fragments of a blue ruin
The Vaarn bestiary has gotten quite sizable, and it's also scattered around various zines, books, blog posts, etc. The most reliable resource is of course the SRD, but some people like a PDF they can print out and refer to at the table. I've done a quick bit of consolidation and made an A4-sized, complete… Continue reading COMPACT BESTIARY
As Skerples and Arnold K have written, you should create threats that ‘attack every part of the character sheet.’ I think this is a solid concept to keep in mind when doing creature design, so I had a stab at it. None of these monsters deal direct HP damage, although they are far more dangerous… Continue reading BEYOND HP DAMAGE
I’ve never made a secret of my admiration for the Half-Life franchise, and I wanted to try my hand at converting one of Gordon Freeman’s most famous alien adversaries (which in turn have a literary forefather in a really great Clark Ashton Smith story). The three headcrab subspecies and their respective zombies in Half-Life 2… Continue reading SCULLCRABS
To Urth they came, long hungering, riding radiation-waves in the silence like fungal spores roil upon the wind. Our light does not love them as it does terrestrial creatures and so these cosmic vagrants are without shadow or hue possessing only unseen form. Those unfortunates who glimpse them are given mind of a withered tree… Continue reading STAR VAMPIRE
The Vaarn bestiary has grown quite a bit since the first zine came out, now totalling at over 100 official monsters. There was some discussion recently on the Vaarn Discord about the encounter table given in the original zine, regional variations upon it, and encounter threat. In the spirit of leading by example, I'm going… Continue reading WASTELAND ENCOUNTERS
I’m back for an eighth installment of Monsters in the Machine. To re-read our previous entry click here, or you can go back to the start and see how it all began. To quickly re-cap what’s going on, this is a series where I feed the GPT-3 AI entries from the Vaults of Vaarn bestiary and let it come up with… Continue reading MONSTERS IN THE MACHINE 8
I’m back for a seventh bumper-sized dose of Monsters in the Machine. To re-read our previous entry click here, or you can go back to the start and see how it all began. To quickly re-cap what’s going on, this is a series where I feed the GPT-3 AI entries from the Vaults of Vaarn bestiary and let it come… Continue reading MONSTERS IN THE MACHINE 7
An underserved category of monster is the Outsider, something that hails from beyond the bounds of our universe and is strange even to Vaarn. Here are five Outsiders to throw at your party. Be warned that they all fight in bemusing or annoying ways, and most require hypergeometric or anti-paradox gear to properly fight. Also… Continue reading FIVE OUTSIDERS
Issue 04 is still a while off, but I have been producing content for it sporadically throughout 2022. As an early Christmas present, here's a few of the monsters the PCs might encounter while exploring the Great Wall. Cannon Beetle Biological / SyntheticLevel 3, Armour 16, Morale +7, Encountered d6Attack: Cannon (d12 blast) The Wall’s… Continue reading CREATURES OF THE WALL
My home Vaarn campaign (currently on hiatus) reached a point where the PCs were delving into the flooded artificial caverns beneath the city of Gnomon, ostensibly in the employ of the Water Baron but in reality seeking to disable his sabotage device. We will return to this narrative someday, and I don’t intend to spoil… Continue reading CREATURES OF GNOMON’S DEPTHS
VAULTS OF VAARN 