The tl/dr; goes like this: I have no really good reason to stop playing, but lots and lots of pretty good reasons that all added up.
First off, I really like Mutant: Year Zero. I think it has a hell of a lot going for it, and has provided a lot of fun time for us. Eight sessions, I think? And I wouldn’t even necessarily say we’re never playing it again. But I know me, and odds are against returning to it (about on-par with us picking up the Great Pendragon Campaign again tbh).
But every session, small doubts and problems kind of crept in.
* The lack of social conflict support undermines Ark drama. I’ve talked about this at some length, no big surprises here. But it definitely cut the legs out from really pursuing the interesting Ark-internal politicking that I think the game’s setup wants.
* The speed of advancement was an even bigger issue, though. An every-session bump is sweet! They like it, I like it. No problems there. But there are a couple issues: for one, the characters get hypercompetent. For another, you just never know when they’ll mutate again. I felt like we got to a place where mechanical competence reached a point where there was no longer narrative uncertainty. They wanted to do something, it got done. Only Zone expeditions continued to be (mechanically) challenging, but tbh it’s kind of boring on the GM side to run those as purely procedurally generated incidents. It’s easy, but easy =/= fun. Not by itself.
* The mutations are all over the place. I get that they’re random and that that’s part of the secret sauce. Buuuuut you also have mutations that are objectively terrible. And you have mutations that synergize in surprising and maybe broken ways.
* Too much to track, after a while. The big one here is that everyone in the Ark is a mutant. Well goddamn it. That means every single conflict means me either looking up the mutation (for an existing NPC) or drawing something from the deck. Then remembering to use it. This is a minor thing, really minor, but it added up.
* I wish there was a better/easier way to track the Zone stuff. I ended up deploying my Endless Roll of Butcher Paper to create our epic zone map, and it’s like 3′ x 4′ and it’s still not big enough. They’d doodle everything they could but still left out details. And I’d furiously doodle stuff into my own notes — remember, we were generating the Zone on the fly — but like… just coordinates (B11, C10, A10, etc.) do not convey nearly enough context. I don’t have a solution to this. It’s a lot of paper/information handling and it accumulates every session.
Boiling all this down, I think the main deal in the end was that whole “mechanical certainty killed narrative uncertainty” thing up there. They got too good, to the point where there’s even precious little niche protection so they can enjoy being good at the things they’re supposed to be. Example: the ex-slave-turned-stalker was always a better fighter than the enforcer. That’s what the enforcer does! So he was left, more often than not, getting punked early in a fight and then waiting for the real warrior to come along and clean up. Blah.
The whole thing feels like it is not built for the long haul, but the baked in campaign demands that you play probably 15ish sessions before you’re within striking distance of finishing.
There’s so very much to love about this game, though.
* The resource grind is great. I love it. You kind of need to gloss over some stuff, like how “and time passes” time needs to happen narratively sometimes but you can’t be grinding through water and grub.
* I really like the rich dice. I kind of wish they’d gone even further, Edge of the Empire style, but it works well. I think it works a bit too well at a certain point, though. Some tipping point of die pool size where you’re not actually rolling to see if you won/lost but to see how well you won by. Which, you know, it’s fine. That means the skills need more things to spend successes on, though, and except for combat those opportunities are spotty.
* The playbooks/classes are good. I wish there were more of them, and more to explore once you got into them. More niche protection. This is one place where stealing the playbooks but not the moves from Apocalypse World show the weakness in that approach: when everyone can “know the zone” or “comprehend” or “move” at a very high level, everyone acts the same. The single playbook special talent is not nearly enough to differentiate them.
* The ark/zone split is genius. Best in class. I want to see many more games do this. Spend some time in acrimonious angry interpersonal mode, then spend some time in tactical dangerous murdergrind mode, and see how those modes interact and inform one another. The best session we ran was where the PCs worked out their differences with an NPC gang they ran into in the Zone. Gloves are off, no witnesses, let’s get this shit sorted oh no it’s rot worms ruuuuunnnn…
Next up: Motobushido.
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Very interested in hearing about Motobushido.
The ark/zone split thing seems increasingly common these days. I first encountered it in Bliss Stage, but it seems like different approaches to that have popped up all over the place: Mouse Guard, some 4E adventures, Night Witches, Atlas Reckoning, etc. Dividing play into different phases (whether 2 or more) is clearly powerful tech.
Huh yeah.
I wouldn’t have thought about those examples as being the same tech, but I guess they are at a certain level. I like it in MYZ because it’s a shift the players choose to make when they want to make it. It just happens, seamlessly, whenever they want. Versus earning checks to buy camp time in Torchbearer for example.
Oh poop, I’m getting old. I can’t remember how or when you shift to the Player Turn in Mouse Guard. Yikes.
I’ll need to look into Atlas Reckoning and Bliss Stage. Don’t have either of those in the library yet.
I don’t have anything substantive to add, but I wanted to say how much I enjoy these debriefs — and all of your longer-form RPG thoughts — and that I always get something out of them. I bet they take some time to do, and I appreciate you doing them.
“* The lack of social conflict support was the first one. I’ve talked about this at some length, no big surprises here. But it definitely cut the legs out from really pursuing the interesting Ark-internal politicking that I think the game’s setup wants.”
I don’t understand this one. You’ve said it multiple times, so I made a point in my own prep to look into it…but I’m not seeing it. Looks perfectly functional to me.
One of the two prerequisites is that you can’t ask for something unreasonable. Then you have to account for bargaining position, which is where all the fictional factors come in that would make it more or less likely to succeed.
Then there’s a roll. If its successful, you do what they want…but you get to demand something in return…a deal…a concession in Duel of Wits terms. If they are willing, then that’s the end of it.
Only if they roll high enough to break your wits do you have to concede with no concessions.
Which part of that didn’t work? Because it seems completely functional as a social conflict system to me.
It doesn’t work, dude.
Use it once. You’ll see.
“* The speed of advancement was an even bigger issue, though. An every-session bump is sweet! They like it, I like it. ”
Also say more about this: How did they manage an every session bump? It takes 5XPs to level up a skill, and I’m only seeing where 2-3 XPs would be reliable to hit every session. An occassional “Spot Light” episode I could see a player managing 5 in a single session…but for everyone to get 5 every session?
Were you perhaps to lenient in what counted as “risking” and “sacrifice”.
Related: Were you aggressively tracking Rot? My concern on reading it would be that the leveling up would be too slow to keep pace with the loss of effectiveness from Rot and that characters would death spiral into ineffectiveness after half a dozen sessions, so I’m surprised that you saw the opposite.
Always a pleasure to read your post mortems.
And a follow-up: I’ve discussed this at great length, even got the designer to acknowledge the issues, and at this point it’s kind of tired me out. Many threads, long threads, they’re in my IGRC collection.
I’m sure you’re familiar with thread fatigue from your Forge years, yeah? 🙂
Sorry!
5xps is trivial to hit every session, Ralph Mazza. What are you seeing that suggests otherwise?
We aggressively tracked rot, yes. EDIT: picking up permanent rot happened…maybe three times total across 8 sessions x 4 players.
Well, you get 1 for showing up. That ones free.
You get one for exploring a section of the zone, which seems like an almost every session but maybe not if you’re doing a big ark session, or if you spend a couple sessions in the same zone location. So I figure that ones like an 80%er
You get 1 for working on a Work Project, which seems like its another almost every session, but given the rules make a big deal of what happens when players aren’t at the ark at the beginning of a session seems like its intended for that to semi-frequently not be the case, so that’s maybe a 60-80%er.
But all the rest require you to sacrifice or risk something…to help a friend, pursue your dream, undermine an enemy. Those strike me as maybe 20%-40%ers to hit one of them.
I can’t imagine how every players could hit multiple ones of those every session. What was the bar you used to qualify as having sacrificed something?
Can you point me at a great length one where you discussed the how’s and why’s of the social conflict not working. I remember multiple threads where you said you didn’t think it did or didn’t like it, but I don’t remember the one where you went into detail as to why.
Trying to prep for my first session tomorrow, and want to know what to look out for.
I can’t here, no, I’m on my phone. Please do your own homework! I have!
Thanks so much for writing about this game, before and now.
I’ve really enjoyed reading about certain features of it and thinking about it relative to a lot “sandbox” ideas I’ve been playing with.
The lack of competence is what ultimately turned me off of the game, sadly. I’d love to see more up-front character competence paired with more drawn-out advancement. I’m one of those weird players who doesn’t care half as much about getting more stuff as I do about being cool.
I don’t need to start the game as super Batman competent or anything, but I didn’t work well under the “fail at everything, all the time, unless I hurt myself” flow we experienced in play. Which is fine, I pulled out of that game and let the others continue to have their fun.
Goddamned gorgeous book, though.
Ralph Mazza We are currently playing this, and yes, we could get a bump nearly every game session if we play it right. In 5 sessions, I leveled up 4 times, I think.
I personally love Motobushido – looking forward to your thoughts on it.
Seems like I’ll need to be more stringent about what counts as sacrifice and risk, then. Bumping every other with the occassional every and occassional every third where different characters ping at a different specific rate but a similar overall average seems to be what they’re going for.
Thought experiment: why should it matter how fast they advance?
I don’t know. You indicated it was a problem. But I would think the idea would be to have them advance at a rate that keeps pace with the unfolding meta plot, so they reach peak competancy when tackling Eden.
My problem is that their competency eventually makes all the uncertainty-related tension of the game go away. Which to me is a problem in this kind of game whether they achieve that in the first or tenth session
Also, the list of traits and skills are short enough that eventually everyone merges their competencies. Not a problem that’s unique to MYZ!
I’d love to see you come back to this game with an aim to fix the problems you’ve found. Use your newfound mastery!
Seems like it should be an easy fix to pace the game such that you get to climax before competancy becomes that bad by regulating XP awards more tightly. I’ll have to watch that.
It sounds like skills were going up faster than mutations were taking attributes down in your game, yes?
To try to answer your Mouse Guard question… I believe that the player turn begins when one of two things happen: the players have handled the two problems and things have calmed down or when things just plain calm down and you’ve been playing it for an hour at least. It’s fuzzy and a bit of GM fiat with guidelines.
Another game that does this that I’m stoked about is Undying.
Paul Beakley, does Clay That Woke hit your Ark/Zone thing?
Jamey Crook I’d have to play and see.
The zone/ark split is special to me because the entire “school of play” shifts within the same game. Interpersonal drama games feel one way, hex crawls feel another, and to deliberately walk between those modes and have the results matter across both gives me tingles.
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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