I’ve gotten some requests to compare/contrast the Year Zero and Genlab Alpha iterations of the Mutant game. So here are some thoughts:
Year Zero
The Year Zero campaign is what I have experience with, and I assume most folks who picked the game up would play it as well. A lot of the game’s underpinnings feed into the campaign: the artifact deck is seeded with necessary keys/clues, the book’s “special zone” entries are all hooked into aspects of the campaign, and the Threats to the Ark deck pull in campaign-necessary NPCs. As you generate the Zone and Ark Threats, odds are good that you’ll either eventually stumble into representatives of the campaign-necessary groups (i.e. various wandering gangs, cults, warbands) and/or extract important campaign artifacts from the encounters. Basically it’s a target-rich sandbox environment, where eventually you get the bits and bobs needed to work your way toward the finale.
Feels like it organically resolves in 12-15 sessions, doing nothing more than pulling from the Threat deck, which more often than not requires a trip to the Zone, which you generate on the spot. It’s absolutely the best perpetual motion machine I’ve ever seen.
Beyond the campaign, I think you just keep doing more of the same. It’s arbitrarily lethal enough that even your really, really awesome mutants will fall victim to dumb shit like falling off a building or getting shanked by some kid with a sharpened screwdriver. But to my eye at least, the best/highest use of the game is to keep the baked-in campaign percolating the whole time. 12-15 sessions is, to me, A Long Game, so it’s a good form factor.
Genlab Alpha
Okay so ostensibly it’s a standalone game. And it is but it’s also obviously an on-ramp to Year Zero. It also runs on a built-in campaign, and it also times out, I think, to about 12 sessions. But the entire thing runs on a different engine: Rather than threats and random encounters organically feeding you clues toward the grand finale, the players engage in a purposeful strategy wargame, tribes versus the Watchers. There are five Key Events that get triggered at certain specific points in the strategy wargame (i.e. when the Watchers’ capacity is degraded to 50%, 20%, 10%, etc.).
You don’t generate locations in the habitat, but you do still generate threats as you move around the map. It’s less exploratory and more of a hexcrawl grind: getting through the forest and under the fence and into the Lodge will cost you, you know, healing and food and possible lasting injuries and possibly going feral. But it’s not organically growing the setting or revealing clues. Not directly. It’s more abstract but also feels like you’ve got more control. Contra Year Zero, where it’s organic but also feels a little random.
I think you need to bring more drama to Genlab Alpha than you do to Year Zero. I feel like the tight constraint of the Ark setting, matched to the Ark Threats and the ongoing Ark Projects, constantly generates great dramatic tension between PCs and the PC/NPC triangles of the relationship map. Meanwhile, the default Genlab Alpha setup is that reps from different tribes have come together to form the command cell of the insurgency. You have connections to your own tribe, but the GM has to make it good. In both my Genlab Alpha setups, I ended up with a pretty good selection of NPCs to start, but they’re scattered across the map, mostly waiting either for a visit to their habitats or for a failed roll, and maybe one of your “hates” shows up to make your life miserable.
A pure Genlab Alpha game after the end of the campaign seems like it would be either less rich, or less easy, than the same in Year Zero. The Genlab Alpha campaign is obviously, purposefully greasing the skids to pull animals and the new playbooks into Year Zero. In fact it would not surprise me at all if there are players who just skip the Genlab Alpha campaign and straight dump the tribes and playbooks into Year Zero. Going the other way — mutants invading Paradise Valley — seems like you have to give up a lot of the hot Zone-generating tech, and everything that grows out of that.
Useful? Need something different? I know I went on long here but I am such a fan of the series. And the zany-seeming material I think is a turnoff to the more serious-minded players out there. I don’t know what to say to that other than it works so, so well when you play it absolutely straight. Genlab Alpha, to its credit, does a really good job of explaining that it’s a fable and not a comedy, and I think anyone who’s read Watership Down or played Marshall Miller’s The Warren will know exactly what this means.
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So, to make sure I’m understanding it correctly, MY0 has more antagonistic relationships and you get dramatic conflict as a result of those. Genlab Alpha it seems like your relationships are primarily aligned and the tension comes from those relationships ending at the hands of the Watchers. I could see that being harder to serve up the Drama, although I’m sure there are asshole mutant animals just like there are asshole mutant people. Genlab Alpha would be heartbreaking in my hands.
Yeah, you’ve got it right.
When you make Genlab Alpha characters, you go through all the same kinds of questions that you did in Year Zero. But you’re not all living under the same roof. Your moose scavenger might have an “I hate the dog seer Armstrong 19, because he has seen my death in battle” and now Armstrong 19 is either gonna need to be a fellow insurgent (legit) or it’s only gonna come up when your scavenger goes to the Lodge. Or, maybe, Armstrong shows up as a failure consequence.
It’s really fine when you are where your NPCs are, but since the XP schema relies on you fucking around with your hated NPC and helping your friendly NPC, I think advancement kind of stumbles a bit. Probably players will push to do things where their NPCs are if they need/want the XPs, but I haven’t seen that yet.
Having finally read through Genlab Alpha, I can say that “zany” is not a word I would use to describe the game. This is a game about living in occupied territory, about terrorism/rebellion, and heck throw in animal rights, too.
Mark Delsing right?
Maybe my favorite scene from our RinCon one-shot was when the cell finally made it to the Cabin Village, which is where the cats are holed up. Mark Diaz Truman’s warrior is a badass puma so that’s the cell’s connection. The leader of the cat tribe is already an insurgent sympathizer, but her seer is … not. We don’t know yet! Either she doesn’t want to rock the boat or she’s a Watcher informant. Yikes!
So they have a Dominance contest (kind of a one-off Duel of Wits) and the seer loses. The leader agrees to send in some of the tribe as a distraction while the PC cell sabotages a checkpoint’s panopticon.
Anyway, the Dog tribe is well known to be heavily pro-Watcher. They’re such good and loyal doggers! And so the cats show up and start a gang fight to keep everyone tied up while the cell sneaks around. In my head at least, the vibe of racially charged violence was right there on the surface and didn’t even really need to be spelled out as such.
Great comparison! I still haven’t decided if I want to run the Genlab Alfa campaign or just toss the animals into the regular MYZ setting.
When are you going to write up your after-action analysis? I need you to teach me how to run the game so I can do it for Gameday! WANTWANTWANT
Krister Persson I’m really enjoying the occupation/surveillance state themes of Genlab Alpha. I’m always a sucker for that stuff!
I’ve settled on the Watcher robots being unerringly paternalistic and “helpful,” as long as that help means maintaining the animals’ usefulness as healthy test subjects.
Basically my Watchers all talk with the voice of Clippy.
I SEE YOU’RE NOT IN THE CORRECT HABITAT. CAN I HELP YOU WITH THAT? I WILL ESCORT YOU SAFELY TO YOUR HOME IN 30 SECONDS! 29! 28! 27!
Paul Beakley Yeah, the Cold War/1984 setting is pretty cool. But the flavor of the campaign is so very different from the rest of the game. Would be interesting to see what the Maskinarium camping is like.
Krister Persson I’m curious too! I suppose next year we can expect the sad robots.
One real concern I have is just how to stage up these lengthy campaigns. Probably what we’re already doing is the right way to go: Run Year Zero for a while and then pause it. Then run Genlab Alpha until the tribes get to the Zone, and then mix it all together. Give the players the option of starting a new tribal character or even a Tainted, or just sticking to their existing Ark and mutant. And then, I suppose, play for a while and stop while you play through Maskinarium. And then roll in the robots and continue.
That is a lot of material! If 12ish sessions is their go-to model, I can’t tell you the last time I actually got through 36 sessions of anything. A little intimidating.
Mark Delsing I meant to swing back to this earlier: Do you feel like you need advice/best practices on one-shotting Genlab Alpha? I can provide some ideas but I’ve only done it a couple times.
Paul Beakley Yes, I’d really love your insights.
Paul Beakley Playing through 36 sessions is quite daunting. On top of that we have a huge Symbaroum campaign going. Just got the second part of a septology. The first two parts will probably generate some 20-ish sessions.
Mark Delsing fine, fine. Sigh.
Loved it. 10/10 A+++++++ Would furry again.
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Best writing on RPGs out there, Beakley.
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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