fragments of a blue ruin
After a long gestation, my RPG zine about vampire thieves, Bloodheist, is out now in PDF! The full PDF costs $4.99 or you can download a free demo version that is basically all the rules and character creation content needed to play! Why are you still here? Go have a look! You can now buy… Continue reading Bloodheist Zine Released
As a follow-up to my last post on Toxin Dice, I thought it would be fun to showcase a few Vaarnish creatures that attack with or use toxins. Toxic attacks are indicated with the abbreviation TOX. If the affected character fails a CON save, they gain a Toxin Dice of the size indicated. So a… Continue reading TOXIC CREATURES
I very rarely make posts about game mechanics, but there's something I've started thinking about recently: poison! How does one make it engaging? I don't really like Save or Die type poisons and I haven't given any Vaarn monsters this ability. The closest is the Amaranthine Death-Worm, which can inflict you with a special status… Continue reading TOXIN DICE
Last time, the gang fought off a rustacean in the depths of the Water Baron's Aquifer machine, escaped the attentions of the Hydra's tentacles by taking refuge inside some broken cryogenic tubes, and descended deeper into the complex in search of the mechanism that would drain the water from the flooded lower levels. In their… Continue reading VAARN ACTUAL PLAY: EPISODES 29 & 30
A small bit of news: Vaults of Vaarn now has a digital System Reference Document for you to peruse. This was initially the work of a reader and fan, Desolate Drifter aka Gulluth Gulch, and I got involved once the hard part was done. The SRD compiles everything from issues 1-3 in a searchable online… Continue reading VAARN SRD
For eons unguessed at, the imminence of death has been a fearful black wing that unfurls across the minds of sapient beings. To escape mortality has been the pre-occupation of magicians, philosophers, kings, science mystics, gene-sculptors and demon-speakers and fortune-twisters alike. Throughout the long-faded eras of Urth, the means by which a mortal man could… Continue reading THE FIVE IMMORTAL PATHS
Last time the players fought some rustaceans and evaded the attentions of the Hydra, a tentacled monster. They then discovered a secret room that contained a gravity manipulator, and managed to shut down a malfunctioning magnet. However, the objects stuck to the ceiling of the magnetised room creating a lot of noise when they fell,… Continue reading VAARN ACTUAL PLAY: EPISODE 28
Some of the writing work I've been doing recently for Bloodheist has been in collaboration with Penny De Redful. Penny is the pseudonymous author of the weekly Scandal Sheet, a scurrilous rag full of gossip and rumours, a publication that every vampire in the Undying Empire decries as an atrocious breach of privacy when their name… Continue reading Penny De Redful Writes In
Long ago, when the Autarchs still reigned over Vaarn, there was a certain valley where no plant grew and no bird sang and no man had made a house for the land underfoot was poisoned and all who camped there would sicken and die. In time the Autarch's wise men were told tales of this… Continue reading BLIGHTSTONE KNIGHT
I run my vampire heist game Bloodheist fairly regularly, but I don't often post the play reports, which I think is a mistake. I was lucky enough to playtest the game with a small new group this weekend, so I've decided to offer a brief summary of the proceedings. The playtesters rolled up completely random… Continue reading Bloodheist: The Clearlake Sanitarium
VAULTS OF VAARN 