules have explicit no-win scenarios. This has led to the game's difficulty becoming the subject of debate among tabletop players, especially since the setting and mechanics tend to Grimdark campaigns. Is the game's willingness to enable the Killer Game Master style interesting and a fun throwback to older pen and paper systems where such a thing was commonplace, or is it an outdated and frustrating style of play that was left behind for a reason? The main crux seems to be whether you believe the game is a Call of Cthulhu style horror trek or a legitimate fantasy adventure, since the game has a pretty serious identity crisis about what it actually is.
  • The game's bend towards violence and depravity is noted to be effective for horror, but the sheer depth of said depravity is often called into question as being truly necessary. There's also some debate about whether or not the depiction of violence against women is keeping within the game's dark tone and an aversion of Men Are the Expendable Gender, or if it carries some unsettling subtext of its own (especially considering the titular Flame Princess, who has lots of artwork of her being butchered or gravely wounded in some way, has been mentioned as being based off of the author's ex-girlfriend).
  • That one major contributor (Zak Smith) is a known abuser, that one (in)famous adventure featured lots of racism, sexual violence, and sexual assault (Blood in the Chocolate, so infamous that even before the author disowned it, the creators of Lancer refused to participate in the Ennie awards over BitC winning an award), and Raggi's aforementioned portrayals of violence towards women (one based on his ex) all make LofTP a divisive work, typical of arguments around the OSR: on one hand, the adventures are often mindbending subversions of typical RPG cliches, but on the other, the edginess and constant things that out right kill you in the aforementioned adventures drive away a lot of people.
• Complete Monster:
  • The Pale Lady is a ruthless Fay who has children kidnapped to use as slave labor until death or she finds no use for them, with the boys turned into eunuchs to better serve. Many of the firstborn children taken by the Pale Lady are sacrificed so she may obtain her powers, her supply of rabbit-men soldiers propagated by her raping human men she finds appealing before using the offspring as disposable Cannon Fodder.
  • Blood in the Chocolate: Lucia de Castillo enslaves a tribe of pygmies for their Cocoa tree with the belief she is a god so that she may create a delicious, addictive chocolate to control the trade across Europe. Allowing her pygmies to torture and sacrifice many people, Lucia uses others for her sick experiments, including children, who she infects with plagues and with her candy so that deadly and agonizing side effects can be observed. Others are kept as sex slaves during the experiments so that Lucia can use their bodies for her own pleasure.
• Nightmare Fuel: Much of the artwork that accompanies the Grindhouse Edition box set is High Octane Nightmare Fuel. One especially notable image features a large monster forcing its way out of a very swollen woman's womb, while another monster eats the woman's breast, and five nude women impale a man with a sword. Something Awful takes a closer look at that, along with several other such Gorn-filled images here.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • Changelings not only mimic people perfectly down to memories and personality, but also produce a confusion effect when they transform that makes it impossible to tell which of the two identical people is the original. If a player character gets copied, even the player doesn't know whether they're currently playing their original character or the copy.
  • The chapter on the dErO in Veins of the Earth is full of this stuff - descriptions of various mind control techniques that you may or may not have already been exposed to, Suspiciously Specific Denials about what the dErO may be up to, suspicion machines, conspiracy pills...
• Rated M for Money: The game's creator admits that style isn't the only reason he chooses shocking art and subjects. This is also a factor in him re-printing Carcosa, an already-controversial setting owing to the various vile acts required to perform sorcerous rituals.