It looks like the Pathfinder 2E campaign (Extinction Curse) is coming to another pause soon. We're on....um, I think it's the end of the second module in the Path, but we're already like level 8 so I am not really entirely sure, maybe we plowed on in to the third adventure path. Who knows! I am a good player and simply do not cheat and look at modules I am playing in.
But that means I'll be back to running again soon. I've been running a live ongoing high level D&D 5E campaign on Wednesdays, but I've pleasantly avoided running anything on VTT lately. I have been messing around with the prospect of Foundry at last, and I think I could do it....Foundry has a lot of potential, although it also has some curiously rough spots as well, things which, say, Roll20 does exceedingly well but which Foundry does not (and the reverse is also true).
I threw out a mess of ideas to the player group, and the one which seems to have the most traction is Vaesen. It's not hard to see why: it has an exotic historical setting (19th century Sweden), an entirely new and different approach to horror (the monsters of Swedish myth and folklore), and an interesting game system with a robust and easy way to make genre-appropriate characters without needing to be intimately familiar with Sweden in the 1850's-1860's.
My biggest road block at the moment is grasping how to make Vaesen as scary as much of its descriptive text promises. It has some decent background and setup for the GM to work with, but when I get to actually reading some of the monster descriptions they sound entertaining....but maybe not as scary or weird as I'd like? The art, based on a famous book of illustrations on Vaesen in Sweden, is almost adorable in its modest cartoonish style, giving me a "children's spooky stories for kids" vibe, which --I'll be honest-- is going to be hard for me to work with, because these illustrations generally aren't evocative of adult horror.
There's got to be something I am missing, some spooky and unknowable element I am overlooking throughout the process. Maybe I am just ruined by more grim and dark horror like Call of Cthulhu and Kult (a game which I can readily, almost immediately see the full and dark potential of)? Maybe my poor old brain has been too deeply influenced by decades of obsession with Cosmic Horror to find itself able to wallow in traditional spooky old folklore. "It needs something truly weird, really out there," my old brain is thinking. "It can't really just be an angry fairy that's curdling milk (and maybe the milk maid is being curdled, too)."
Still, I am going to give it the old college try and see how it goes. Everyone is prepped with main and backup characters already, and the player enthusiasm is strong, so I must feed from that for my own.
I mean, hey, at least its not yet another D&D game! More on that and my extreme D&D burnout in a future post, though.
I understand your quandry completely. The setting of Vaesen is incredibly evocative and I'm definitely stealing (adapting) the headquarters development system for my campaign but most of their adversaries are a little too fanciful/fairy tale without enough creepy. I think they tread further over the line into 'keeping a tenuous peace between vaesen and humanity' when I'm more inspired to develop 'repel the forces of horrific baby eating darkness' tales. Johan Egerkrans does have some genuinely darker stuff but a lot more pretty troll maids with cow tails. Mining the more horror themed stuff from the core book bestiary as well as Mythic Britain and Ireland should give you a decent base to build on.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment...I agree, Mythic Britain and Ireland add some good stuff. There are creepy monsters in Vaesen (such as the Nuckalavee) but it is a bit of wading to find them. I'm determined to find a way to make this work for me and my players, as they seem quite fired up about it, but a small part of me feels like the net result may still be a bit too close to a "D&D like" feel, in the sense that the monsters may be interesting but not exactly evocatively scary. We'll see. Some of the issue is simply a Free League Style, I think....they tend to have games with a specific format and approach that are incredibly procedural and very busy in over-explaining processes. This often means room for nuance or mystery must be forced in a bit.
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