"The Double": A Vaesen Community Content Review

 

"The Double” is a mystery for the Vaesen RPG, written by Melpomene Games.

As with my previous review of a community-content Vaesen scenario, I will start with a spoiler-free quick review, followed by a more detailed look at the scenario, with some suggestions on how to improve it.

Spoiler-free quick review:

Positives:

• A very original Vaesen;

• An existential Vaesen;

• A Vaesen that will force one of the characters to learn about themselves;

• Uppsala will become more alive after this, some NPCs may become recurring;

• Short and to the point (but could be even shorter and more to the point);

• Requires, by design, a lot of customization.

Negatives:

• Text could be a lot better structured and organised;

• Only one of the characters can be the target of the Vaesen, so that character benefits more from this scenario than the others;

• You need to have a player character that can benefit from this encounter;

• The game master has to know the character well, or find a way to get information; from the player without ruining the mystery;

• Requires, by design, a lot of customization;

• Not all scenes are equally well developed;

• The author left the game master to decide on the goals of the Vaesen, possibly to allow the scenario to be more or less conventional; this makes the text more confusing, and the more conventional option is not that interesting.

In summary:

• It is the first scenario I read from the community content that I immediately wanted to play;

• It is one of the few scenarios I read, from Free League or otherwise, that truly creates a story with a significant impact on one character;

• As usual with community content, the concept is better than the execution, although this one can lead to some truly inspired moments.

Detailed review with spoilers:

This scenario is about a doppelganger monster, quite different from the last entry. The idea is that the Vaesen awakens in the Castle. This creature is a doppelganger who takes the appearance of one of the members of the Society (from here on referred to as “the Original”).

The scenario is not completely clear about it, but if we take what I consider the most interesting interpretation, the doppelganger also learns about the mind of the Original and goes about living their “unlived” life, doing things the Original has not done for lack of time/opportunity, fear, or giving priority to other things—the wants and interests the character has pushed back on and ignored, and may miss.

The thing is, this must all be done in a week. At the end of the week, the Vaesen will return to its “egg” and wait many years until it can adopt a new face and live another week.

In the written scenario, the life of the doppelganger is essentially encapsulated in two encounters the doppelganger will have (and that the Society will have to investigate). The first is where it defends a person in a fight with their fiancé, resulting in the end of the engagement, the person falling in love with the doppelganger, and the fiancé becoming a hateful enemy of the Original. The second is a very public political discussion in a student tavern, resulting in some students becoming fans of the doppelganger/origianl, and others becoming quite hateful towards him. For the romance and the political clash to work, I think they must be designed to be meaningful to the Original. So I chose a personality for the girl whom the doppelganger saved that would be easy for the Original to fall in love with, and I chose the debate in the tavern to be about equality and redistribution of wealth—a theme that the Original had a clear opinion on, although he tried to be extremely cynical about governments in general and pretended he didn’t care.

I also added a scene where the Original was thanked by many people for his charity work at an orphanage (the Original has hidden guilt for having sacrificed a child to stop a werewolf) and praised for the brilliant student he is showing up to be at Uppsala University (the Original in my campaign is a university dropout).

Most of the active antagonism comes from the ex-fiancé of the love interest, so you can really leave nasty actions out of the doppelganger’s agenda—unless the revelation of the “life not lived” of the Original is something bad or something the Original really does not want to face or reveal. The ex-fiancé should be from a wealthy and influential family to have the means to make the life of the Original (and of the Society) difficult.

As written, the scenario fails to explain why the previous victim of the doppelganger became so depressed and stopped painting after being doubled. It is not clear at all what the doppelganger did to him. I tried to make it clear that the previous “victim” refused to learn anything from the actions of the doppelganger and saw with fear what they revealed about him. Since the “victim” was a painter, I imagined that the doppelganger started to paint on themes that the “victim” was inspired by (mostly explicitly sexual and anti-religious) but had no courage to explore due to a fear of social rejection. However, the “victim” could see how the paintings of the doppelganger were superior and more evocative than his own. Incapable of following the revelation of the doppelganger, the victim completely gave up on painting, and to this day hates the doppelganger for destroying his life. As a suggestion, this could also be about the victim being afraid of accepting his sexual orientation/desires.

As written, the scenario also allows for the idea of the doppelganger being evil and scheming to replace the Original. I feel this is a mistake. I think it is okay to suggest it as a possibility to the players during their research on the Vaesen to add a bit of paranoia at the beginning and a feeling of normalcy (the players are used to the idea that most Vaesen are dangerous). But what really is interesting about the story you can build around this Vaesen is that you can really help one of the players explore in more detail who their character is and who they want to be, or what they are afraid of becoming.

There is another more interesting way for the doppelganger to be evil, hardly discussed in the scenario, which is for it to explore dark urges of the Original. As written, the scenario makes it difficult to adopt this direction. But it is certainly another way of using this Vaesen. 

So overall, a lot of good ideas and potential in this one. As is mostly the case with Vaesen community scenarios, it could be better edited and the ideas could be more developed. In particular, this one suffers from wanting to leave too many options open instead of focusing on what makes it unique. Because of that, it does require some work from the GM to put it on the table, but it can be made into a very appealing experience.

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