Vaesen Published scenarios: roundup review
I recently finished running a series of Vaesen scenarios, arranging them to align with the seasons. I ran all the published scenarios in the Corebook, A Wicked Secret, and Seasons of Mystery, and I ran one scenario from Mythical Britain and Ireland. Meeting with my players just four times a year, I matched the scenarios with the season we were in. Here's the order I chose and my thoughts on how they played out:
Silver of the Sea (aWS)
A Wicked Secret (aWS)
Fireheart (SoM)
A Winter's Tale (SoM)
The Night Sow (aWS)
A Dance with Death (SoM)
Dance of Dreams (Corebook)
The Devil on the Moor (moved to a cold rainy Spring) (SoM)
The Hampstead group (moved to Stockholm) (MBI)
Song of the Fallen Star (aWS)
(I added in parenthesis the book in which each scenario appears: aWS - A Wicked Secret, SoM - Seasons of Mystery, MBI - Mythical Britain and Ireland)
In my experience, the scenarios work well in any order, but I recommend organizing them by seasons, even because seasonal weather almost always plays a role in the plot, or is essential to the general feeling of the scenario . For instance, A Winter's Tale and The Night Sow are Winter/Christmas time scenarios, whereas Fireheart and Song of the Fallen Star are scenarios that must happen at the peak of Summer.
Warning: Some spoilers for all the mentioned scenarios from here on.
However, I would consider planning so as to run Fireheart later in the campaign, since the Vaesen there is epic and provides fresh surprises even after encountering most of the other Vaesen. The plot is also rather complex. Moreover, The Night Sow is one of the most dangerous scenarios, so I'd avoid starting with it. A Dance with Death has a contrived plot that might not appeal to everyone, hence my decision to postpone until late in the campaign to run it..
Moreover, while Dance of Dreams can be completed in a short session, and it is relatively simple when it comes to the actual main plot, it challenges the characters' faith in the Society, so it's better suited for mid-campaign play.
Looking ahead, I plan to run Where the Sun Dies from The Lost Mountain Saga, the standout scenario in that collection, which in general I found too railroaded to be interesting for my style of play..
Initial Scenario Recommendations: A Wicked Secret, Silver of the Sea, and Dance of Dreams
These have relatively simple plots - especially Dance of Dreams -, evocative settings, and the Vaesen of each story is at the same time sufficiently familiar and sufficiently unique of the setting to make them memorable.
I find A Wicked Secret and Silver of the Sea particularly charming, and in many ways they are “standard” Vaesen scenarios, where you have a very good usage of all the elements in the game.
The Silver of the Sea is relatively straightforward, but if you are running it as the first scenario, you should be rather lenient regarding the final encounter. It is very dependent on the game master whether what happens is just a cinematic scene where the characters run away or a Total Party Kill. I would lean towards using the final revelation about the island just for flavour and letting everybody get out of there (assuming they solved the other threats).
In the case of A Wicked Secret, the only thing that I felt required further explanation was the exact means (ie, ritualistic or otherwise) by which the main villain controls the Vaesen. To make things interesting, I assumed that she had to touch the bones of the creature, which are buried under the Church, in order to give new commands to the creature. This also creates some chances for her to be followed. The priest almost always dies.
It is also not clear why the Skitts don’t leave the town sooner, given they should be aware they are in danger, and how nobody, especially the hunter, Vilhelmina, has not yet found the body of the man who was murdered at least a week ago. When I run it, I assume that Vilhelmina has seen the crows, and avoids the area, because she does not want to be the one to find the corpse. She may mention this to the Society characters if they manage to get in good terms with her.
Dance of Dreams has a simple and interesting main plot, but it is problematic as a beginning scenario in some ways. First, it reveals crimes committed by previous members of the Society. Thus, it may reduce the confidence of the players on the worthiness of the mission of the Society too early in a campaign. Furthermore, at the time of writing, there is no supplement that deals with the reasons why these crimes were committed or with the past history of the Society in general, so the conspiracy it suggests may require Game Masters to come up with their own explanation of those events if the players decide to investigate the matter further.
On top of that, it also introduces a potential long term rival and maybe villain that works for the Rosencreutz (a rival organization of the Society that sees all Vaesen as demons and intends to simply destroy all Vaesen), but again, at the time of writing this blog post, no supplement has provided any material on either the organisation or the character in question. Of course, you can take these as an invitation to create your own conspiracies and plots, but the elements that are given are not particularly easy to build a conspiracy around, and of course, if any later material comes back to these, you may find your own material completely incompatible with “the cannon”.
Fireheart is epic, and it has a very interesting plot. You can keep the players guessing for quite a bit about the source of the problems. The main preparation I did for it was creating a number of legends about avarice, gold, and mind control (some that connect to dragon’s gold, others that connect to witches and mermaids) to make the players that did some studying during the preparation phase wonder what Vaesen are they dealing with.
A Winter’s Tale is a great mystery that requires more than anything that you play the actions of the Nyse to show the emotional turmoil the creature is going through: the attacks must show his need to express his rage and feeling of rejection, whereas in a direct interaction with him any characters that listen to him will hear him confess to his sorrow and loneliness. Mediating the relationship between the Nyse and the innkeeper is one of the high points of the scenario, and dealing with the two brother demon hunters (a cameo from “Supernatural”), who can cause a catastrophe by misunderstanding the nature of the problem, is an interesting challenge. Hint: give the two brothers clearly different personalities: one cocky, action oriented, and a bit hotheaded, the other one quieter, more affable and pensive (just like Dean and Sam).
The Night Sow is a great investigative horror scenario. It does have one issue that is difficult to explain to players that are particularly observant. The first victim is aware of the danger of staying out at night and yet she does it and is predictably killed. Also, if the Sow can only appear at night, it is difficult for it to be used in the final confrontation (which actually makes it a lot less difficult, but may not be particularly climatic). Don't forget to have fun with the antics of the witches posing as artists.
A Dance With Death the setting is very charming, and the mystery unfolds in intriguing ways. However, the plot is rather confusing, with the Vaesen being involved in a complex triangle of relationships with the two main NPCs. Somehow, it feels a bit too contrived to me, but the players seemed to enjoy it a lot, so maybe it is just me.
My advice to a GM is to let the birthday party run for a while, and to push gently the players to get involved in interactions with the NPCs.
Devil on the moor is another great mystery, with a poignant, tragic ending. The main issue for the GM to address is how are the players going to figure out that the rage of the Vaesen is focused on a book (and not on a person as it is usual of this type of Vaesen). It is important to make it clear that the attacks seem to be centred around the place where the book is, but for that to be noticeable the book needs to be moved around…
When I ran it, I didn't make the old lady the mother of the dead girl, just her aunt. This makes it easier to explain why she felt abandoned by all, because certainly this old lady wouldn't abandon her.
The Hampstead Group feels different from most of the others, as these are always centred around small remote villages and locations, whereas this one is located in a wealthy neighbourhood of a capital city. I moved the action to the neighbourhood of Djursholm in Stockholm, but I kept the Scottish Vaesen, by making her and her husband expats in Sweden (the husband being a prominent banker). The scenario feels great as a change of pace and it sudden turns from what comedic (the "artists" who sleep and drink all day) to very creepy. I also made it such that, to figure out anything about the Vaesen, the characters would have to specifically study Scottish folklore (either on their library or at an university library), and that their research on typical Swedish Vaesen would yield accounts of creatures that wouldn’t exactly match the clues (Mares, Mermaids, etc).
Song of the Fallen Star is very charming, but pretty straightforward to figure out, and suffers from small inconsistencies, where the major one is the total and absolute lack of communication between the Trolls and the human, whereas the basis of the story is that the human actually started playing the kantele to become friends with all of the people/Trolls in the whereabouts, and apparently was very successful in that. Yet somehow, the same Trolls do not explain the nature of the agreement they made with him and just retaliate. From this I get the feeling that during the scenario the NPCs are supposed to act with different personalities than the ones that led to the conflict. You can wave a lot of those concerns away by just saying that Trolls are strange and mysterious, and that the human that dealt with them is too tied to logical and scientific thinking to see what is right in front of his eyes, but it still sounds a bit stretched to me. And as a fan and a bit of an expert on the Kalevala (or I used to be, as it has been more than 15 years since I wrote a version of the Kalevala in Portuguese), I was expecting more from the references to Finnish myth.
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