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I’d love to hear how it goes. I also recently made an interactive character sheet for the new 2nd edition of the game that has a quick reference to help new players.

Yeah I think Leo is working on a gm screen for the 2e release so I’ll just wait to see what he comes up with. Should be great.

And it loves being referenced. The only thing I wish I could have found a way to fit is the wounds table. It’s one of the more interesting features of vaarn combat, but it will have to remain a gm side thing. Maybe a bookmark or a gm reference will happen sometime

Awesome, I hope you find it useful at your table. I know I love having a cheat sheet as a player taking on a new system. Hopefully this will get more people playing vaarn.

Haha, nope. We are running late.

Oh sweet, I’m so glad you found some use for those paintings! I love the book. Well done.

Its got the most babelicious art though.

I’ll let Austin speak to rinkrank’s motives but for the design critique. I had played with other ideas but I wanted to try and build something that the creators would see as an homage to the game they made. First foray into a new game especially I like to learn the rules of the design before I start breaking them. I’m sure this reflects my relative lack of experience in design, but I am really trying to learn more than express in my work right now.

Yeah, I had no idea that was going on, old Rinkrank would have got me.

Thank you! I hope you get to play it and enjoy. Re: linearity, I heard the same critique of Into the Fog on the Between Two Cairns podcast, but having played it I’ve actually found Fatherfog does a clever slight of hand here; the decision making falls to the characters and how they interact with each other and the world. In Into the Fog, we all ate the stew, all but one. When we encountered the glistening armour, I went off the string to examine it, unafraid, holding my lantern. And when the hair tried to capture me, I shattered my lantern to defeat it with fire, but leaving me without light. It definitely inverts some expectations about classic role-playing games, and arguably b2c are right, this is a story game with torches and rations.

Re: Mansrot, its a good call, and I think the thing we came to after play test was that a description of the three sisters with cloaks and brooches would actually really support clocking what was going on. That said, it was fun to play it and have the PCs NOT recognize mansrot, only realizing later that the old woman Rinkrank had devoured was someone they cared for per the questions in the intro.

We build on the foundations of the ones that build before us. It was really fun analyzing the work of Into the Fog and working to achieve a clear homage while still making something unique. You are very kind, thank you for reading it.

Thanks for checking it out. We definitely looked to Into the Fog for inspiration on designing the adventure and just lifted the three-act structure directly. Austin is really great at weaving interesting choices into what, on the surface, looks like a linear adventure (see Carving Ymir). It does make a good one-shot, though Rinkrank is a tough fight without leveraging his trick, so your players may need those backup characters.

Hey hey, thanks for reading. The way you describe the mountain is basically how I perceive it. The Rinkrank entry bit is from the fairy tale and so his asking to be let in a trigger for PCs who know it to realize that can trap his beard in a glass window or door. It is definitely a fairytale conceit, telegraphed by his song. The glass post is mostly meant to act as a last place the beast will go without a push, but the writing is from the fairy tale: the Princess on the Glass Hill (or the Maiden on the Glass Mountain) where the youngest son of three uses magic horse to climb the mountain and win her hand. The author is ostensibly a king, taken from his daughters by the fog (leaving them orphaned to the village). Glad you enjoyed it, having run it I can say that it definitely is a bit cryptic in that the PCs without knowledge of the folklore will find somethings to inscrutable but I think that actually added quite a bit to the fairytale nature of the game and the players all really seemed to enjoy the strangeness of it.

Yeah, I hear it. I went with the traditional approach to page numbering on the pamphlet, but I did try a bunch of things (the one you mentioned specifically in fact). I ended up liking the split of act 1 and 2 across their creatures with art more.

Yeah, I’ve only really run and played in a few things with Vaarn that weren’t just generated from the tables inside, which I think is just such a wonderful resource. I am hoping this finds its way to plenty of Vaarn tables and I get to hear all the crazy stuff that goes on. I heard one group hit the Kronophage already, devestating.

Thanks so much, you are too kind. I have been head over heals into a vaarn hole so when the star aligned with this title I had to do it.

duuuuude

Page refs are a pain, especially when there are 2 existing versions of the books, a new one (2e) in development and the first version is just 4 zines. Pure chaos! I will leverage my electron wizard powers and hoist words from castles of caged light. Anyway man, thanks for reading it and sharing your thoughts, I really laboured my ass off over this so I’m really glad it landed for you. I deeply admire your work, and respect your taste.

Well, you have heard of the game system now, AND I linked to the SRD, so you can go check out the rules and stuff for free. If you get nothing else from this, exposure to vaarn is what I want you to have.

Yeah I know there its a heavy subject, but don’t let it get your down, you can always try again next loop!

Hey thanks for reading. You know originally the idea was the party could start from any hex, and only one of the hooks started you in a specific hex, but in the end I decided it was less clunky to run from the hip if you just have a place to start and restart from, save the GM some work, and we can always just override that at our own tables anyway. I feel like designing in small spaces you get a lot of value from just deciding on the thing sometimes.

I’d love to hear how it goes! Thanks for checking it out. I had considered Black Sword Hack for it originally (would have been more sorcerous) but was also dancing around the idea of Mothership.

“She may not rise, lest a storm rage for 7 days and 7 nights without relent”: the safeguard is the trigger, and the weather is the plot. Pairing five statted groups with a d6 activity column gives thirty scenes off one table, so the referee never invents what anyone is doing? The crown giving +1 max HP an hour: two hours to help the village, four to save Marlus, so every mercy is priced in boss health, just sick.

You are too kind. I’m a huge fan of your work, so it means a lot to hear you think well of mine.

Thanks for the kind words. I really enjoyed reading yours as well. That lava trap at the end is devilish stuff.

I’ve never played starfield or really heard much about it. Dune is definitely in the register for Vaults of Vaarn, as is Gene Wolfe and a bunch of other Appendix N influences. I think at some level with these things, you are relying on the evocative quick jab of words to deliver a mental image that isn’t necessarily going to land for everyone. Thanks for checking it out.

“Not thriving communities, but blossoming ones” does more work than most supplements manage in a full page. The creed reads like real doctrine, not villain notes. The vine strip running the full width of the interior looks decorative but it’s the 48-hour clock, so the art is the thing you drop a token on. The real prize is the double-d12 wares roll: rolling what the priests gave you, then rolling again to learn whether that gift was the poisoned one. Nobody at the table knows which kindness carried it. Stealing that.

Incredible entry. Really a joy to read, fun themes covered in an evocative way. I love the map art and playful layout and design decisions that were made. The Descent Events sounds legitimately terrifying, like being pulled apart in the hands of the matrix kind of stuff. Very messed up, I love it.

Well that’s just a hell of a lot of fun right there. Great work.

I’m glad you feel the vibes came through. I was really trying to hit a tone I didn’t know would land. The gravity well, the impossibility of escape, really seemed to line up with my conception of despair.

Thanks for reading! I love my little phantom of the opera snake. Glad I added to the hype pile for Vaarn, a worthy system for exploration, to be sure.

Too kind, I did work pretty hard to achieve some brevity here, but I admit to standing on the shoulders of titans (the age of whom is a Vaarnism)

Tight solid slice of adventure. That stress carrying capacity design is super elegant and works great for forcing the decision making. Fun ideas well executed with a clean layout and clearly written for play. Well Done.

Haha, dangit. Yeah I had made that note for myself (councilor -> counselor) and I guess just missed implementing the fix. Good catch. The hex coordinate system is just being expressed as X.Y instead of X,Y because I thought it looked more sci-fi. Agreed on the brevity of 21st century digital boy, but alas the space taketh away. Thanks for reading.

Sounds like they got mushrooms in their brains and they’re gonna have to do some murder about it. Pretty weird, good stuff.

Fun little romp to release a imprisoned dragon soul. I love that its the dragon who gave us magic and she wants us to go on quests to bring her stories of the outside world. Pretty fun.

Cool dungeon map, lots of interesting choices to make. I don’t think its helping the adventure but I lol’d at poster of spider on webline saying “HANG IN THERE BABY!” The corpse pile feeding the fly population to feed the spiders is evocative if also totally representative of the inefficiencies of spider cult food security.

Cool wave defender setup. I like the idea of the battle continuing to fall back deeper in the castle. The players actions seem like they have good payoff.

Fun to read, beautiful to look at, even turned me on to a new game I’ll have to get into ;) well done.

I love these little NPC vignettes. Wild vapor-wave style visuals, lots of fun. Ptarmigans? Sneaking my little Canadian chickens into adventures now are we? Very nice. “Thank you”