Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique well-regarded modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited harsh critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

Vaults of Vaarn is a old-school post apocalyptic roleplaying game with new-school sensibilities, art and writing by Leo Hunt and layout by Guilherme Gontijo. It has been released firstly as the blog Vaults of Vaarn, then in an episodic zine format, and most recently in the deluxe hardcover version that I’m reading today. Despite there being a whole game here, the rules about 6 pages of a 140 page book, so its really a setting module in my esteem.

I mentioned Gontijo because this book is good looking, inside and out. A striking embossed cover with white highlights and matching bookmark sets the tone for a gorgeous single toned ultramarine interior, fully illustrated by the author. Headings are super legible, with the exception of ancestries. Ancestries are marred by the management of large artworks, but they do make striking spreads, and while it compromises the in-session usability, these aren’t likely to be read in a session, or they? Typography is legible, elegant, and just a touch futuristic.

I think a larger format would improve on these strengths, although at the moment Vaarn fits on my shelf along with the A5 hardback modules I have like The Isle, Witchburner and Halls of the Blood King, which is nice. The A5 format is certainly in vogue right now, and it’s convenient for carrying with you, but as a result the book doesn’t look as impressive on the shelf as Reach of the Roach God, but nevertheless it stands up there with that and Trophy Gold as one of the best looking elfgame books I own.

Vaarn‘s rules are an elegant fork of Knave, a game I have little love for, as I feel it’s dry and ineloquent, but Vaarn’s Mystic Gifts rules and its barter system, are simple and flavourful additions for the post-apocalyptic fantasy world of Vaarn.

From here on is world building by random table, disguised as character creation some of it uninspired, most of it fantastic. If you’re a synth, you might be independent because you realised “you must awaken the titans”, long dead gods of yore, or that “machines created humanity”. A mycomorph might be born mute but telepathic from the corpse of a king. These are short, immensely flavourful sentences. Mutations, however, feel plucked from the first edition of Gamma World, and not in a positive sense. Given an acknowledgement goes to Into the Odd, it’s a pity the mutations aren’t as intriguing as the ones there. This may be intentional, though, because Mystic Gifts are again bangers. A nano machine infection allowing you to see into the future; or randomly generate a gift (Grasping Sandstorm anyone?) Exotica are equally flavourful, a glorious mix of religious and faux technological that sell the setting perfectly. Vaarn’s character creation section is a masterclass in worldbuilding through implication, achieving what most fail at with aplomb.

The bestiary is large (75 adversaries), fully illustrated and really fun. A favourite is the war camel with its hump-mounted flechette cannon. I would enjoy dropping these adversaries into a scene. I don’t love the hexflower approach to weather, even though I know it models it elegantly. I bought the print copy of this book, and so I’d have to print the flower and leave it on the table so I could track where we’re up to. The hexflower is also one of the few design missteps in the book; I think once I was familiar with it I’d be able to use it easily, but the patterns used to differentiate sandstorm from heatwave look similar at first glance, and the fills are shrunk in the legend and difficult to identify. On the other hand if you land in one spot you get “polychromatic light night like the tendrils of a jellyfish deity”, which is fire.

I often complain about how random tables need specificity to work. Spark tables are to help you design and are a useful tool, but a module or game should have tables full of concrete things. Vaarn’s region generator, a full chapter of randomisers to help you create your personal Vaarn pointcrawl, almost nails this. Each location type is very specific at their best (although I don’t love columns of things like “Envy (Success) much at all). It’s a little uneven — some of these locations are immediately excellent on any roll, some would require a fair bit of work to get the fire burning. But I’m excited to make a Vaarn from this, even if it’s more prep than I’d like.

If that was the whole book, I’d be disappointed, because at this point it’s asking me to make my own Vaarn, and attached some evocative rules and lists to that. But there are 40 pages to go! And those 40 pages go to the desert city of Gnomon and the adventuring sites that surround it.

Gnomon is wordier than I’d like, the writing is solid. It’s easy to pick out excellent turns of phrase from amongst the paragraphs, although I wish I didn’t have to, particularly in the introductory sections. But from there, it gets terser and we’ll organised. Three sentences to a district, plus a few sights and sounds. An excellent structure to locations, similar if I recall to that used in Fever Dreaming Marlinko. These aren’t intended to be hooks, however, but rather vibes. “Elderly newbeasts play dominoes beneath a leafless tree” is poetic and casts the sense of a dry and lifeless world with life striving against it, but it ain’t adventure.

Factions are where the adventure lies. There are 7 major factions that are fully detailed, 4 minor ones with minimal detail, and a further 7 specific random faction generators if you need more. Major factions take a page from Gamma World, with each having a condition to join, and expectation, and benefits. They also have what you expect: A leader and mooks, a goal and a look. A fantastic addition is advise on how to run each faction as a villain or as an ally, adding wrinkles such as a Baron held hostage by his captains or the grandmotherly Abbess instead burning unbelievers alive in rapture. The clear expectation is that the players actively engage with these factions, but no direct hooks are provided into them, which would add a lot. The sun total is a great toolkit that nevertheless requires manufactured desire for participation, desire that should have been folded into character creation if it wasn’t folded into setting.

Finally, there are adventure locations, four spreads with maps and keys. They’re beautiful and well-written, but in a traditional style, rather than an evocative for improvisation style. I’m not usually one for balance in modules, but there’s a peculiarity in the level up rules here that rubs me the wrong way: You level up for selling or trading an exotica, a relic of the dead world. But each of these locations hides one in four to ten keyed locations. If they’re run as written and not improvised on significantly, you’re levelling up quite quickly. It occurs to me that a larger party, who as a whole require 4 or 5 exotica to level up, won’t progress too quickly though.

Vaarn is a complete package when it comes to post-apocalyptic fantasy, a one-stop shop that is specific enough in its worldbuilding that it’s worth delving into. It is marred when it steps away from that. Inconsistent randomisers, that often could be some away with or made more specific. Descriptions that sometimes feel limiting. A lack of hooks to grant players opportunity to desire to look deeper, rather than expecting a reliance on meta norms. It expects a degree of preparation, but it’s scaffolded heavily, but a few weak points in that scaffold make it challenging to prep for someone who lacks confidence or experience in prepping this style of game. Luckily, if that’s not your jam, the locations already provided mean you’ll probably never need to use them if you chose, but despite a decent page count, they don’t feel likely to provide a lot of time at the table. That’s a lot of criticisms, but the consistency of evocative content and great writing in this is out of this world, and seriously outpaces books like Oz and Cess and Citadel in its ratio of imagination fuel to word count.

I’m genuinely on the fence about whether the effort expected for me to run it, and whether it’s worth it. The writing and the vibrancy of the world — similar enough to other post-apocalyptic fantasies to be easy, different enough to be interesting — makes it appealing despite my misgivings. There are also a number of modules available, although I don’t know their quality. It’s a compelling enough setting that I could see myself writing something more to my own tastes for the game, which is probably a shining recommendation in and of itself.

If you’re looking for post-apocalyptic adventure that’s light on mathematics, walks the line between gonzo and melancholy, and with a fairly good toolkit for generating content between sessions, this is probably the best thing on the market.

Idle Cartulary