A couple things have been nagging me about Forbidden Lands since our first session. They are entirely tied up with the fiction, not the procedures.
First: the creators went through a lot of trouble to design a multi-faceted, robust, living setting. It’s like a mini-Glorantha in some ways. There are detailed demographic breakdowns on the map, lengthy writeups about the various kin, deep history (1200 years worth!), and religion. The GM’s Guide tells us that religion, for example, is super important to everyone in the Forbidden Lands. But then there’s no on-ramp for any of that for the players.
We have one character whose backstory, generated via the Legends & Adventurers booklet, includes a reference to one of the gods. So, sure, I went ahead and read the bit about Clay out loud from the GM’s Guide. There isn’t even, like, a quick little breakdown of the religions in the Player’s Book iirc. I should probably just designate who worships what, following the kin and history materials, and provide that stuff to the players.
That’s kind of a theme of this game, and it feels a lot like their other games (in particular Coriolis): lots of talk about how important culture is, but very little to actually make that happen in the game. Not even a player-friendly setting dump. So the characters feel like fish out of water, rather than deeply embedded into the setting. Combine this with the lack of family or kin ties, and you’re left with either lots of GM heavy lifting or just letting the players discover the world as they go.
Second issue, much smaller: I have no idea what fictional justification there is for the big pretty map they have. In Mutant: Year Zero, only the GM has the full map. The players need to draw out their map as they go. But the big pretty map in Forbidden Lands is explicitly a player tool. Where did it come from? How do they have it?
Dunno. It just bugs me. They could and probably should have made ’em map as they went, maybe providing some ranged scouting like the zone stalkers can do via tall buildings and radio towers in MYZ: climb a very tall tree on a hill, or a mountain, or the walls of a major structure. That would change the nature of the food/water/sleep/cold grind a whole lot, though, especially since they don’t really have a home base to operate from (other than The Hollows, if you’re following the official campaign).
Share this:
Discover more from The Indie Game Reading Club
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I used to love big, fancy player maps in fantasy games… and then I started learning about historical cartography, and… whoah. I’m now almost offended when PCs in fantasy worlds have detailed setting maps.
Despite all of it’s many historical problems, one thing that was pretty good about _Kingdom of Heaven_ is the bit about how to find the Holy Land: “You go to where the men speak Italian, and then continue until they speak something else.” The maps of that period made essentially no claims to cartographic accuracy; they were merely illustrative. This is west of this and north of this, y’know, roughly. You’re French and you want to find your way to Jerusalem? You hire someone who has been, and hope they don’t rob you and leave you stranded. Or, you know it’s “East,” so you go east on whatever trade route or road you’ve got, and you get to your next destination, and you ask. I love the feeling of strange discovery this engenders, even amongst the people who are from that setting.
It was actually a bummer for me running _The One Ring_, because I felt like I shouldn’t give the players the full map. Maybe a handful of hexes around their home areas, plus the hexes for whatever route they had taken to Lake-Town. If they wanted anything else, they would have to ask around, or just go for it. Buuuut one of my players is an old Rings-head and knew the general layout like the back of his hand. A new world, like FL, well, that might offer some opportunities!
Well, speaking of TOR and LotR, I can get behind the idea of players having a rough map. Even the sheltered hobbits in LotR had a rough idea of what was in each compass direction; it was the details and the paths of which they were unsure, and that seems to be kind of what you unveil as you play and put stickers on the map.
Not to mention, it’s a helpful contrivance so players can plan. “Here’s where the walls of the sandbox are.”
This is one of my unwritten essays!
Here’s the synopsis.
Religion is bullshit. That, I think, is a key intended “fruitful void” of the game. The game SAYS how important religion is. But the god’s are totally not real.
You can see it in the ridiculous nature of the religious schism between Raven and Wyrm. It’s a flat out “tastes great / less filling” “green vs purple” set up. They present it very seriously rather than satirically, because people take it seriously and people die over it. But it’s nonsense. In fact, in my preferred setting variant (that I’ll probably wind up using) this distinction arose organically as part of the 250 year Blood Mist isolation and was projected back via made up history. It was never actually a thing.
You can also see it in the utter absence of clerics as a class. There’s magic, there’s sources of magic, there’s no actual divine source of magic. It’s just bullshit.
You can see it in the Dwarves. Their religion is literally about building the world bigger so they can reach the sun. Really? Over 1200 years of recorded Raven Land history there’s no mention of that at all. There’s no story where an army marched across a plain full of pillars one year and came back 10 years later to find the plain had become a giant hill built atop those pillars by industrious dwarves. There’s no mention of how, after the blood mist, an entire Forest is now a mountain range, and it’s raw bare rock because with the elves largely withdrawn there’s no one to make the woods grow…because that’s the mythical division of labor right? There’s no adventure sites that lead down into the Earth that depict onion like layers of successive ages of the world built up, and then covered over as the dwarves make the world bigger. There’s none of that, right? But there is a mention of the primitive proto-dwarves (dwelvers?) who live deeper and are revered as ancestors. Huge is just as much a bullshit made up god as all the others.
And I so dig that. I mean, it’s kind of hard to have actual religious conflict in a fantasy game where the gods are literally real. I mean, no faith is required to worship a diety when the game gives you their AC and HP and what spells they can cast. But in FL…there are no literally real gods. There’s just myth, and the problems people create for each other when they fight over whose myth is better.
The game could have given hierarchies and ceremonies and tenets and stuff to flesh out the 3 competing human churches. But I kind of dig that it didn’t. Because eventually it will come up. Exactly what are the holy sacrements of the Congregation of the Serpent? Do people get married by Rust Priests in the Rust Church? At some point that will matter if you play long enough, right?
And what will drive home the idea that “religion is bullshit” more, than when you just make that shit up on the fly…exactly like (IMO the game is saying) any religion did.
As for the map. That’s easy. There’s a whole pre blood mist history of war and crusade and invasion. There’d have been maps aplenty. Campaign maps, tapestries hanging in halls, atlases. Lots of them. Some would survive.
It would have been nice if the player facing map was more rustic with distorted distances and more precision around Alderstone and less in the unconquered east. More like a period map than a game map. It would have nice if there were differences between the maps; maybe some rivers that changed course, almost certainly a lot of very expanded forests…that would have been a super cool bit of extra effort. But it’s understandable why they didn’t bother.
Wow!
I hadn;t thought of that before. I totally love the idea of making the religion a part of the player’s lives somehow.
@Ralph – is that info in the Forbidden Lands book? (I have not read/bought it yet but I will if it is.) That sounds so cool.
Well, yes and no.
Yes, in that there are three religions and the history is full of wars between them and the Rust Church will persecute Raven Witches, etc.
But all my comments above are my own layering gleaned from what is not said. Like there is a bunch of stuff on the importance of religion…the Psychopomp of the Congregation of the Serpent, the Ferrale of the Rust Church. But there’s no Clerics. There’s no divine magic at all (there are a couple of events that are attributed to miracles, but in a magic rich setting can be lots of other things). So if you’re like me and like to explore “why is that…what could that mean in the fiction” then it’s all there. But you have to find it in the negative spaces.
For instance, the 1200 history of the forbidden Lands, really isn’t. It’s not a history at all really. It’s really the biography of an evil wizard. Everything in there is either prelude for context or historical events that he largely shaped.
So once I detected that, I began to think of the three religions as reflecting 3 different responses to the wizard. The Raven Church are those Zygofer opposed and crushed. The Congregation are those who initially set Zygofer on his path of destruction and then were horrified at how far he took it and tried to reel him in. The Rust Brothers are those who threw in with Zygofer whole heartedly and became him minions. The game doesn’t present them in these terms…but when I read between the lines that’s what I see.
Correlations to modern politics being obvious here. Intentional? Accidental? Or my own baggage coloring what I see. For game juice purposes…doesn’t really matter.
Each of these groups have their own religious flavor…but did those flavors exist from the beginning? Was it really 3 different organized religions who each interacted with Zygofer differently? Or was it just that after 100s of years of magically imposed isolation, each group remembered their past and drew solace and inspiration from it, and turned those memories into a faith that, of course, they believed goes way back…cuz that how churches do it.
Thanks for the response.
I usually read and take things at face value but I’m going to try applying this ‘negataive space’ to the next couple of games I read.
Re: textual onramps for players: I would argue that the play style of Forbidden Lands advocates exposing players to the fictional culture only through play at the table. No homework. That is part of the game function of the Blood Mist, to make it so that every adventurer is in some ways a cultural outsider to begin with. From the Gamemaster’s Guide, p. 6:
The Forbidden Lands may be unfamiliar ground to the adventurers, who have lived isolated in villages and other settlements, but it is a land with a long and rich history.
…
To convey the history and myths of the Forbidden Lands to the players in-game, you use legends. Every monster, every artifact, every adventure site and every character of importance … have their own legend. … In this way, the players build their own knowledge of the Forbidden Lands and its denizens.
Given this design, the referee tools for translating history and fictional place to players will bear a lot of the load. From what I’ve read so far, there are some solid efforts to provide useful tools (such as treating “legends” as a first order game object rather than an informal fictional element, as mentioned in the quote), but I have yet to get it to the table. I would be curious to hear about your experiences with this aspect of Forbidden Lands.
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.
Liked it? Take a second to support The Indie Game Reading Club on Patreon!Share this:FacebookRedditTwitterTumblrPinterestEmailLike this:Like Loading…
Related