"The City That Drowned": a Vaesen Community Content Review

 

 “The City that Drowned” was the first non-official (ie, not published by Free League) scenario for “Vaesen” that I ran.

As usual, I will start with a spoiler-free summary of my impressions on the scenario, followed by some more detailed considerations.

TLDR (spoiler free):

 Positives

- Starts in medias res

- Very moody and atmospheric

- Great backstory

- Easy to drive toward a very climactic finale

- Writing is well-organised and clear

Negatives

- Time tracking and town navigation by identifying lit spots as places of interest feel very mechanical and "video game-like"

- The introduction of treasure collection as a main scenario goal, while thematic, does not feel very fitting with the typical behaviour of Society members.

 Overall

- Lots of atmosphere, a scary Vaesen, and a great backstory for the cursed village make this scenario sing.

- A good Game Master should try to hide the more mechanical elements of the scenario from the players.

Detailed Review (including spoilers)

The Society is traveling by coach at night when they get lost and end up in the central square of a village that shouldn’t be there. Most of the village is dark and wrapped in mists.

Over time, they discover that this town disappeared more than 400 years ago when it sank into the waters of a lake. The village becomes visible and reachable only one night per year, and then it sinks again into the lake.  

The sinking of the village was a punishment bestowed by the Neck because of the unscrupulous and immoral greed of the inhabitants.  

The village doesn’t disappear forever under the waters because the ghosts of the townspeople keep the only non-greedy person in the town—a young girl—prisoner.  

Moreover, there is silver and gold scattered all over the ghost town, and a giant sow ready to hunt and kill anyone who tries to release the girl or take the treasure.

In many of these reviews, I complain about authors not following the Vaesen mystery structure. But I mainly complain about this because those scenarios often feel disorganised and difficult to read. That is not the case here. The structure is different from the standard Vaesen mystery, but it is very readable and very usable in play. In fact, the editing is clear, the text is to the point and easy to read, while still conveying cleanly the atmosphere and the feel of the scenario.

I like particularly that the story of what happened to the town is presented as a jigsaw puzzle that the Society solves by moving around and collecting new tidbits of information about the past. 

One of my issues with this scenario is that it expects the Society to stay in the town longer and explore to gather more gold. Although this is certainly thematic—since the characters risk being punished by greed and end up sinking with the town if dawn comes before they leave—it doesn’t fit too well with the usual motivations of a Society character. When I ran it, I made more central to the story that there is an innocent trapped in the town that should be freed - although that didn't completely stop the players from carrying some extra loot with them - which is in itself perfectly fine.

Moreover, time management does require some work from the GM, and, for the scenario to be immersive,  this time management must be presented to the players in a way that does not make it too mechanical, ie, the players should only be aware that when the church bells toll, another hour has passed, but you shouldn't explain to them that you added 15 minutes to time for each movement that they did between buildings.

A small minus is that although the text is well-organised and well-written, the presentation is very minimalistic: we don’t get illustrations nor (more importantly) a map of the town (which I normally really like to have).

All in all, this is a neat, short scenario, and my playing group enjoyed it a lot. We ran it in a relatively short single session (3 hours). There is ample space in it for customization and improvements, and it is easy to add to any Vaesen campaign.

A word from my sponsor (ie myself): I have two great Call of Cthulhu scenarios for sale on DTRPG! One is a mystery on a small village in the Portuguese coast in the 1930s, the other is a frenetic modern scenario that runs in less than 3 hours: 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/476771/kane-s-tone-and-bad-tidings-bundle