Vaesen

 

Vaesen is a 'nordic horror' roleplaying game, illustrated and inspired by the works of Johan Egerkrans. It's a really beautiful book, worth having simply for its aesthetics as an artifact. I got it as an add-on to the Kickstarter for their new Mythic Britain & Ireland source book. I suspect I probably first heard of it on the Grognard Files podcast. It's published by the Free League, the Swedish rpg publisher, and uses a modified version of their Mutant Year Zero engine. This is the first game I've read using MYZ, but not the first one I've actually bought.

It's set in 19th century Scandinavia where the creatures of nordic folk tales are real and the player characters are investigators all gifted with a second sight which enables them to see these creatures, or Vaesen.

It uses a dice pool system as it's core mechanic, exclusively utilizing d6. Like VtM you roll a number of dice equal to the sum of your relevant skill and attribute values. A 6 counts as a success, and for most actions only one is required. For opposed rolls the character with the greatest number of successes wins. Each of it's 12 skills defines what happens should you have more than one success, generally you have some kind of choice, in the case of combat you can do more damage, make the opponent drop their weapon etc.

It seems like a very clean, simple system. Combat is spiced up with the use of playing cards for initiative. These are drawn for all combatants at the beginning of a fight (lowest goes first), but can be swapped by expending additional successes on them. I really like the sound of this, I'd been thinking we should try this in our WFRP game (having heard that  Deadlands does something similar) and only hadn't for fear of nerfing the Initiative attribute, but Vaesen's swapping card mechanic provides an elegant answer.

It feels like a system very much geared to creating a certain mood and kind of story. The rules are more abstract than simulationist. Damage to a character is expressed as 4 mental and physical conditions (exhausted, battered, wounded and broken for physical), each of which reduces your dice pool by one, with a descriptive critical being applied when you reach Broken. Dice rolls can be pushed (i.e. re-rolled) at the cost of sustaining a condition.

Character creation is points based, which everything except memento (a personal object you can use to relieve a condition) being chosen rather than rolled. Your age descriptor determines the number of points you get to spread between your attributes and skills, with your Archetype setting the options for Talents (special modifiers and abilities) and various background details, relationship types and starting equipment. There are 10 Archetypes ranging from Officer and Servant to Occultist and Academic.

The game is presented very much as having a set structure, from the advice on how to create a mystery to the fact that each character can gain an Advantage (2 bonus dice for one roll) on the journey to the site of an adventure, to how you can upgrade your base afterwards. It does away with much book keeping by having a resources stat that you roll on for acquiring equipment rather than tracking money.

 I like the sound of this in theory, and can see how these abstract, almost board game elements could facilitate an evocative mystery story, especially including the fact that each character has a Trauma, a Dark Secret and a specific relationship with each of the other player characters. In theory. The fact is our group seem to gravitate naturally to a more simulationist style of play, where often the most fun seems to come when we're playing out a game moment by moment rather than cutting from one scene to the next. I'm definitely pilfering that initiative system though.

It can be purchased from the Free League webstore.

Conan (23-01-21)

I actually read this quite some time before Feng Shui but I've just rolled up a character using the Modiphius webapp and skimmed the action mechanics again to write this up now.

This is the Modiphius Conan game from 2017 using their '2d20 system', with the unwieldy subtitle 'Adventures in an age undreamed of' (which always makes me think of a Chris Morris bit from the IT Crowd). It is a beautifully illustrated book, with just over 400 pages providing the rules and plenty of resources for adventuring in Robert E Howard's Hyborea, including a starter adventure.

Character creation is detailed and evocative with each stage of the process involving assigning or modifying stats as the result of some background story consequence.

You start by picking your homeland, then your basic attributes (Strength, Awareness, Brawn, Coordination, Intelligence, Personality & Willpower), modify these according to ‘Aspects’ (Fast & Fit, Eagle-eyed, Socially Adept etc), then roll or pick Caste (social class) and so on. The system can clearly produce a really varied range of characters with interesting details including story hooks in the form of  Events with Traits which double as a device for the player to regain Fortune Points.

Most characters start each session with 2 Fortune Points, these can be spent on bonus dice for skill tests, gaining additional actions in combat or influencing the story in some way. The GM awards Fortune Points to the players throughout a session as rewards for achieving aims, good role playing etc.

The character I rolled up was from the Priesthood caste and got the 'A place in need of Guidance' event resulting in the ‘Shrine Guardian’ trait. 

I could potentially invoke this trait in play by having members of my scattered congregation appear looking for help, or make the noble nemesis of my faith be the friend of some NPC we are bargaining with, and thus have the GM replenish my Fortune Points as a result. Note there is not much guidance on the specifics so its  very much reliant on player creativity and GM ruling.

 

For me the standout game mechanic is Momentum.

Skill tests are a little like the White Wolf Storyteller system of rolling dice against a target number and counting the number of successes. The difficulty of a task dictates how many successes are required, and in the default situation the character gets 2d20 to try to achieve that. A success is any die roll under the sum of the relevant attribute and skill values. 

For every success more than the quantity required for the task the player gets a point of momentum. This can be used immediately or stored in the party pool for later (to a maximum of 6). Momentum can be spent by anyone to gain extra dice for a skill test, extra damage dice, inhibit an enemy action, glean more detailed information from some inquiry roll, or increase the quality or scope of an action.

This sounds like a lot of fun to me and judging by Seth Skorkowsky's review it facilitates team play and is conducive to the heroic action outcomes you'd find in the source material (as you can boost your actions up to cut heads clean off etc).

The GM has their own version of Momentum - Doom Points. In general the game is rigged in the players' favour; they always win initiative, weak enemies are downed in one blow etc. Doom points provide the GM with a systematized method for overriding this on dramatically appropriate occasions. They start with as many as the sum of all the players' Fortune Points and more are added as a result of player actions or circumstantial effects. Like momentum, doom is represented by a pool of physical tokens on the table, likely contributing tension as the pool builds.

I'm sure there are a load more interesting rules in Conan, but without rereading that whole big book I'll need to leave them for now. Overall it looks like a fun game with plenty of interesting systems for emulating the Conan stories, although I don't remember playing any rpgs back in the day with such meta-gaming systems at their core, so I have no real idea of what that would be like.