Made it about an hour last night into our third Coriolis session before tons of frustrations and disappointments that have been burbling under the surface broke free. I shut down our game right at that moment, debriefed with the players for a bit, then jumped in on setting up for our next game (The Veil, which I’ll talk about in another post).
I’ve spent most of last night and this morning chewing on just what the heck happened. Still don’t have firm answers but I know it’s a mix of the game and me. I’ll talk about both.
The Game
Coriolis has some problems, both at the mechanical and the conceptual/support level. The tl;dr is that the mechanisms in place are super conventional and don’t really do anything at all to support the game’s concepts.
The Darkness Point economy sucks. It just does. I honestly thought I could make it work and do interesting things but it’s just a very shallow, poorly conceived economic cycle. The very short version: when you pray to reroll misses (which happens all the time because of how they’ve rejiggered “success” from Mutant: Year Zero) you hand the GM Darkness Points (DP going forward). You also gain DP from space travel, and from being awful human beings – killing and torturing and whatnot. Then the GM has a list of things they can spend DP on, with what I read as a strong implication that these are all things the GM can’t do without DP. Most of the choices are combat-mechanical: make them drop their weapon or empty their clip, or give NPCs some mechanical advantages they don’t normally have. But DP do other things too! Like invoke a character’s “personal problem” or give them a mania or whatever.
Here’s what happened in our game: because you’re pretty much praying all the time, virtually every time you go to the dice you’re giving the GM a DP. There’s no shortage of DP. I ended up with a ridiculous surplus, like 12 or something left over from session 2. With that many DP, I now have unlimited resources to inflict endless misery on the characters. Then it’s on me to decide, is endless misery actually that fun or interesting for the players? I’m all about challenges and tough decisions, but I guess I don’t have the sadistic streak necessary to either constantly drag down the players with manias and problems, or save up and just dump it all on their heads and cackle because, you dumbasses, why did you give me so many DPs?
The feeling of the DP economy is awful. And it’s uninteresting.
The money economy sucks maybe worse than the DP thing. This to me feels like a junction of lots of small elements of the game: the sandbox quality of the setting, the procedural tools at hand, and the core assumptions of what your crew will be up to.
Coriolis at first appears super conventional in its approach to money: you have a detailed ledger of what you’ve earned, what you own, and what you owe. What it doesn’t have is any kind of guidelines as to what one should be earning, what you should own, and under what circumstances you actually owe.
Newer-wave games like Torchbearer have nailed down this kind of capital/labor cycle: going to town costs and costs and costs, the dungeons are fine-tuned to produce not quite enough, and the whole point of the exercise is the grind. And that’s baked into the premise, right? If you’re a dungeon delver in Torchbearer you fucked up at some point or just never had good choices in your life.
In Coriolis, by contrast, you decide first on what kind of ship crew you’re going to be. That is, what kinds of adventures you want to go on. We chose Explorers, but there are also Traders, Mercenaries, Agents, and Pilgrims. Feels like Blades in the Dark, right? Well, so what the game doesn’t do is demand answers as to why. Why does your crew go exploring? What are you trying to accomplish? That was an oversight on my part, that I never thought to really drill into that. So the conventional answer, as always in conventional games, is “for the money.”
The money thing is badly underbaked in Coriolis. You can decide on what kind of lifestyle you want, but there’s literally no reason not to go as cheap as possible. The GM can fictionally position things in your life if you go Spartan or Luxury, I suppose. It would have been interesting and easy to have larger implications to your lifestyle choice. There are other reasons to spend money as well: your monthly ship payment, ship upkeep (which does not work as advertised; I spent a couple weeks trying to make the ship grind make sense and it just doesn’t), cash for gear, cash for portal jumps.
The one place where income is discussed is in the Atlas Compendium, which has a mission generator tool. Well, that right off the bat is totally a sandbox tool, right? Here’s what’s available, take it or leave it. And if the money grind were tighter and better implemented, that might produce some interesting pressure to go out and do shit. But god, how boring. How. Boring.
The Problem Is Me
I think I’m the problem, frankly.
The fact that the game pushes us toward treating money as the point of the exercise (without providing good tools to make that an interesting exercise) just bummed me out so bad. Getting jobs and paying bills, is that really the best and highest use of our make-believe time? Has #latecapitalism insinuated itself that deeply into our fucking brains? Awful. Depressing thought.
So falling back on the easy fallback? My fault, totally. I’ve lost the skill or interest or whatever in building out the bigger picture, the plot. Asking the players “so why are you a crew? Why exploration and not mercenaries?” And the game throws all these sandboxy things at me: a mission generator and a system generator and encounter tables. And none of their sandboxy tools provide anything interesting to hold onto.
This surprised me so much because Mutant Year Zero is so, so good. And it’s a sandbox! But Mutant’s is a completely different approach. You don’t give a shit about your money. You give a shit about your Ark and keeping it going and just surviving from day to day. You don’t go out into the Zone to get rich, because the Zone will eat you alive with the Rot and monster encounters and phenomena and cannibal cults. And you’re not constantly facing failure and an uninteresting decision to not-fail. Pushing is good and risky in MYZ in a way that prayer is utterly uninteresting and not-risky in Coriolis.
I can hear some of you asking “but why not spend those DP on badness?” And you’d be right. All I can do is point to my comments above and just say, again, that on the GM side, spending DP feels either boring or sadistic and I hated it.
I’m not sure when I lost my taste or ability for conventional roleplaying.
It’s probably been a long time coming. And for whatever reason, probably a cocktail of sentimentality and habit, I kept trying to plug away at it despite knowing at a gut level that it would not deliver what I want out of play.
One of my players asked me last night, “Why do you keep bringing these trad games to the table?” And that was funny to me, because I thought I hardly ever did! But we were able to recount a list of conventional games we’ve attempted and shrugged at after: Stars Without Number, Edge of the Empire, 13th Age. I’ve subjected myself to Dungeon Crawl Classics and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay more recently as a player and just kind of shrugged at those as well. Hopefully I’ve learned my lesson.
When I think about the games where we really got something out of it, they were not what I would consider conventional games: The One Ring, King Arthur Pendragon, Mutant: Year Zero, Apocalypse World, Urban Shadows, Epyllion, Sagas of the Icelanders. Yeah, it’s PbtA heavy. I explained, half heartedly, that I was trying to break up the drama games and the adventure games. Or more specifically and honestly, I think, I was trying to break up the PbtA games with palate cleaners.
If Coriolis had just recreated the magic they achieved in Mutant: Year Zero I would have been so very happy, I think. But the game’s premise I think would have to be different. Now I’m looking ahead to Forbidden Lands, another Modiphius jam, and I’m really worried that it’s gonna be another Coriolis. Which is my problem, not the game’s problem, which provides enough scaffolding for conventional play fans to get something out of it (i.e a pretty fun interpersonal combat system, pass/fail-with-complication resolution, nice array of level-up perks, seriously cool space combat system). In fact I kind of resent that I don’t have the focus or interest or time or bandwidth, whatever it is, to make this kind of play interesting to me or my players. But I don’t, and I need to be honest about that to myself.
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I’m sorry you had a less than good time! You should try Hillfolk so I can suck everything you learn out of your brain.
I’ve been dreading this likelihood since I read the Coriolis quickstart. Usually I can find something in a game that jumps out at me and makes me excited, and despite my efforts, I couldn’t find that in these rules.
That said, I think you’re right that a lot of it really does come down to play styles. I have a guy in my group who would probably run a really great game of Coriolis, but at the same, he would be happy just ignoring whatever rules he didn’t like and whatever he felt didn’t work, and making up anything he wanted to fill in the blanks.
Just wondering here, because I am about to read the book and run some stuff in Coriolis, but would the DP economy be better maintained if success was happening on 5’s and 6’s as opposed to just 6’s? That was something I was kind of curious about myself when I was reading the quick start and I did that thing that a lot of us gamers do- pick up dice and see if I can succeed at tasks easily or not.
Apocalypse World games are thuddingly traditional.
What feels like sadism to the GM is often delightful to players, I have discovered. The wrongness of what you’re doing as the GM is magnified in your own mind. The shit you dump on them is what players end up thinking about and enthusing about between sessions. Although I’m not convinced “you drop your gun” or “your obsession rears its head” is a misfortune of that sort, so that particular list might not be a good one.
I absolutely agree Coriolis’ money system is a huge misstep. Honestly they should have looked to the 1001 Nights source material, where fortunes appear and disappear more or less instantaneously, and ultimately are not really relevant to the virtue or evil of the characters.
That sucks. I hate abandoning a game in the middle, but sometimes you gotta cut your losses. We did that with The Sprawl – we just wanted too much between-mission play.
You are correct. Coriolis was a gorgeous looking half baked attempt. It promised thing it could never deliver. And the only thing worth a damn is the setting. Like you I was SOOOO hoping for the crew and ship to take the place of the Ark from MYZ and everything else to tie back into that dynamic. But after reading the rules and seeing all this (let’s face it) trad game stuff with miserable and broken lables… I just facepalmed and never even bothered to try it out at the table. Still bought the first campaign book just released though. Because a) it’s gorgeous and b) I might port it into another system.
Paul Beakley I found myself nodding way too much to all of your points. It is a mirror image of the Coriolis game I ran and abandoned last year. I felt bad about doing so as some of the players totally loved the game but from my GM side it was just misery.
Jason Corley seriously, this feels like a missed opportunity to align the two influences. If the spaceship crew / middle-eastern fairy tale genres have taught us anything it’s that the actual numbers aren’t what matters, it’s whether, at that moment, you’re lush with treasure and looking to blow it, desperately need cash to make it to tomorrow, or are doing just fine thank you and soon to be one of the other two things.
If that’s the source material you want to emulate, this game forcing the GM to try to engineer that in the economy seems like way too much overhead without guiding you to those states. Maybe some time pressure on paying off your ship would have helped. As a big number, it’s distant and abstract.
Right, if the story needs you to be broke, the GM should simply have the option of throwing in a few DP and shouting “YOU ARE BROKE, PRAISE BE TO GOD”
The evil part of me wants to I-told-you-so really bad right now, but honestly, I’m bummed that the game imploded mid-session for you guys. ? I was assuming that, at the very least, you’d craft some awesomeness out of the game and then just talk about the hurdles you had to clear in your post-mortem.
The upside may be that this was the implosion you needed to realize what games work best for you and that you need not take “breaks” from them.
I ran five sessions online, but only managed it because I cut corners, house-ruled, and twisted the thing into submission. Very much cooked instead of raw. There’s a lot I like here, but getting to that is much more work than it needs to be. I haven’t read Mechatron or the Forbidden Lands draft yet because I’m nervous about how they square with the rest of these games.
Modiphius has become a cautionary tale, a red flag. One very good game and then a lot of beautiful garbage.
Half-baked would be my descriptor of choice.
Mechatron has some neat looking stuff but I need to let my heart heal before I can trust again.
A man’s got to know his limitations.
I’m going to use the original rules instead, but gently port them to Fate Core, for many of the reasons you’re stating.
MadJay Brown ran a oneshot that I played in, and it seemed cool, but when we got into a gun fight, the rules seemed to be poorly explained. So yeah, I think that half-baked seems to fit nicely.
IMHO, one shot version hides the systems busted economies. I remember that game Matt Harrop
Your experience matches my expectation from having played MZ0 (amazing) and then comparing to what they had changed. They had set up such a beautiful functioning mechanical ecosystem in MZ0. It couldn’t have been an accident. There are too many moving parts that mesh too nicely to have just fallen into it. Somebody over there did that on purpose.
And then they had the opportunity to do the same with Coriolis. Different theme, different, gears, different sources of stress…but it could have been built with the same mechanical eco-system…and they just muffed it.
I didn’t compare designer credits to see if it was the same or different team, but huge missed opportunity. I said in a Coriolis thread the day after I read the game “If I ever run this, I’m going to run it with MY0”
Fortunately Forbidden Lands is based on the full MY0 tool kit. They just released a new beta I’m hoping to read this weekend. I’ve liked the mechanics I’ve seen, but I haven’t seen the “ark” equivalent yet, which is supposed to be in this release. Unfortunately they got 1 strike with me for the hatchet job they did on the setting. The quickstart setting was so clean, so perfect, so uncluttered…then they went full stupid on the last release and really bummed me out.
One nice things to come out of the FL KS is that we will eventually see an SRD for the MYZ system. I can imagine several settings and ides which would work by leaning into what made the original so strong.
Yes, All of this — so true. The game system is frustrating as hell. And frankly, I find the setting lacking too, at least if the game wants you to be a crew of a space ship. Or maybe it’s just that I am unused to and therefore feel locked down in published settings of this kind. If I were to play again I would probably either decide to put the player characters right in the middle of the political games on coriolis station, or begin the game just after the sudden destruction of the whole station and it’s council. Just to destroy the sense of static status quo I felt reading and playing it.
Does anyone know of a good non-pbta science fiction game? With space ships? (I couldn’t care less about production values as long as the ideas and game system are exiting.)
Hey L. D. try out Elysium Flare, from Brad Murray.
I literally just got the release email, but I’ve been following along on Patreon and it’s a cool space opera game with bunches of aliens, spaceships, and three branches of physics that most any of Your Favorite Space Opera can fit into.
rpgnow.com – Elysium Flare
You mentioned Mutant Mechatron upthread. I just thought I’d quickly post to say it was a delight to me as a player. The dice mechanic works and does the clever things with colours and rerolls from M:Y0. The setting and theme work for me far better than I thought it would when I was persuaded to play.
Coriolis I’ve not got to the table as it didn’t do much for me on a read through. I had intended to try again, but I won’t worry too much now. Though it’s the brokenness which troubles me more than the tradness. I’m sorry you couldn’t make it work for you.
Adam Schwaninger thanks! I will check that out!
I think Fria Ligan is about 50/50 so far with my experience. Really love MYZ and Tales from the Loop, disappointed in GenLab Alpha and Coriolis. Haven’t dug into Mechatron or Forbidden Lands yet.
JPierson71 I ran Jorune using the Coriolis system a few times. In the first installment, the players really felt like they were wandering shits. I could never use the DPs because they were borderline failing at everything without my help. I quickly adjusted in the second game using d10s with success on a 9-10 and that seemed to address the issue. It raises a few issues (like critical hits table on d6s but nothing major). I suspect (but I haven’t tried) that successes on 5-6 might be too radical and unbalance the other way (no incentive to pray, you succeed most of the time).
L. D. I haven’t played Firefly, but I’ve read it and liked what I read. I think it could be a good hack for Coriolis, but would have to go back and look at it more in-depth.
Forbidden Lands is very much a fantasy MY0 port. They’re remarkably similar.
Question — did your reluctance to use the DP maybe break the feedback loop “I pray a lot, I get hit a lot by DP-fuelled trouble, I don’t pray so much in future”?
I’m really sorry you didn’t enjoy yourself. I hope Forbidden Lands works better for you. The one game of Coriolis I played at GenCon already had me thinking “so, I pray for every roll, right? That seems…weird.”
I was sad about Mechatron. It had the same problem for me that Genlab Alpha had, which was it is essentially a railroad-y campaign scenario with rules attached. In another place, a person replied to me that I should just ignore the campaign scenario and just use the rules to add robots to MYZ, that in fact that was the point of Mechatron to some extent. It is not intended as a robot version of MYZ it is intended as an extended method to add robots to MYZ. I’m not sure if that is true, but its really not my thing either way, as a GM. Like Paul Mitchener I would probably enjoy playing it though.
Adam D I have a friend who is much the same as yours, I think. Who seems able to just go for it with traditional games in ways I can’t. I’m playing in a Star Trek Adventures game with him and its a riot, and I would fail at GM’ing that game in moments.
Hans Messersmith according to the Kickstarter updates, the delay was from rewriting the campaign to be more like the M:Y0 one and less railroady. Well, I’m “just” going to play and enjoy. Less stress that way.
As for Star Trek: Adventures it’s great if you seriously trim the rules and ignore many of them. Which strongly supports your point.
Rob Alexander maybe! But for context, what Benoît FELTEN describes above maps to what we saw as well. Everyone’s such a colossal fuckup that they’re praying all the time and it’s not an interesting decision or statement. The decision to not pray just goes away entirely once the GM’s pool gets big, probably more than 6 or so. That’d trigger two “bad” outcomes, like succumbing to your personal problem plus gain a mania.
The fact that the worst outcomes, as far as I’m concerned, are also “now you lose control over your character” results probably is a big reason I found invoking them so distasteful.
It could be as easy as rejiggering the DP spends so they give you more interesting outcomes. Like Jason Corley’s thing about being suddenly broke.
I meant to do this before 12/31 but, well. Y’all have read plenty about my malware woes. It’s under control for now, but I’m looking at maybe, possibly reinstalling at wordpress.com and letting them deal with the server headaches.
Here’s what I played and my year-later takeaway, nice and short for potty reading:
Epyllion
Played, didn’t run. I really enjoyed it! But a couple things still jump out at me a year later:
As lovely as the friendship crystal mechanic works (short version: you give away your supply of tokens to other PCs when they act on the flags you’ve put on them during character creation, then either count them up when helping or spend them on the “moon magic” move), I still remember it being especially punishing for groups that aren’t great at paying attention to each other. Basically, you end up spending a lot of energy playing toward other folks’ flags but if they’re not paying attention, it’s easy to feel resentful about spending that energy. Given how my year played out, I very much think this is a phenomenon of my home group. I hope to address this more specifically in 2019.
I have no idea how the long game plays out. I chased advancement really hard and got to the next age. It’s fine. I did notice that advancement choices are pretty narrow. I feel like everyone’s playbook will end up looking like everyone else’s playbook across play groups and experiences.
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No Thank You, Evil!
I played a good amount of this with my daughter early in the year but we haven’t played in months, now. Honestly, I’m kind of itchy to get her to try something with a little more mechanical complexity. That’s totally on me and if I’m being honest with myself, it’s probably not what she would enjoy. But I think about running NTYE and it bores me. The narrow, short formula absolutely works! But it’s a narrow, short formula for play.
Probably the next thing we’ll do with it is move her to the highest character sheet level. She graduated from triangle to square in January, and that might have been the last time we played.
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Burning Wheel
2018 has obviously been a long fucking year because I completely forgot we played Burning Wheel! I played, didn’t run. It was nice. I’m also clearly not the target demographic for this game any more. It’s just such a heavy load, both on the GM side and the player side. Lots to manage. We didn’t do a great job of really workshopping Beliefs, and our campaign reached a point where we’d just kind of…done what we came to do. Was that my short attention span? Maybe!
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Bluebeard’s Bride
Played this at NewMexicon 2018 and it blew my mind. It’s super weird, very arty-farty, not at all a conventional RPG in terms of agency and bildungsroman and long meaningful campaign play. It’s a one-shot featuring a series of horrific vignettes, everyone plays an aspect of a single character and takes turns in the driver’s seat, and it’s so squicky and weird that it’s just impossible (or perhaps just in poor taste) to try and describe actual play. Very high on my list of best games of the year.
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Sagas of the Icelanders
Another NewMexicon 2018 game. I ran this, because I always run it. SotI is on my very short list of games I’m so good at, I can make the game do anything I want. It is a lovely experience every time.
This particular game was a “spotlight GM” event that I ran. I remember it being funnier and more Fiasco-y than it usually is. Worked great and I’m adding that mode to my quiver for future runs.
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Masks
My first run at Masks and it was super fun. My buddy Kit ran it at New Mexicon, and he is to Masks what I am to Sagas. The game does some really interesting stuff about supers relationships and completely dispenses with Champions style physics modeling. It’s terrific, loved it, want to run it here in 2019.
I had another opportunity to play Masks later in the year, at Rincon 2018 with Jason Corley running it. I played a more conventional character and it was a more conventional experience, which is great because you don’t have to push the envelope every time.
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Golden Sky Stories
Actually a fantasy adventure hack called Fantasy Friends. GSS is cute but not my jam: it’s heartwarming and affirming, you basically bid points to get things done and then do heartwarming and affirming things to get those points back. I mean it’s nice! And Nick Hopkins did a really good job running it. I was just ehh on the whole model of play afterward.
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Coriolis
Coriolis was my only real heartbreak of 2018. I adore, absolutely love Mutant: Year Zero from Fria Ligan, and Coriolis is built on the same engine. The game is packed with interesting history and social context, the setting is super interesting, characters look neat. I mean just on reading the text, I was all in. But the game has a huge glaring problem at the center of it: a GM-facing economy called Darkness Points.
What I discovered was that I grind against the DP economy in every imaginable way. First off, there’s a huge list of bad shit the GM is “allowed” (?) to launch at the players by spending DP. I read that to strongly imply, or mandate really, that nothing on that list is in my toolbox without spending those points. Then what really killed me was that I can effectively earn and keep unlimited DPs, and the players can’t do shit about it. Even playing hard toward the intent of the system, this is I think intentional! So there’s no meaningful decision making, no tension, nothing. It’s a list of things I feel like I can’t do but actually can do because I’m spending an effectively unlimited number of points.
I will say, though, that Coriolis has an extremely nifty spaceship combat system. Each player takes on a specific on-board role and everyone’s contribution matters. It’s great.
Otherwise, the game left me restless and irritated. What a shame, because it’s so very beautiful. And it appears I only ran three sessions of it? Ye gawds.
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The Veil
I tried to run The Veil but it catastrophically failed for us within an hour of the first session. When I had read the rules, the playbooks stood out as weird and very specific and I thought “oh wow, everyone is so strange!” And they are. But once you figure out where each playbook comes from, escaping the tropes and references becomes nearly impossible.
For us, I think, we worked hard at not doing that. But the moves, oh the moves. Designer Fraser Simons made a fairly lengthy argument explaining his approach, which was to build the moves in a very broad way. I like the idea in principle, but lordy in practice we just couldn’t get a handle on how anything was supposed to work or how any given move’s outcome was supposed to look in the fiction. The whole thing felt very abstract and it wore everyone out in about an hour.
But! But but but: I think The Veil may be best in class for how you create your cyberpunk setting. Each playbook has a very specific set of questions and inputs, so that any given playbook mix produces a wildly different and unique setting. We really liked this. The Veil produced a setting I’d be very happy to play in! Just with a different game.
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Scum & Villainy
My surprise hit of the year was Scum & Villainy, a sci-fi take on Blades in the Dark. I’d had the pleasure of playing once before at a private con earlier in the year, but I was so exhausted that the playbook felt like an incomprehensible wall of jet fighter controls.
I gotta say, now that I fully grasp how the GM-player transaction works in Bitd/S&V, it might be my favorite. Even more favorite than Burning Wheel! I really like how the negotiation bounces back and forth: how well positioned are you? How difficult is the thing? How hard do you want to try? Are you willing to take an additional consequence? Love it to pieces.
Our run at Scum petered out because everyone advanced to a point where there was really no more mechanical tension to the game. This is something I was worried about in Blades as well: the Resistance mechanism (short version: if you suffer consequences you don’t like, you can resist them at a cost to your stress) is such that eventually you can just do anything and everything and practically never suffer for it. I don’t love the realization that so much of the play juice was coming from the mechanisms, but in S&V it did for us.
It did get me thinking about versions of Blades where maybe you don’t get better, but the scope of your action just gets broader. Dunno. It was a good experience, very fun, just ran its course.
Oh and I ran it at RinCon 2018 and completely forgot! Pitched it, explained it, ran it, easy as pie. S&V is definitely on my short list of pickup one-shot games I’m happy to run without any prep.
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The King is Dead
This is Vincent Baker’s diceless, GMless game of fantasy intrigue built on the PbtA framework. I absolutely love this! And it may be my favorite of his games, even more than Apocalypse World itself.
The core of the game is that everyone gets a copy of the same rules book. You sketch out sexy young princes and princesses in a Game of Thrones-ish setting. And then you start picking little mini-games to play out scenes. You start with a game called “muster and intrigue,” which adds a little fictional context to the setting and gives you a card. The ostensible object of the game is to win the crown by any means necessary. You do that by building a good hand of cards, with more and better face cards worth more than numbered cards.
I’ve played this game twice now. The first time, we just rolled with the minigames and didn’t worry much about the underlying card game. It was really fun that way! But the second time, when I ran it again at Rincon in Tucson, I really charged hard at the card game. It was even more fun that way, because it forced me to play really strategically and think bigger-picture. My game basically shifted from playing Arya to playing Cersei.
Highest recommendation.
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Palimpsest
Okay, I pretty much never brag on myself but I’m going to now: I am super proud of my Game Chef submission this year, a little time travel game called Palimpsest. The premise is that three different time travelers converge on a small but vital moment in history, and try to make events conform to their wishes before uncertainty collapses and that moment is forever set.
I’ve run it twice, it was fun twice. It could stand a bit of polish and definitely some art direction, but this was the first time I’ve ever submitted a Game Chef and thought to myself “oh heck yeah, this fucker has legs.” I’m gonna publish it in some form down the road. But for now, here it is:
Download here
Legacy
Oh boy. The last game I ran this year.
It did not end well.
It started with such promise: a game about generations passing through time. A game about building up communities, rather than scrabbling for short-term wins.
It ended for a lot of reasons. Some had to do with the game itself: Mechanically, Legacy was overwhelming to everyone. There are move sets for your character and your family and the common moves and the story moves and and and. There are multiple economies. There is room for really unpleasant coercion via the game’s debts system. But beyond that, Legacy demanded everyone walk away from deeply ingrained habits of character monogamy, agency, and campaign continuity.
It was just too hard. It ended on a really sour note and we haven’t run a game since. That was early December, I think? It’s been a month.
It did, however, give me a lot to talk about.
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Can we talk about horror and mysteries in games for a minute?
In principle I like both these things, particularly in the media I enjoy. In reality, at the table, they may be the worst gaming topics I’ve ever come across. The evergreen popularity of Call of Cthulthu means this is obviously not a widespread feeling. For my tastes and abilities, though, I trip up on them a lot. My horror tends to be too horrible and triggery, especially if I lean into disempowerment and body-horror themes. And mysteries end up being too convoluted when I design them, demanding so much problem/puzzle solving that there might as well not be characters present at all.
Thing is, I know how to fix those things! I could, if I cared to, renovate those skills. If I’m being honest with myself, mystery is already part of almost everything I play, particularly when it comes to big reveals and sudden recontextualization. Love me the element of mystery, just not, you know. Capital-m Mysteries. Horror also shows up a lot in my games but when I run a game in the capital-h Horror genre, things get out of hand.
With that in mind, I was excited to try Vaesen.
Vaesen
Available in PDF from DriveThruRPG.com
Available in hardback from Free League Publishing
Swedish Fairytale X-Files
Vaesen is Free League’s game of gaslight Scandinavian horror, and the Society that faces it down. It’s set in 19th century Uppsala, Sweden, which is both weirdly specific but also super-broad. Lots of things happened in the 19th century, and my American public education didn’t really cover Scandinavia other than Vikings.
I’ve been a fan of Free League’s Year Zero Engine games ever since Mutant: Year Zero, which we played a ton. But I feel like they’ve gotten less tight and interesting ever since: Genlab Alpha was less good, and Mechatron and Elysium remain on my shelf, read but unplayed. Forbidden Lands is a fun system but the default setting is not awesome. Love the Coriolis setup but the system changes did not work for us. Can’t speak to Alien or Twilight: 2000 yet, but Vaesen is nearly a return to form, more in line with Tales From The Loop: simple and focused.
I’ve played darned near every Zero Engine game and Vaesen is near the top of my list.
Innovations to the Zero Engine
Every Zero Engine game fiddles with the basics of the game in some way. For example, they all have some version of pushing, that is, rerolling the dice that didn’t produce a success (a 6, usually) at some risk to yourself. The version in Vaesen is brutal: you take a mental or physical condition (temporary harm) when you push. No risk, just harm.
Damage converts to permanent changes, for good or ill, when you return to your headquarters. Bad outcomes become permanent defects, good ones become insights. It’s mostly better than the Lovecraftian “madness” stuff with a few iffy gamified mental health bits (PTSD and dissociation being standout examples).
Terror is the game’s most direct nod to the horror genre, and it looks like other fear mechanisms out there. Under certain circumstances, the GM can impose a fear check of varying difficulty. If you can’t beat the difficulty on the first try, you can push like always, but pushing does damage to your stats (as does terror!) so it’s a very quick spiral. The end result, should terror befall your character, is a choice to flee, fight, stand there in a daze, and so on. It’s fine, but not novel.
There’s an interesting knot of rules around resources and social class: your character comes with some equipment, and before every mystery you roll your Resources stat to see how much other stuff you can grab on the way out the door. When you return, it’s most likely gone forever unless you’ve made certain improvements to your headquarters. Later, the social class to which you belong gives you leverage for acquiring additional gear while away from home. Class is a small but important detail in the setting and this is a nice way to mechanize that.
Otherwise? The four stats and the spread of skills will look familiar to anyone who’s played other Zero Engine games, as does skill use and conflict. Very easy to take and run with immediately.
Castle Gyllencreutz
Cozy!
One of my favorite bits of Zero Engine games is the baked-in campaign, the shared enterprise, or whatever common effort element they’ve included. Not all the Zero Engine games have this, and the ones that don’t feel like they’re missing something.
In Vaesen, the characters belong to The Society for whatever contrived reason, all gifted with “The Sight” and able to see and interact with the (otherwise invisible) vaesen. At the start of the first session, they’ve just received the keys to the Society’s former headquarters, Castle Gyllencreutz in Uppsala, Sweden.
The campaign, such as it is, revolves around discovering the mysteries of the castle. Each addition or uncovered secret gives the Society a neat new advantage. There’s also a good chance that it’ll trigger a complication for the Society back at home: police curiosity, a nosy journalist, some vaesen deciding to haunt or co-exist in the castle. It’s very lightly structured, and there’s no end-game condition the players are aiming for.
In our game, the Society discovered a secret occult library hidden behind a false bookshelf, and a forgotten gallery of items brought back to the castle by the mysterious former Society members. Meanwhile, a go-getter journalist had taken an interest in the Society, and a tiny fairy queen’s court was about to take up residence in the crawlspaces and vents they can’t get into. Weird, colorful, and some good excuses to have scenes and character development in the castle.
How To Build A Vaesen Mystery
The meat of the game is in its procedure for creating a mystery, a vaesen-caused situation that’s drawn the attention of the Society. Turns out that, without any conversation about what the Society is for, this is a weird and empty premise for a game. Or at least it was for my players, who didn’t connect with the Scooby Doo quality of the game until their characters found themselves invested in the situations and the outcomes.
I suspect that players who are totally fine with delving dungeons because that’s what you do with a dungeon, will be okay with how Vaesen deals with mystery creation. That’s because you arrange the clues into actual, physical locations.
There are three big ideas behind a Vaesen mystery: primary and secondary storylines, and a catastrophe countdown that drives urgency while the mystery remains unresolved.
The primary storyline is all about the inciting incident: a vaesen has done something, or a supernatural event has transpired because of a vaesen. Someone’s dead or cursed, something weird is going on, and so on. The clues necessary to piece together a solution to the inciting incident are always available to the characters, Gumshoe style. You can’t screw it up, as long as you go to every location and get every primary clue.
Secondary storylines are optional and exist only to complicate and enrich the basic setup. The Society isn’t only hunting a werewolf (for example), they’re doing it in a town where two shipping companies are fighting with each other about harbor rights. Your troll hunt in the backcountry might also have to contend with the squabbling married couple you’ve hired to lead you to its lair. On paper the secondary material feels frivolous, but in play it’s my favorite bit of the game. The “clues” around the secondary material aren’t automatic, like with the primary storyline. You may or may not get the whole picture.
Finally, there’s the Catastrophe Countdown. It’s essentially a Front like in Apocalypse World. The GM can tick the clock whenever they feel like it, but especially if the action is slowing down. Each tick escalates the situation and hints toward what’s to come. At the end of the countdown the catastrophe itself takes place and the mystery is no longer resolvable. It’s not a formal, system-driven system, and I’m skeptical that many GMs will be willing to pull the trigger themselves and just make the mystery fail.
I ran the mystery that came with the rulebook, to see the clues/locations/countdown material at work. Then I did that procedure once more, and found I was able to create a more dynamic, adapting situation than the pre-existing material provided. I’m sure that’s just a matter of having it all in my head, rather than constantly referring back to the list of locations, clues, NPCs and the countdown clock.
The Premise Carries The Day
At some point you need to decide how much Vaesen is about the mysteries, the overarching cosmology, and the personal stories of the Society members. The occasional complications that arise from upgrading the castle do a good job of challenging the Society itself, but turning those complications personal is where the good stuff is. The premise, that every Society member can see the vaesen and have been personally impacted by them, does much more of the investment work than the mysteries, I think. And that’s where roleplaying through a mystery is best in my mind, when the revelations and stresses of the investigation show us the characters.
The dark fairytale vibe of Vaesen is startling, when you start reading the examples of play. What looks like a spooky haunting reveals an abusive parent who beats his child. A lady troll magically coerces men to seduce and consume them. It’s got serious, heavy darkness to it, all wrapped up in cuteness and weirdness. The monsters and the vibe are derived from Vaesen: Spirits and Monsters of Scandinavian Folklore by Johan Egrkrans, who also provided the gorgeous illustrations for the game.
What really caught the attention of my players was the underlying premise of why the vaesen are suddenly a problem: the creeping modernization of 19th century Scandinavia. I leaned hard into the imagery of failed farmsteads and downtrodden families moving into the big cities, and city life being exciting and very modern in contrast with the backwards rural weirdos. We had a terrific, long, in-character argument in fact about exactly this: What is the point of the Society? Are we here to fight vaesen, or are we here to help humanity and vaesen live together? Are we pro-human or anti-vaesen? What did our forebears have planned? That’s all interesting stuff, and a very strong, memorable moment in play for us.
The Not So Great
I think a common feature of many mysteries in fiction is that they don’t really care about personal growth and development. This is a feature of Vaesen as well, and you have to fight against it to put the spotlight back on the characters. In other Zero Engine games, for example, there’s a sentence or two explaining how to change your relationship with other characters. And there’s usually an XP or two to be earned for helping or protecting friends. But Vaesen offers neither. If you started the game distrusting another PC, you’re going to distrust them forever. It’s trope enforcement rather than growth facilitation. It’s trivially easy to change of course! But as written, it’s a clear signal the game wants you to direct your attentions back to the mystery.
The other not-so-great bit of the game is the practical outcome of the mystery creation rules I talk about above. It produces a dungeon-like experience, with players moving from location to location and dealing with some central challenge in return for a clue, and it feels stiff and formalistic. Leaving out that structure, and driving the situation through interactions with NPCs, vaesen and the catastrophe clock, is more dynamic and flexible. But that’s on the GM to manage.
Last Thoughts
So does all that add up to Vaesen being an unproblematic alternative to Call of Cthulhu? Not really! Vaesen is its own horror thing and thank goodness, we’re already overloaded on Mythos stuff.
Vaesen’s alternative to “madness” is pretty good but you still end up with gamified mental illness. And thematically you’re not facing existential horror at all: the vaesen are weird and they’re creating problems due to, ultimately, colonialism, modernity, and capitalism. We read repeatedly that humanity and the vaesen had coexisted and had an understanding. This is profoundly different from Lovecraftian horror, if you care about the existential underpinnings of the Mythos and not just the monster-hunting. If you wanted a more Lovecraftian experience, though, it wouldn’t be hard to refactor the setting and use the system as-is.
The Castle improvement/discovery minigame is very cute, but I wish it drove more actual campaign-style play. I hesitate to say it definitely doesn’t, because I really did like the fun little complications that emerged from their improvements. But I feel like it’s mostly on the GM to integrate those into the more provocative material. A nosy cop who was perhaps involved in investigating the odd murder of a character’s spouse, a rival group of occult investigators who prove to be responsible for the animated corpse that scared a character into discovering their Sight, stuff like that. It’s not in the rules but it’s all there.
I know a lot of gamers have strong opinions about mysteries: how to plan out an interesting one, whether mystery-oriented gaming is good or boring, and whether the puzzle or the characters is more important. To its credit, if you set aside the game’s own make-a-mystery procedure, Vaesen is flexible enough to accommodate your own mystery and horror philosophy.
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