The Making of Vaesen: The Hollow Vale

Now that my Vaesen campaign has concluded, I'm writing up some of my design thoughts over Christmas in the odd quiet moment between family engagements and doing my taxes. This post splits into the creative process around writing the Hollow Vale campaign and my observations about the Vaesen game system. I will write a separate post about what was really going on behind the secenes.

The Hollow Vale was largely dreamed up during my summer vacation in the Mediterranean. This is always a good time for creative brainstorming. I wanted to run a campaign in 2025 and ideally wanted it to be a folk horror campaign centred on the West Country. I originally pondered running this with Call of Cthulhu, but discarded that eventually in favour of exploring Vaesen, which I thought would fit the bill. This led to one chapter being discarded as too Lovecraftian and not sufficiently 'Vaesen' to be replaced with the Glastonbury chapter (my favourite to GM as it happened).

 I wrote the first three chapters up in a fair amount of detail in advance. The initial Harrowstone chapter sets the scene and welcomes the characters to Harrow House. It includes their initial interactions with the ghost of Isaac Merrow and their first battle with the wight under Dartmoor. I left the second part of the campaign partly defined as I wanted it to be flexible enough to be reactive to the actions of the players.

I wanted to focus the game on the West Country and have been pondering a regional English campaign for some time now. This was partly inspired by my reading of Jamaica Inn during the pandemic, but also my many trips to the region as a child in the 1970s and 1980s (my grandparents lived in Taunton). Many of the locations featured in the campaign I have visited as a youngling on summer holidays, although Harrowcombe is completely fictional! 

I also wanted to use a map of the 'Hollow Vale' as an introductory document for the players, focusing on ley lines, the region as a whole and potential locations of interest in the future. Had it been more of a sandbox campaign, I might have allowed the PCs to explore the region more freely, but found it better to have them summoned to various crisis points by concerned citizens to put out vaesen fires, which is how the Scandinavian adventures seem to be structured.

The big light bulb moment for me was Mordred. Initially the Hollow Wight was just that, an evil spirit dwelling under Dartmoor awakened by the proddings of misguided occulist Merrow. I knew I wanted to include Glastonbury and the Mourning Queen and it was as I was diving into who the Mourning Queen was that I realised she could be Guinevere herself, now living as an immortal in faerie. From there it was an easy leap to connect the Hollow Wight to Mordred and open up the strong Arthurian flavours in the second half of the plot.

The Circle of Six was already something I wanted near the back end of the campaign, a coterie of occultists in Bristol who were seeking to return the Hollow Wight to the world of men and awaken the vaesen of the land, but at the start of the process the wight did not have a name or a purpose. The expedition into the sewers and the hypogeum under Bristol cathedral were locked in fairly early on.

The dark secrets of the player characters which were defined at the beginning of the campaign also had an impact to varying degrees. These elements were added as we went on. The Black Stag Inn at Harrowcombe, the sighting of the stag man on Dartmoor in the mist, the silver stag on the lawn of Harrow House, all came from the background of Roddy MacLeod's player. Similarly the 'William' sub-plot and his complex relationship with his twin in faerie started coming to the fore in Glastonbury, largely because I saw 'shadow William' as now a servant of the Mourning Queen in her palace of glass in Avalon (he became the phantom fiddler at the harvest festival).

Fallowdrake I designed myself at the start of the campaign using the random tables in the Vaesen rules. From there I proceeded to thinking about a literary rival and decided to use a real world one instead of a fictional writer. I pondered Charles Dickens initially but then stumbled across Lewis Carroll, who seemed ideal given his fascination with the surreal (he wrote several tales about the fae outside his Alice books). Further research on Carroll/Dodgson provided a well-rounded NPC the characters could meet in Glastonbury, questing for the Mourning Queen and possessed of the second sight himself. The fact that he published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland at the end of 1865 only confirmed my choice!

I deliberately wrote the campaign to track the course of the seasons, from late spring on Dartmoor early on, to high summer under the apple boughs of Wellow, to the autumn rains and floods (and harvest festival) in Glastonbury. Naturally the conclusion came with the snow in Bristol and plague victims huddling around fires to keep warm in the slush-ridden side streets of the Floating Docks, listening out for the sound of rats larger than they should be!

An evening of repose at Harrow House

Thoughts on the Vaesen system

Overall I found Vaesen very easy to run with the right level of complexity for me as a GM. From the start I designed my own vaesen encounters, and this proved an experiment in terms of relative powers. Predictably, as with many RPGs, a lone vaesen can find itself outfought by multiple enemies. This led me to a further look at some of the creatures in the core rules, and I decided to beef up my later encounters a little - e.g. more armour points for the wererats in Bristol, and the ability of frog swarms to minimise bullet damage (but sadly not damage inflicted by a 16 stone vagabond jumping on them with hob nail boots).

I felt that the player characters were a lot more robust than their equivalents in Call of Cthulhu, and we only rolled once on the critical physical damage table in the whole campaign. That said, it did saddle Roddy with a permanent -2D Fear penalty which could have been a big handicap for him earlier in the campaign. He almost died in the caves under the Mendips. William proved to be an absolute beast in hand to hand combat, but that was what he was designed for, and he was arguably the party's most potent weapon against vaesen.

I must further investigate the ability of players to inflict mental damage on vaesen as this can by-pass their defences quite easily. The rules do not deliver a clear steer on this, but the damage tracks of vaesen do include mental and physical effects. It does make it easier for PCs to defeat vaesen with natural damage soaking powers like the Cheddar Giant encounter. 

In addition, the ability to use attack successes to switch initative with an NPC makes it harder for a single threat - like many vaesen are - to properly come to grips with players. Some vaesen can deal themselves two initiative cards (shades of Savage Worlds) but many will find it hard to cope with this srategy. I'm not sure I'm a huge fan of it as a concept and I may drop it if I run any more Free League games.

Overall I liked Vaesen as a system and its similarity to Alien, although I prefer the panic rules in Alien to the fear rules in Vaesen. I particularly liked the ability to improve the party's base of operations with various features including a gardener, an occult library and a deadly herb garden. The level of power creep in the game became more obvious in the later stages and I think the final confrontation with the Circle was well-timed, as PCs were becoming much tougher, with talents like Brave inuring them to Fear.