Hello everyone!
It's been a while since last time I posted here. My work load is changing daily, so it was kinda hard to manage some free time to write. Since some of my work-time of this week got cancelled, I'll try to get back into Hive again. Today, I'll talk about an interesting game, called VAESEN.
What is VAESEN?
Vaesen is a 19th century Scandinavian folklore mystery game, but the publisher basically says "Nordic Horror RPG". Depending on Google Translate, vaesen means "creature" in Danish, which suits perfectly on the game itself. Vaesen is a common name for creatures from fairy tales and folkloric stories. By saying Scandinavian or Nordic, you shouldn't expect to face Norse mythology. It's a whole different topic. If you ever seen the TV Shows [Grimm](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1830617/) and [Supernatural](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460681/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0), mix them up, set the date as 19th century, and change the concept into Scandinavian folklore. And this is the game itself.
Thursday's Children
“Monday’s child is fair of face
Tuesday’s child is full of grace
Wednesday's child is full of woe
Thursday’s child has far to go,
Friday’s child is loving and giving,
Saturday’s child works hard for a living,
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay"
There is a concept in the game, called "Thursday's Children". Vaesen are mystical beings. If they don't let you, you cannot see them, and that makes them some sort of urban legends, or superstition. But, kids who born on thursdays are special. They can sense or see the vaesen (sometimes it depends on the abilities of the vaesen). And when these kids grow up, they become player characters. Player characters are some sort of investigators who go after mysterious events and deal with the vaesen. Sometimes you have to kill them, sometimes you have to drive them away, or deal with them.
Character Creation
Character creation of the game is quite simple.
First of all, you gotta pick your character's archetype and age group. Age group will you give you attribute points and skill points. Archetype will give you a key attribute, a key skill and other character features. When you spend your attribute points, you can raise your key attribute to 5, and others to minimum 2 and maximum 4. When you spend your skill points, you can raise your key skill to 3, and other to a maximum of 2.
There are 4 attributes.
Physique: Your physical quality and resilience.
Precision: Technically it's dexterity plus concentration.
Logic: Your capability of problem solving, and education.
Empathy: Your ability to understand and influence other people.
There are 12 skills, 3 linked to every attributes. When you do a skill test, you should summarize your skill rate and linked attribute rate. That's your dice pool. You will roll that amount of d6 and you should have at least one 6 for success. Extra success doesn't mean anything more most of the time, but it depends on the situation.
In the character creation process, characters will have a motivation, a trauma, and a dark secret depending on their archetype. The archetype also gives you one out of three "archetype talents" at the beginning. When you advance in your character, you can pick other talents regardless its archetype, as well. And you also get starting equipment. You don't get money. Instead, you get a Resource Rating depending on your archetype.
Conditions Instead of Hit Points
The game has condition mechanics similar to FATE's physical/mental stress mechanics. You can take damages or conditions as physical or mental conditions. You have 4 boxes for both sides and when you take a damage, you could decide as if it's physical or mental. When you mark your conditions, they give you penalty on relevant dice rolls. Physical gives penalty to Physique and Precision related skills, and Mental gives penalty to Logic and Empathy based skills. If you take 4 condition on one group, your character becomes broken, and their actions are limited. If you take 5th damage/condition, your character dies.
Headquarters
According to the game, characters technically know each other and they put a name on their relationship with each other, like "I owe my life to X", or "Y is my rival" or something like that. And they will have a headquarter. When you finish a mystery, you get some points to improve your headquarter and you could do a better preparation for your next mystery. Preparation will give +2 to your dice pool, and you can use this advantage only once in a session.
General Opinion
I ran this game only once, but I like its simplicity and I know there's an upcoming book about mythic Britain. I'm thinking about hacking the into my culture, creating some folklore creatures and localizing archetypes. If I could do that, I want to translate it into English to see if anyone has any kind of interest about Anatolian horror/mystery.
That's all for now. I'll try to keep writing stuff as much as I can, but I'm rolling on a chaotic vortex of time nowadays. See you in another posts.
I heard a lot about Vaesen and it looks interesting, great worldbuilding and artwork - another Fria Ligan masterpiece. But I don't like horror or dark scenarios, so no Vaesen for me ;)
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I recommend you to try at least one game. It doesn't give much horror vibes actually. Maybe in the softest-ever-core version of it. It's more like mystery-investigation mix with Scandinavian version of Victorian era.
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Regarding the game, I like the concept of having some headquarters from the start you can improve. So players have another motivation except for getting XP and equipment. So it's easy to give them rewards/loot that do not boost their power but make a nice addition to the headquarters. It's also a great place to store souvenirs from former adventures.
Thank you! Glad to see your comment as well! I hope you could have some free time to catch breath. That tempo deserves a nice rest.
The game seems really good. But actually, I cannot see where its campaign could end. Because there could be lots of Vaesen, but they're not like a certain boss or something. Maybe they could add some non-vaesen enemies that could be a BBEG. I'll be waiting for new books.
This sounds like a game which has lots of really interesting ideas. I might have to use a few of them even if I don't play the whole game.
Also, I would love it if you wrote a post about Anatolian folklore ! It would be interesting to see how much of it has roots back in Hittite times.
I hope work and life get a bit less chaotic evil for you, I've missed seeing your posts !
Thank you! I missed being around and reading your posts as well. Seems like RPG topic has a little slow-down around here. That means, we gotta push it back to its glorious days, right? :D
I actually would like to see some Germanic, Balkanic and Arabic concepts in the game. They have a community content program which you could release your own creations and put them on DriveThru. I've seen a Japanese Vaesen book with some Oni and Yokai stuff. There could be lots of different aspects, and it's kinda exciting! And sadly, we need people to make them for us :P
I'll try to catch up with your worldbuilding series!
As a thought, I wonder if it would be worth co-ordinating with oblivioncubed from Worldbuilding on daily prompts, and sharing them between the two communities. They've been a really great inspiration to prod me into writing posts !
Keeping up with different communities is kinda confusing for me. If you got your inspiration, maybe it's worth to try, at least to a point that you decide it's not worth anymore. But I have to say that this place has to have an active nerd/geek community. When I got my busy times, I saw the decrease on the new posts and votes. It made me sad, because that means people don't want to spend time on this kind of contents. I always found sharing and trading RPG experience fun. I hope we could burn that fire within the people again! (When did I become Hive RPG Paladin?)
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