Saturday heralded the end of a three session Vaesen campaign. My group, which vacillated between 5 and 7 players per session with everyone choosing to use the randomized character generator in the back of the book. I think they favored that for two reasons: it made figuring out a PC very easy, and it helped generate a back story, particularly useful for players not overly familiar with what a 19th century Swedish investigator should look like.
Players had few issues by and far; Roll20 has a decent character sheet which includes a D66 button and it seemed to calculate things just fine. The odds of getting a success in the incredibly simple Vaesen edition of the Year Zero Engine are generally pretty good unless you're rolling a suboptimal skill, so much of the system's emphasis on only rolling when really needed is predicated on this notion, I suspect. Unlike other Year Zero Engine games, though, Vaesen doesn't have some sort of willpower or mutation mechanic that is predicated on pushing the rolls to generate useful points.
As a GM, some oddities cropped up during play, as follows:
The Preamble Phase - There is a preparation phase of the game, early on during the initial introduction to the mystery. In actual play I realized this was a bit more convoluted to approach than I expected, in that the book didn't give as much useful advice on how to execute it as I would have liked, and I will need to study the prepublished modules to see if they offer any suggested direction.
Issues of Setting - During play we got into a vigorous discussion on Swedish naming conventions of the era. Apparently surnames beyond "Thorson" type nomenclature were not in common use in the 19th century, but none of the "historical name generators" I used talked about this, nor did any of my research (or the Vaesen campaign section) address this. The intent in Vaesen is for this to be a pseudohistorical Sweden that you make your own, but sometimes players (and GMs) crave that specificity or verisimilitude and this did cause a teensy bit of a hiccup during the initial game session. We got over it, though....and ironically much of the game was set in Turku, Finland anyway.
Initiative and Roll20 - Roll20 does not support the kind of deck that works for initiative in Vaesen, and if you can craft such a deck in Roll20 I do not know how to do so. We made do with a regular deck of cards and winged it.
During the course of game play I got a pretty good feel for the base game mechanics. If we play again we'll be exploring more of how the group can explore and develop their castle in Upsala, the core setting for the investigators in the game. It's reminiscent of the way the Cthulhu by Gaslight sourcebooks for Hudson & Brand handle things, where the campaign revolves around 33 Golden Circle and the legacy of the erstwhile investigators. It proved a useful setup nonetheless, as I relied entirely on the expected starting point of the core book to get the PC introductions and purposes out of the way.
Very little actual violence happened, with one brief shoot-out in session two. The vaesen encountered, while potentially very threatening, were approached with a level of circumspection by the PCs and as such they were leaning heavily into a problem-solving approach and no violence (beyond some errant NPCs in the mix) was had. The potential for any encounter with the vaesen to turn lethal was pretty obvious, though.
After my first session I was feeling a bit unconvinced I wanted to continue, but by the end of session two I had found a bit of a groove, treating it a bit like the way AD&D 2nd Edition used to let you play in a sort of gothic European setting in the Masque of the Red Death for Ravenloft, except with the PCs being very fragile and the vaesen being in their own ways just as bewildered and conflicted about humans as the humans (who could see or believe in them) were about vaesen. The end result felt a lot more to me like a dark fantasy tale with a sprinkling of gothic horror and some victorian investigative procedurals than anything else; the book itself seems to imply you could (or should) lean hard into the enigmatic horror of the vaesen, but its really hard to do...especially if you were, like me, a kid growing up with stories about tomte (nisse) and other creatures. Making them feel scary or mysterious can be a bit of a task, though I think I pulled it off.
For my group I think it was a nice change of pace; horror that wasn't too horrifying, and an historical setting that was also vaguely mythic, while still being mostly grounded. A lack of overall familiarity with the Nordic19th century didn't overly impair us, though it as a side effect led me down a rabbit hole learning about the Lapps, better known as Mani, of whom I have family ancestry. That was entirely due to one of the online sourcebooks Free League lets fans publish, but it in turn got me reading extensively elsewhere about the mani and their marginalized existence....interesting stuff.
My group overall had fun. I think I may run it again, down the road, but who knows. The system is incredibly simple, and I am more interested in trying the more complex versions of the Year Zero Engine to be found in Forbidden Lands and Mutant Year Zero now, to see how it holds up when extra layers of complexity are added to the mix. This might sound odd to those who prefer simpler mechanics, but maybe think of what I am referring to less as "complexity" and more as "nuance," and I like nuance in my rule systems. I will say this much: I am now more motivated to get a Kult game together.
Next up we will at last give Death in Space a shot. I'll write more about that soon.
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