TTRPG Review: Vaesen
I finally figured out why this game sounded so familiar: "vaesen" is the term Grimm used to refer to its monster-people. Remember Grimm? It was on around the same time as Once Upon a Time during that big wave of "dark fairy tale" stuff? Anyway, that's not important, just something that's been bugging me.
Now, Vaesen the tabletop game hails from Free League Publishing, who have done several other cool titles I like. The concept is "Nordic Victorian fae horror," which is four words I like smashed together in a very appealing way. James Bojaciuk of 18thWall invited me and several others to play a test campaign for review purposes. And we all sort of ended up liking it a lot. Look for his review, and reviews from other players in the campaign, down the line. But this one is mine.
As a system, I like the majority of it. And the peripherals are a bit like the little girl with a curl: when they're good they're very, very good; and when they're bad... well, I'll get into that.
The Core System
I've mentioned in other TTRPG reviews that I really appreciate any system that has characterization baked into the mechanics. For example, PBTA games will tie leveling/progressing to making difficult rolls, failing rolls, or addressing your character's backstory or class while playing. In that vein, a huge chunk of the Vaesen character sheet is given over to characterization—not just your own, but how your character interacts with everyone else.
Each character has a Trauma and a Dark Secret that guides their bit of the story. And, as you're solving spooky mysteries with your group, you're encouraged to air out the group's Dark Secrets as well. This is a great mechanic and also encourages at least some secrecy at the table (which is great for players like me who enjoy less inter-party pre-planning). The down side to this is that, when your Dark Secret is discovered, you're encouraged to take on a new one. That's fine for a short campaign, but it can start to feel like your character's backstory is back-heavy or fragmented for longer ones. Some of the suggested Traumas and Dark Secrets are also a little iffy, but most of us came up with our own anyway.
In terms of actual mechanics, you're building pools of d6es for your stats and have levels of physical and mental harm (affected by attack rolls and fear rolls, respectively) rather than hit points. 6's are successes and 1's are failures. The presence of a 6 cancels out any 1's, but the absence of either can be read either as a failure or as a success with complications at the DM's discretion. A relatively easy system to get used to, with minimal math.
Players also get a base that they can build out over time using resources and points from doing missions. I really loved this aspect of it, as it presented little bonuses that helped everyone while also creating a setting for character-centric roleplay.
Mythic Britain & Ireland
This is where our campaign actually started, and boy was it great. Maybe it's because our group was made up of people who are already interested in the mythology of the British Isles, but this was such a good fit for us.
The book contains three playable mysteries and lots of resources for various beasties and creatures. If you're an expert on this aspect of history and mythology, you might notice a few things that don't quite fit into place. Regardless, the mysteries were really enjoyable and a good way to get our feet wet at the beginning.
The one downside is that there are occasional dead ends and red herrings during the information-gathering phase. These are fine in non-interactive fiction like books and TV shows, where the path to the finish is already set in stone. But when you have a group of people chasing down leads in real time, it doesn't really add to the thrill of the hunt to find out that you've been hitting your head against a brick wall for half an hour. Fortunately, our DM agreed, and would tell us outright if something was engineered to be a dead end.
Overall, this was a great introduction to the world of Vaesen, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a solid introduction.
Now, though—woe, Lost Mountain Saga be upon ye.
Lost Mountain Saga
It should be very telling that, at one point, we ran a timer to see how long it took until our group went in a direction that the campaign book didn't account for. (15 minutes, by the way.) While the conceit of The Lost Mountain Saga is super intriguing, the execution does not live up to the promise. Most of the action relied on the player characters going along with whatever the story wanted, even if it went against all logic. Simply to keep the game entertaining, our DM had to retrofit a lot of things. He would, however, read to us what was supposed to happen.
Now, I am a big believer that it's on you as the player to figure out why your character is here, and not on the rest of the group to convince your character to be there. However, there's a difference between embracing the flow of the story and, say, following an obvious cult into a forest, accepting food from them, and watching them kill a horse. Especially in a game in which you play a supernatural investigator. There's only so much narrative causality one can endure before one starts to wonder why this wasn't just a book instead.
The actual mythos of the expansion, which involves an archaeological dig and ancient Norse god-giants, got me really excited. It also made a great setting for our characters' expanding stories. But so many of the mysteries just felt... off. A man of the cloth attempting to bring back witch-burning and going completely unopposed in the era in which this game was set felt strangely out of touch, and yet it was still not the most out of touch thing in this expansion.
From what I understand, this expansion was based on an actual play podcast, which I have not listened to, so I can't comment on how it was transferred. All I know is that our DM did the absolute most to bring it up to playable standards, and that's the opposite of what a ready-to-play campaign book should be.
To sum up: Vaesen is a fantastic, atmospheric, character-forward TTRPG. It's so good that our party is looking to play more in the near future, even though the review process is over. It's so good that it's inspired characters we still talk about in Discord DMs. Mythic Britain & Ireland is excellent, and will be catnip for enjoyers of British folk horror and lore. The Lost Mountain Saga... is, I'm afraid, simply not good.
At the very least, I would recommend picking up the core book and Mythic Britain & Ireland. There are two other books of mysteries that we've yet to try, but the concepts intrigue me. I'm hoping our little group will band back together again soon to investigate them.
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