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
I was recently invited on Brad Kerr and Yochai Gal's RPG module review podcast Between Two Cairns. As a long time fan of the show, I eagerly accepted, and we spent a lovely afternoon discussing Vaults of Vaarn, the work of David Graber and M. John Harrison, assassinating John Lennon for a second time, the… Continue reading Guest Spot on Between Two Cairns
Following the success of last year's Vaarn Summer Jam, I'm hosting a second annual game jam on itch.io! The submission period will run from the start of June until the end of August this year, making it a true summer event. The returning Summer Jam is a non-ranked game jam, where entrants are invited to… Continue reading VAARN SUMMER JAM ’23
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
Stratosfolk are the descendants of abhuman worker corps, bred by gene-sculptors to construct space elevators and orbital habitats. Rudimentary human nervous systems fused with living vacuum suits, the creatures have survived the Great Collapse and live as a free people in the highest layers of Urth’s atmosphere. Able to inflate and deflate their gas-filled bodies… Continue reading PLAYER ANCESTRY: STRATOSFOLK
Travel within the Great Wall is profoundly different from travelling the empty wastes of the Interior. This is an attempt to codify the differences, and make them apparent to Referees and players alike. Directions The Wall is a vertical structure. Directions given will differ from the standard four compass points. When giving directions, a denizen… Continue reading WALL-CRAWLING PROCEDURES
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
There comes a time in the evening, when the lamps have been dimmed and the mammut have settled in their stables, when one sits alone on the porch listening to summer rain fall upon the orange groves and the warm wind rummaging in the deeper forests about the estate. Work has ceased and the only… Continue reading THE HEGEMONY AND ITS DISCONTENTS
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
VAULTS OF VAARN 