VAULTS OF VAARN: SECOND EDITION

Greetings wanderers, just wanted to update you on the progress of my projects and the future of Vaults of Vaarn.

Specifically I want to address an issue of much discussion: the availability of the Deluxe Edition hardback. Having spoken with Games Omnivorous, I’ve made the decision to part ways with the publisher. There’s no hard feelings on either side, I just want to be in charge of producing future Vaults of Vaarn books myself and grow my skills on the layout and logistics side of publishing. The 2022 Deluxe Edition is now officially out of print and will not be returning to shelves.

What does this mean for the game? (drumroll please) Allow me to announce

Vaults of Vaarn: Second Edition

I’ve decided to take the opportunity to reimagine the project rather than just reissuing the exact same book. My writing for the game and setting has expanded a lot since 2021, which is when the text of the Deluxe Edition was finalised. I would like to include some of the expanded material from the Patreon, as well as other material that only exists in draft form currently.

My current goals for Vaults of Vaarn 2E are as follows:

1. Maximum backwards compatibility. I’m not interested in reinventing the wheel, since the core rules still play well. It is likely that the way the rules are explained is revised to clarify some common questions, but the core gameplay systems will not change. It will still be Knave 1E with plenty of mutations.
2. Increase usability where possible. The original zines assume you’ve marinated in the OSR blogsphere and leave lots of basic play procedures unexplained. There isn’t even an initiative system in the original Issue 1. I want to focus on filling these gaps and making the game easy to understand for new people (without compromising the OSR principles).
3. Focus on content. The appeal of Vaarn has always been the vivid worldbuilding through content generators rather than the specific ruleset. I want 2E to focus even more thoroughly on the procedurally generated world, and include equal emphasis on generating dungeons and settlements alongside generating wilderness pointcrawl maps.

Basically the goal is to make the same game, but better, and please all the old fans while drawing in new players too. Nothing too difficult then!

Currently what I’m looking at doing is splitting the book into two parts: part one for players and part two for referees. The table of contents currently looks like this:

Player’s Material

• Introductory Material: a big-picture setting overview, how to play an OSR-style game. Keep this bit brief.
• Basic Rules
• Player Ancestries (10, including everything from Issue 01 and 03.)
• Equipment (including Cybernetics)
• Esoteric Pursuits (Mystic Gifts, Alchemy, Hypergeometry)
• Followers, Mercenaries, Pets, Steeds, Vehicles
• Miscellaneous Tables (books, drugs, etc)

Referee’s Material

• Running the Game (referee duties, how to adjudicate common situations, etc. Nothing too heavy).
• Creating a Campaign: step-by-step on seeding enough stuff in your sandbox, advice on when to use the following chapters, which are the ‘meat’.
• Creating a Vault: procedural dice-drop methods for creating science-fantasy dungeons
• Creating a Settlement: producedural dice-drops methods for creating settlements and outposts in the blue desert
• Creating the Wilderness: the familiar pointcrawl generation procedure we’re familiar with from Issue 03. Edited and updated.
• Creating the Cast: NPC creation procedures. More in-depth than we’ve seen before. Includes some info on the bigger ‘factions’ that NPCs can belong to.
• Bestiary: a full bestiary for Vaarn, a best-of selection from the 100+ monsters I’ve written about in the zines and on the blog.
• Treasure: Exotica, Hypergeometric Codexes, Advanced Cybernetics
• Miscellany: Diseases, Nanomachine Infections, Quantum Daemons, and more. Anything that didn’t fit in the other chapters.
• Appendices: The Titans, Languages, the Immortal Paths, Religions (for Referees who like pre-written lore)

You’ll notice an omission: Gnomon. I would love to get the city into the Referee material but I don’t know how much space we’ll have. If I can’t I would like to remaster the city setting zine into a full book at some point, with support for running the dungeons in Gnomon’s Depths as well as the city on the surface. We shall see.

This is obviously a lot of work, but I’m confident it can get done. Much of the material exists in some form already; the main things that need development are the Settlement and Vault generation rules. I’d be tentatively looking at bringing this project to Backerkit sometime in late 2025. You can sign up for updates on crowdfunding here. The campaign date is speculative currently.

I have previewed the draft Player’s Material and the settlement building chapter on my Patreon, so check those out if you’re curious.