Vaults

The eponymous vaults of Vaarn are the underground spaces that riddle the blue desert. They are known as the cradles of monsters, and the hiding spaces of fabulous Exotica. They are the primary crucible of the game’s action, in which the PCs test their wits and strength against the denizens of the depths. 

Exploration Turns

The time spent exploring vaults or other adventure sites is abstracted into Exploration Turns. During a single Exploration Turn, the PCs can:

• Travel from one location to another.
• Search the location they are in.
• Take a Short Rest.
• Conduct any other action that seems appropriate, such as excavating a grave, hacking an ancient computer system, damming a stream, etc. Especially time-consuming actions require multiple exploration turns.

Running and Fleeing

Running through a vault allows PCs to traverse ten locations in a single Exploration Turn. However, the Referee will describe only scattered impressions of the locations, without detail. Any traps are triggered automatically and encounters always surprise the PCs.

Encounters 

Each Exploration Turn, the Referee checks for encounters by rolling d6 and consulting the table below. If the PCs are over-encumbered or making lots of noise, the Referee may roll 2 or even 3d6 and take the lowest single result. 

Doors

Listening outside a closed door takes one Exploration Turn. The PCs can only get vague information about the room by listening, such as whether it contains living creatures.

Stuck or locked doors can usually be forced open. Explosives or sustained gunfire break down doors instantly, at the cost of an Encounter roll. Forcing a door open with brute strength takes 10 Exploration Turns, minus the PC’s STR bonus (minimum 1 Exploration Turn). Some doors may not be opened without special tools like keycards.

Hidden and Secret Features

Vault locations are described in hierarchies of  available information. Each location will have some obvious features: qualities and points of interest that the PCs can easily see without needing to search for them, such as brooding statues, waterfalls, or gleaming computer consoles. However, some locations will contain hidden and secret features as well. 

Hidden features are concealed from view, but not otherwise obscure. They will always be discovered by spending an Exploration Turn searching the location: a switch behind a curtain or a golden orb submerged in a murky pool are two examples. 

Secret features can only be discovered by engaging with the vault as a whole and describing specific PC actions rather than a generic search. Sometimes they may require knowledge from elsewhere in the vault to find, such as a door which only opens when a specific statue is prayed to. Secret features cannot be uncovered by declaring a generic search, rolling dice, or attempting ‘perception checks’, but by engaging with the fiction of the location. Searching the room may (at the Referee’s discretion) unearth a hint to the presence of a secret feature, such as a draft of air in a room containing a secret door, and so on.

Light and Darkness

Vaarn’s vaults are mostly lightless, their glowglobes having long since burnt out. PCs need a source of illumination, whether an electric torch or a fluorescent chunk of fungus. Without light the PCs are travelling blind: they take three exploration turns to move from one location to another, and cannot effectively search an unlit location. Encounters always surprise the party. Ranged attacks cannot be made without light, and melee attacks have DIS. 

Resting Underground

Vaults are inherently dangerous places, and it is inadvisable to camp there. If the PCs are engaged in an extended delve and insist on taking a Long Rest in a vault, they must find a secure campsite in a room with easily barred entrances. If they fail to do so they have a 3-in-6 chance to be surprised during the night by an encounter. 

Escaping the Vault

Sometimes you just need to leave. If things are going really poorly and the players want to get back to the surface right now, have each PC roll d20 and consult the table below.

Summary

An ancient cult that is proscribed everywhere in civilisation, but thrives in dark corners of Vaarn. The Children take as their sigil a rooster, headless and inverted, a charm against the rising of the Promised Sun. 

The sect’s rites invoke the activation of the dreaming mind, in the hopes of hastening the arrival of the usurper star and the dissolution of reality. Junior cultists are enticed with visits to personalised dreamworlds where all their sublimated wishes are fulfilled.

The Children seek nascent psychics for recruitment by infiltrating their dreams. A town that suffers from shared nightmares is harbouring a Darkling Sun sect.

Worship of the Darkling Sun is but a mask for discordant veneration of Azathoth, the Daemon Sultan. This secret is not known to all Children, but is revealed when they achieve the rank of Ninth Mystery.

Goals

Preserve their Secrecy. The cult fears discovery and annihilation. They recruit carefully and do not reveal the true purpose of their sect until the acolyte has spent many years studying the fragmentary Liturgy of the Darkling Sun. Priests of the cult hide their identity with cowls of captured shadow.

Strengthen the Dream. The Children seek powerful psychics to empower and expand the dreamworlds their rites create. These recruits may enter the dream willingly or unwillingly, but enter it they must.

Usurp Reality. The cult’s ultimate goal is to invert reality, switching the ontological status of their shared dreams and the waking world.  Urth will be captured in the orbit of the Darkling Sun, another name for Azathoth, a dreaming idiot god. This will be apocalyptic for the inhabitants of Urth, but the Children believe the ascension of the usurper star will be heaven (for them).

Allies

Court of the Jigsaw Autarch. Destabilisation of lucid reality suits the Jigsaw Autarch as readily as it does Azathoth, and the two sects often work hand-in-hand to unpick the stitches of creation, although each would betray the other in pursuit of their ultimate goal.

Other worshippers of Azathoth. The Daemon Sultan is venerated by the Moonbeasts of Luna, Star Vampires, certain Cliff Ghul families, and other unwholesome beasts. Such monsters will aid the Children when called upon.

Enemies

The New Hegemony. The Hegemon’s Inquisition is aware of the Children , although they do not know the full extent of the cult’s goals. The Hegemony know enough to sentence all Children to death, and Legionaries are trained to spot signs of cult membership during searches. 

Faa Nomads. The Faa do not tolerate worship of the Darkling Sun and eliminate sects from their tribal groups.

Seekers of Eyeless Wisdom. More than any other faction, the Seekers are awake to the reality-warping threat the Children represent. The Seekers are in competition with the Children for recruitment of nascent mystics, and are able to locate Darkling Sun cabals using clairvoyance and telepathy.

The Children Triumphant

I dreamt a dream that was not a dream
The old sun sank and in her place
Rose an interloper, dark and strong
And the hills, my bones, shivered
Like children in the throes of sleep
While dark new stars ushered old along
Streams ran uphill, colours spoke
And all folk had one face, a paper mask
I cried for help but it became a song

Child of the Darkling Sun

Biological / Psychic
Lvl 3 (12 hp) / AV 11 / ML +5 / Enc d6
Atk: Dagger (d4) / Darkling Dream (Special)

Dark-robed dreamers, hooded in black silk and blinkered by their desire to transcend lucid reality. 

Darkling Dream: the Child falls asleep. While they sleep, they manifest a nightmare into the waking world, with no Save possible. The nature of the nightmare varies: stairs may become slides into pits of razors, the sun may have your father’s face, doors may seal shut or open into indescribable vistas. Waking the Child (either through damage or anything else that would wake a sleeper) ends their dream’s impingement on our reality. 

Nightmare Herald

Outsider / Psychic
Lvl 5 (20 hp) / AV 14 / ML +5 / Enc 1
Atk: Darkling Lullaby (EGO Save vs Sleep) / Revelation (d4 EGO damage)

The formless musicians who attend to the Daemon Sultan Azathoth in the dreaming chaos at the end of spacetime. The Children summon these pipers into our reality to aid their dream rituals. 

Sleep: targets fall into a nightmare-wracked sleep and cannot act. They can be woken by direct damage, or anything else that would wake a sleeper. 

Feast of Dreams: at the start of the round, a Nightmare Herald regenerates d6 HP for each nearby sleeping creature, allied or enemy. This effect can resurrect the Herald from apparent ‘death’.

Not all the blind beggars who sit besides crossroads in Vaarn are sightless, as the compassionate might suppose, due to misfortune. Some chose the dark.

Summary

The Seekers are a remnant of the synchronistic religious/scientific programs that attempted to expand human consciousness in the lost ages of Urth. Their holy colour is yellow and their sigil a helix-weeping eye.

Seekers blind themselves as part of a series of escalating mutilations intended to boost their precognitive and telekinetic abilities. They live ascetic lives underground, appearing pale and emaciated. The most exalted are tongueless and footless, relying entirely on psychic abilities to move and speak.

The seat of the sect’s power is a chain of temple complexes buried beneath Vaarn’s northern mountains, each temple but a cell in a great lightless honeycomb. Generations of Seekers live, work, and die without ever coming to the surface. In Vaarn’s deserts, smaller bands of itinerant Seekers pursue esoteric goals on behalf of the sect.

The Gestalt Choirs

Seekers combine their minds into Gestalt Choirs, enormous group-consciousnesses that perform psychic feats no single mind could do alone. While singing in these Choirs their bodies are tended to by other Seekers. 

Gestalt Choirs may be formed or disbanded for many reasons, but three are always singing: the Choir of Honey-Dappled Clouds, which obscures all Seeker temples from psychic view, the Choir of the Immanent Lamp, which attempts to map the sect’s possible futures, and the Choir of the Yellow Hand, which governs logistics and daily life within the sect. 

Goals

Birth the God-Eye. The Seekers pursue psychic power beyond all other goals, attempting through generations of genetic manipulation and psychic training to breed a powerful mystic prophesied as the God-Eye, the One Who Maps the Eyeless Path. 

Recruit Promising Psychics. The Seekers are always looking for new, brightly shining minds to induct into their order. Any PC who displays high levels of Gleam will be approached by missionaries. 

Purge Psychic Threats. Powerful psychics who are not suborned to the will of the Gestalt Choirs and the Eyeless Path are threats and must be eliminated. 

Allies

Faa Nomads. Many Faa tribes are adherents of the Eyeless Path, and foster their psychically-gifted offspring to Seeker Temples. 

Enemies

The New Hegemony. Hegemonic doctrine is at odds with the Seekers’ posthuman quest for transcendence. As the Hegemony expands into Vaarn, dedicated teams of anti-psychic hunters are recruited to combat the Gestalt Choirs. 

Titan Cults. The Titan Cults seek the restoration of the machine gods, and will not countenance the ascension of the God-Eye in their place. 

Children of the Darkling Sun. Out of all factions, the Seekers best understand the threat to reality posed by the dreams of the Children . The two organisations have waged psychic war for thousands of years, and are in heated competition for the allegiance of talented mystics. 

The Seekers Triumphant 

Quench your lamps and sound your trumpets, for the God-Eye walks amongst us. A new Age of Dark falls upon us like an anti-dawn. He Who Maps the Eyeless Path has a gift of prescience which extends to the thousandth alter-nativity, and his sight-beyond-sight cuts through the manifold hallways of Time to locate the destiny we mean to grasp. Away with doubt! Away with despair! Seekers no longer, for we have found the Eyeless Path, and our yellow banners shall fly from every stronghold and temple, and all the Urth shall be but a tool in the God-Eye’s hands.

Seeker of Eyeless Wisdom

Biological / Psychic
Lvl 2 (8 hp) / AV 11 / ML +5 / Enc d4
Atk: Brain Burster (Special) / Telekinesis (d6, STR save vs lifted and thrown)

Walkers of the Eyeless Path, who seek endarkenment within the subterranean halls of their hidden temples. Aspirant seekers cloak their eyes in yellow bandages, and forgo speech in the hopes of strengthening their telepathic puissance. 

Brain Burster: an embolism catalysed by psychic malice. For each combat round that the Seeker focuses their attention on a target, the target takes unblockable damage, with no to-hit roll required. This damage starts at 2 and doubles each turn, unless the Seeker’s focus is broken , or if they switch to a new target. Creatures without a brain cannot be harmed by this attack.

Master of Eyeless Wisdom

Biological / Psychic
Lvl 7 (28 hp) / AV Special / ML +7 / Enc 1
Atk: Mind Control (EGO Save vs Controlled) / Telekinesis (2d8, STR save vs lifted and thrown)

Masters of the Eyeless Path, who achieved endarkenment and now guide lesser minds upon the road. Self-blinded and legless, they levitate above the azure dust, resembling emaciated puppets that hang from unseen strings.  

Prescience: Eyeless Masters telepathically predict the assaults of their opponents, always moving ahead of the blow. They cannot be harmed with any attack unless the attacker learns to shield their intentions, achieved with an opposed PSY Save. Stripped of their prescience, Eyeless Masters have AV 11.

Please note this is only useful if you have not already made a pledge via Backerkit! Existing backers who want to add items to their orders will be able to do so in the pledge manager, which should go live later in the week.

Although I’m not a big fan of counting mutant chickens before the eggs hatch, it does seem that writing and illustrating Vaults of Vaarn will be my full time job for the foreseeable future! This is not the outcome I expected, but it is a huge thrill and I’m really looking forward to making the core rulebook as good as I possibly can over the next year.

48 hours still remain to back the campaign, and if you were a pre-launch follower you can still get the reward (Fragments of a Blue Ruin) when you back. This special PDF will be a collection of prose poetry and flash fiction from the world of Vaarn.

Awful Bliss

Because the campaign reached over £100,000 in pledges, I have committed to making a new adventure module which will be freely downloadable for all backers. This module will be called Awful Bliss. It will be a zine that focuses on Vaarn’s horrible hyena-women, the Cacklemaw. I have a special place in my heart for them and I think they can easily carry an adventure.

Expect ritual puppets, ‘fun’ and ‘games’, repulsive food and drink, and dreadful live bands at the Great Gloating, the annual weekend gathering of all the Cacklemaw Clans. The Great Gloating will be part music festival and part espionage survival-horror as the PCs infiltrate the gathering to rescue a kidnapped Hegemony Consul and become embroiled in the plots of She Who Laughs Last, a legendary Cacklemaw assassin. 

Thank you to everyone who has supported the project over the past five years, I couldn’t do this without you and I’m humbled by the enormous show of support during the BackerKit campaign. I am going to be on holiday from September 2nd until the 16th, and then I will be hunkering down to deliver the core 2E book. Hope everyone has a good end of the summer!

I spoke with the fast-growing Substack blog OSR Rocks about the process of writing VOV 2E, some of the OSR products that inspired me, and what’s in the future for Vaults of Vaarn! It’s a good interview so hopefully you enjoy.

If you’ve yet to pledge to the Vaults of Vaarn 2E Backerkit campaign, you still have 24 hours to get the early bird reward, ‘Fragments of a Blue Ruin’. This special digital-only zine will contain flash fiction from the world of Vaarn.

Take a look at the pledge tiers to see what’s available during the campaign:

ALL ZINES INCLUDED PLUS ADVENTURE PACKS PLUS PATREON CONTENT

320 PAGES IN HARDBACK B5 SIZED TWO COLOUR PRINTING

CHECK IT OUT NOW

This reward is titled Fragments of a Blue Ruin and it will be a special text-only collection of Vaarn prose poetry and fiction fragments, many of which have not been published previously. You can see the cover above. I think this will be a really fun little zine-sized reward for keen backers.

Patron Discounts

I can also confirm that there will be discounts available for my Patrons! Once the campaign is live, there will be an update posted on Patreon for each membership tier, instructing you how to obtain your discounted copies. If you aren’t signed up already, do so now!

Only eight days to go until launch! We now have a beautiful animated trailer video courtesy of the talented Mr David Blandy! Please sign up to follow along on the Backerkit prelaunch page to be notified when the campaign goes live.