I am running a new Vaults of Vaarn campaign, and decided to publish some play reports. One consideration for the group I’m running this for is there are a lot of new parents. This means highly constrained availability: basically about three hours every two weeks. To accomodate these gaps in time for very sleep-deprived folks is the West Marches rule requiring the party to end sessions back in the nearest safe area. This ensures there is no sense of “wait, where did we leave off?” between sessions, and last minute drop outs are not disruptive. Vaarn’s second edition also has a table for escaping the dungeon with a single roll to handle this requirement for when the party is unable to manage leaving the dungeon within the allotted time.

Speaking of Vaarn’s second edition, the timing of running this campaign means I’m doing a mixture of 1st and 2nd edition content, plus a few of my own house rules. Vaarn always felt like a toolkit kind of game rather than a “complete system” so I think it works a la carte, but it will be interesting to see if any points of friction ever pop up.

Campaign Prep

My prep for the first session was as follows:

  1. I decided to set the start of the campaign in Sargattea at the base of the wall
  2. I followed the Wall point crawl creation method outlined in zine number 4, and sketched out a few additional ideas based on the spark tables from those results
  3. I created a starting dungeon in the sewers of Sargattea

For the dungeon keys I just wrote them in typst, not unlike my adventure Beneath the Ikor Quag Sinkhole, but unlike an adventure for public consumption I elided over a lot of detail since the audience is just myself, and without any special formatting.

For the map I drew it on a Supernote tablet, and then added a solid black layer on top. In person as the party explores I erase the black layer to reveal the map. It’s a simple but effective trick I picked up from Gus L’s games online where he would screenshare a map he uploaded to GIMP with a fog of war layer on top (in general I have a lot of best practices from those sessions). If you have a spare iPad around you could do the same thing using Procreate. I’ve played in in-person OSR games where player mapping is a thing, but that can be time consuming, and when time is precious it makes sense to cut it.

First Session

For the first session everyone created their characters, and I am happy to report players continue to get a lot of joy out of the Vaarn ancestry spark tables. It’s not the fastest OSR character creation process out there, especially with the 2nd edition procedure of allowing players to pick/roll between exotica, mystic gifts, advanced weapons, hypergeometric codices, cypernetics, or an alchemy kit because this means having to explain the differences between all these things. But it does the job of getting players excited about the game without bogging everyone down in too much detail, so I’d say it strikes a good balance.

After character creation I read the nine facts about Vaarn, which just takes a few minutes. There is a podcast called All Systems Nominal that had a recent episode about Vaarn and spent a lot of time discussing the anti-canon nature of the game in a way I found perplexing. The thrust of the discussion was that additional setting detail as the game gets more developed would “undermine” the anti-canon, and I think was really missing the utility in play at work here, and some basic misunderstanding of the term. In a standard game of D&D you have a setting that is easily recognizable to players that is a mix of pulp & Tolkein fantasy pastiche. Science fiction doesn’t have this luxury. There are all kinds of science fiction worlds that have very little to do with each other. So the typical approach in tabletop games as varied as Shadowrun, Lancer, or Sky Realms of Jorune is to have a large amount of text (sometimes whole books) detailing the setting/lore. With good writing and players interested in spending the time to engage with these fictional worlds that is a fine approach. However anti-canon is another solution to this problem for those of us that find combing through volumes of lore daunting. With the anti-canon approach you establish a few key facts, and then the rest is determined at the table. You can add additional facts, but you won’t have some elaborate history. Vaarn exists in a post-historical consciousness. There is stuff that happened, but it’s all a jumble that no one understands anymore. Since no one knows what happened, you don’t need to worry about it as a player, although perhaps some clues will come up in play. It doesn’t mean there is no setting detail, there’s little utility in providing a blank canvas, but there are plenty of creative gaps so the table can make the setting their own. And crucially, you don’t need much to get going. Just read those facts, and then you can explain additional things as they come up, but it isn’t important for people to know what the different religious beliefs are, what the Autarch lineages were, etc.

As an example of the creative gaps, in zine no. 4 you get a few paragraphs about the city of Sargattea, two related factions, and a few semi-related spark tables to give you a sense of the city, but it’s all impressionistic sketches really. Here are some details I made about Sargattea that are not in the zine:

  1. It is similar to many South American cities where the wealthy neighborhoods are around the base of the city, and the higher up you go the more impoverished it gets (this made sense to me based on the look of the map)
  2. Because my version of Vaarn leans extremely heavy on the Book of the New Sun influence (far more than Dune, Hyperion, and the rest), and Sargattea strikes me as a city that has been around for a long time, there are more buildings than people here.
  3. Again, Book of the New Sun influence, the social strata of Sargattea is the patricians, then the various guilds that serve the patricians along with the city militia, and then the guildless at the bottom.
  4. Sargattea enforces strict border controls for city entrance and exit. Only patricians, approved commercial orgs, the militia, and guild members can pass through the gates. Guildless residents are essentially trapped in the city.
  5. Patricians control pale ichor resevoirs, so even though there is an abundance of drinkable ichor you still see the sort of debt-token system as you would in Gnomen, perhaps not as strictly enforced, but nevertheless a present aspect of urban life.
  6. Taxation to maintain public infrastructure is fairly heavy handed.
  7. Due to the importance of these pale ichor resevoirs, patrician family tombs are often located in the sewer systems above the city.

With these invented city details, and starting the players off as members of the guildless class, they now have incentives to get out of the city, and the setup for my initial adventure, which involved the opportunity for the players to join the gecko herding guild. Their initiation task was to track down some missing large geckos (similar to a medium sized dog) that belong to one of the patrician families that got lost in the sewers. They were given a sewer pass (but not a pass for the patrician crypts of course), some jars of grubs for bait, a couple of light pods and sent on their way. They managed to descend a treacherous path into the sewer entrance, negotiated with the guard at the entrance who thought their sewer pass was expired, explored the sewers a bit, and came across a group of levellers trying (ineffectively) to destroy the machines in the pumping station who were favorably disposed to the party, but unwilling to help them look for geckos when they could try and destroy the system that allows patricians and guilds to hold power over ordinary folk. An uneasy truce was maintained as the party left to take lunch outside the sewers, and the first session concluded. No combat yet, though with each interaction they thought hard about it!