Vaesen: The Sinister Secret of Signilskär - Post-Session Thoughts
I have a group of former colleagues that run a Vaesen game occasionally, which works out to about once per quarter. At the end of the last session, the GM had mentioned wanting to see the game from the player side, so I volunteered to run the next game. He has been running the Wicked Secret book so I opted to write my own mystery on the assumption that he had probably skimmed the entire thing.
Going into the planning process, I had a few ideas rolling around my brain (mainly The Alexandrian’s 3-Clue Rule and Running Mysteries articles and DIY & Dragons Landmark, Hidden, Secret blogpost) and wanted to actually use that knowledge. Right off the bat, the Vaesen book has great tools for making your own Nordic horror mystery. I found the flowchart template to be a great starting point to begin brainstorming with. The tips for creating clues generally followed the same advice from the above articles and it also included a small but useful collection of tables at the end to help with generating the content. Free League made an excellent choice including these 20 pages in the book.
My plan going into the game
I decided on three locations separated by ferry rides and two “main” NPCs or sublocations at each. I then assigned Landmark, Hidden, or Secret info to each location and used a clue map to ensure I had enough arrows pointing to other locations and the necessary revelations. The critical clues were all Hidden info, and were given to the PCs for asking the right questions (and not locked behind a roll). I baked in a timer to keep the pressure up and tried to build some scenarios where the PCs would have to decide between two mutually exclusive options to keep it interesting. I threw in a couple of Chekov’s Guns for good measure and the last key decision I made was to reveal the Vaesen was a Sea Serpent early, so the rest of the session would focus on how to deal with it.
How it went…
One-shots are hard to run but I think I’ve gotten better at pacing and storytelling over the last few years. And then that Saturday, I was humbled; I prepped way too much material. We played for 5 hours (including breaks) and I was still able to bring it to a satisfying conclusion, even if the players didn’t get an opportunity to fully explore the area. The PC to PC interactions and roleplaying took center stage and a majority of the time. They seemed to enjoy it and their conversations generally moved the plot along, so I didn’t feel the need to intervene. On the whole, the players picked up on the mystery quickly, didn’t chase red herrings, and seemed to have a plan on what to investigate next.
One thing that slowed progress was their reluctance to split up (due to the lethality in previous sessions). Towards the end of the session they finally split up to search different locations and I think if the story had lasted multiple sessions they would have grown more comfortable with breaking up into pairs. At certain points, I was getting nervous that the players not in the scene were getting bored and having side conversations until I was able to hear that they were actually plotting their next move!
I had planned for a “brief” encounter with the Sea Serpent to help prod the investigation along if they hadn’t figured out what they were dealing with yet but at the 4-hour mark, I decided to make that the final showdown. Combat in Vaesen is clunky and time consuming with lots of rolls and counter-rolls. The fight occurred when the Sea Serpent attacked the ferry on the way back to their home-base and the result really highlighted the danger it presented. In the end, they were able to drive it back and bring the ferry to the safety of port. If this were planned over multiple sessions, I think this would have been a perfect “first session ending” as the PCs found themselves on the back foot. From there, we went into “epilogue” mode where we just quickly narrated the remaining time and then zoomed in on a final scene with the Sea Serpent taking out the passenger ship that was docking to pick them up and just ended it with the ship sinking, bad guys win, fade to black amongst the calamity of the shipwreck.
What I will keep for next time
- The Landmark/Hidden/Secret clue format was great for me at the table. For each location, I knew which puzzle pieces to hand out and when to do so.
- Filling out a clue map during prep to ensure there were multiple ways to get to each conclusion.
- Limiting combat to just the final confrontation of the Vaesen.
- Keeping the focus of the mystery on figuring out how to “solve” the Vaesen instead of determining what type of creature it was.
What I would change next time
- Keep it all in a single location with 3 sub-locations that are relatively close to each other.
- Reduce the number of clues. Probably 1 Landmark clue (just the description of the place), 2-3 Hidden clues, and 1 Secret clue (background info or maybe an alternate way to solve it).
- Step up the time pressure to 24 or maybe 48 hours so that every investigation and even deciding to sleep would be a meaningful choice.
Conclusion
Overall, I enjoyed running the mystery. I am not a fan of the Year Zero system the game uses but it works OK for mysteries. Talking to the players as we were cleaning up, they seemed to enjoy it and was very interested in the sandbox that I had created. And they all agreed that the slow buildup to the Sea Serpent attack worked out well and they feared for their characters’ lives when it showed up, especially when I started asking for all the d6s on the table for its attack. I think the players were disappointed that they didn’t get the “good” ending but overall understood the time constraints and were entertained by the story we told that night. Not sure when our next game is and who will be GMing but looking forward to it nonetheless.