Greetings wanderers, I hope everyone’s enjoying summer. I wanted to talk about some of the upcoming projects in the Vaarn ‘franchise’ and how close they are to completion.
Currently I have three projects in the pipeline:
- Pariahs of Vaarn, a compilation zine of the Monster Monday creatures which have appeared on the Patreon since its inception. Monster Monday entries tend to have longer, more in-depth stories attached to them and don’t fit in with the concise bestiary format that we see in the main zine series. I decided they could have their own, occasional zine release instead. Issue 01 of Pariahs is currently 28 pages long, in full colour, and contains all the Monster Monday posts except the recent Mimics. It also collects the Quantum Daemon rules. Currently this zine is available in PDF to Patrons only, with a print run set to be mailed out to Patrons soon. I intend to sell the remainder of the run on Antipode.
- Vaults of Vaarn Issue 04, the long-awaited fourth installment of the main zine series, which will take us to the Great Wall of Vaarn. The zine is currently 68 pages long in draft and I am still filling out the d20 location generator tables which comprise the meat of the zine. I am getting about an hour during my workweeks on this project, so it is progressing, but slowly. My patrons get updates on this issue, with the latest found here.
- Vaults of Vaarn: Deluxe Vol. 2 (working title), the sequel to the Games Omnivorous hardback. I have a verbal agreement with GO but not a contract at this stage, so don’t take anything I say here as set in stone. The book will be about 100 pages long, and the pitch is basically more. There will be more Ancestries (including the four that didn’t make it into the first hardback), more Bestiary entries, more cybernetics and exotica, more vehicles, more generator tables, a more detailed Vault generation system, more Adventure Sites (including Adventure Pack 02: The Fount of Illustrious Flesh and Caeba in the Maw), and some optional variant rules to deepen the game (an example of this content would be the Advanced Weapon Rules). Currently this volume is not planned to include the content from Issue 04.
Currently, Pariahs of Vaarn is finished, and I’m waiting for it to arrive from the printer. Issue 04 still has a decent way to go, but I’m hoping to be done by the end of the year. The Vol. 2 hardback will be done when it’s done, but I wouldn’t expect to hear much more about it before 2024.
Personal News
Last but not least: my partner and I are expecting a baby in October! This is a source of great joy and much anxiety, as we are first-time parents. I mention it partly because I want to share the news with everyone, and partly because a newborn will affect my workload and production speed this year. I really want to have Vaults of Vaarn #4 finished by October. My (perhaps foolish) hope is that I can continue to post to Patreon and work on Vaarn with a newborn, but the frequency will certainly drop for a while.
VAULTS OF VAARN 