Vaesen - A Wicked Secret

Rulebook cover for Vaesen

This was a pickup game after Precognition! I had been itching to play this system for a while and opted to join. Glad I did as it was very cool and prompted thinking about how we set up, run, and manage investigation scenarios as a whole.

The Stat Sheet

The Snapshot

• Harrassed a traumatized man about his experience
• Interviewed a powerful pagan woman
• Found a dead body
• Got the priest killed
• Almost died from a church grim
• Rid the town of the church grim but did not catch pagan woman

The System

Vaesen is a nordic horror investigation system where players have what's called the Sight and can see the supernatural. Skill checks are utilized to discover what's really happening in the world, and only a 6 counts as a success. Equipment, traits, and attributes are added together to give the player their dice pool when rolling. Players can suffer conditions, both mental and physical, that diminish their dice pool, depending on the type of skill test they're making. It's a straightforward and simple system to get into that allows room for improvisation for both the GM and the player.

The Brief

While we’re at our crappy castle, we receive a letter from August von Meijer. He tells us about one of his employees, fleeing a village at night in his night shirt and raving about a beast. Now, we’re doing research of our own to see if we can deduce anything before getting involved. Our research yielded knowledge of pagan rituals and their natur motifs, tying into some religion. We've also heard rumors that the village has a bloody past and their pagan rituals persist to this day. Lastly, the previous priest of the village died under mysterious circumstances. His body was found mutilated in the woods. With this knowledge, we set off on our journey.

Arriving in August's office, he notified us that he'd be covering our travel and lodgings. He's very eager to be done with this deal and secure the land. A woman named Marta is allowing us to stay with her, and he's informed us that a Dorotea Skytt was deep in negotiations with him. No one has said yes or no to his deal yet.

He told about his employer, Lindesköld, who had been put in isolation due to fear of him hurting himself or others. We spoke to Lindesköld who told us about a beast with glowing red eyes that followed him. He remembered church bells ringins and had scratches all over his arms from tree branches.

Investigating the village, we spent much time talking to Marta and the priest who seemed to be quibbling over something. The priest had medieval texts, relating to the behavior of the creature. We deduced it to be a church grim, a beast that would do anything to protect the church.

A circle of crows alerted us to a dead body, another employee of August's who had been missing for a couple of days. We found a note on his body about meeting with the priest, though not in his handwriting.

By nightfall, the priest was killed by the church grim, and I threw a rock at the church and ran away, hoping to give the rest of my group time to burn the beast's bones that were under the foundation of the church.

Somehow, we all lived, and the church grim was destroyed!

The Takeaways

After playing this, I immediately ran it for my one-shot group and felt this was the best scenario to use, since I was already familiar with it. You can read more about it in my post about Info Grids & Bargain Tables.

Pros

• Very different investigation style
• Felt like I had player agency on the outcome of the investigation
• Very easy for players to get into

Cons

• Requires realizing that not all clues are NPC-based
• Need players who are willing to be creative in discovering information
• A lot of management on the GM side

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