Vaesen

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It can be purchased from the Free League webstore.