Vaesen, the RPG that asks: Are you smarter than a leprechaun?

hello there what if I was to tell you that there was an elf behind you right now getting closer and closer reaching out with long fingers to grasp your neck you might think me a loon make your excuses turn to leave but you do so at your peril welcome to Quinn's Quest [Music] [Music] vion is a hell of a pitch backed up by some wonderful art a game that wants to let a table of players G about in the Golden Age of detective stories of trains and tea gas lamps and ambitious hats but you aren't investigating the villainy of humankind but of fairies mermaids and even Giants and that's hard cuz it's not clear how far the legal system extends to ghosts although if you are interested that question is explored by different RPG bully pulpits ghost Court anyway if you know anything about RPGs you'll know that the most popular ones are built at up a gory firmament of Adventure but what you might not know is that the second most popular foundation for a ttrpg is investigation mystery solving instead of sticking your nose in a room full of stinky little goblins you stick your nose into rooms full of tempting little Clues and historically call of cthulu has had a near strangle hold on this sector Decades of games quite literally countless supplements endless interpretations and subversions of HP Lovecraft and Friends monstrous Gods their slimy progeny and the cultists who presumably think yeah this system seems bad but I'm going to make a difference from the inside which then makes vion I'm not going to say revolutionary cuz it is still about the occult but vion kicks open the door and says stop with all this cthulu stuff for just one second what if we did investigations into something that was more nuanced and human and less racist than HP Lovecraft stories what if we did investigations into the monsters of folklore now that I think about it there's no way there isn't racism in folklore let's move on vion because it's a Swedish game invites you into darkest Scandinavia during the Industrial Revolution because it's an RPG you can actually set it wherever you want there's even a source book for Great Britain and Northern Ireland in case you want to go there for some reason don't come here it's bad you can actually set any RPG wherever you want or you can ignore rules or you can squish two games together and make him kiss I personally want to run a woou game but set in dojos in an impoverished part of the north of England with people like smoking cigarettes and then having fights in car Parks but you and I are getting distracted vison imagines that with industry taking hold across Europe with folk Traditions losing their Millennia long strangle hold on the human spirit and with a mass migration towards cities that are for the first time glowing with light the vison ancient monsters like banshees and elves are essentially acting out like a white man on the internet who's realizing they're going to be less important in the future and your party of players make up a daring or cowardly if you really want to have fun Society of investigators with the sight the ability to see vion and in the game your group will be fighting to solve problems where some human has realized something weird and bad is happening where they live like maybe a woman made a deal with a fairy or some dude down in his luck has entered a relationship with an ashtree wife but this being a horror game there might not always be a clean solution often you'll need to figure out not just what happened but the equally thorny conundrum of what's to be done with your players frequently having to pick a side between Vicon and humans industry or tradition Christianity or paganism or punishment and forgiveness because the humans you're dealing with are often in Desperate circumstances while the vion you're dealing with well like call cthulu these bad boys aren't things you're going to see off with a rifle and some hser or maybe they are why don't you try it why don't you try shooting a with a revolver and see how big your GM's grin gets as they think about what happens next but before we get any further have I played bison you bet your pencils I have I played a short campaign of Bison mostly using the scenario iOS that the publisher has for sale and let me tell you if you've not played an investigation RPG [Music] before think about it speaking Mega broadly for a second if I'm playing in an RPG rather than running one I would rather play an investigation than a fight in fact try this thought on for size a lot of modern and critically acclaimed dungeons right now which is a bizarre sentence to say treat dungeons as less of a gauntlet of fights and obstacles and more like a location that is very complicated almost an ecosystem these dungeons have many paths through them many factions within them for you to play off against each other and many problems for you to try and bypass entirely these are the sorts of dungeons that I would be really excited to experience as a player dungeons that make the most of the Glorious open-endedness that makes tabletop RPG special players can do anything kiss anyone avoid whatever they want and the point I'm building up to is that almost all half decent investigation RPGs have that freedom that open-endedness by default in an investigation where you go who you're going to pester how you're going to achieve your goals that's all up to you every NPC's future hangs in the balance equally at threat from the villains and the players sometimes in some my vice in Games The Players cracked the solution but a key villain got away and in one of my investigations my players rescued everyone but weren't totally clear on what they were rescuing them from and if you as a player was to tell me Quinns that sounds annoying I want a clean story I would tell you yes absolutely absolutely sure that's your prerogative but for me it's just exciting it makes the story feel like it's alive it makes me feel like I'm making a difference it makes me feel like I could win the car or I could go home with nothing however I'll just flag here that for me personally as a GM I find investigations much harder to design and harder to run than a dungeon is or like a swords and sorcery Adventure whatever a good investigation if you want to make it as open-ended and sandboxy as the genre kind of expects that just takes a lot of work you need a an interesting situation a cast of memorable NPCs a spread of clues that are thoughtfully positioned in a variety of locations but then even for me getting my Investigations out of the book like a fraud I found them really demanding to run I enjoyed it a lot but I was constantly switched on I had to make sure the players had freedom to forge their own path but never felt lost I had to make sure they were making progress but not too quickly but not too slowly and you need to make sure that overall the investigation isn't too easy or too difficult when you don't have something help for like hit points to show you exactly how bad your players are getting beaten up cuz you can't see what's happening in their heads you can't see their thoughts yet I'm working on it I swear to God it made me feel like I was Landing a plane it was like I was so in the game and I was so exhilarated when I did it I was also kind of despondent when in one of our investigations I did the I don't know Landing equ equivalent of busting a landing gear because my players went home that evening feeling that the mystery was just a little bit unfair and that their bad ending was not deserved but then also that's just me like one of the reasons I think I'm a good GM is because I care maybe too much whether my players have a good time so here's a PSA don't be like me kids don't think of gming as something you can fail at unless you want to be awesome so yeah running vion was tricky enough that there was no way I was going to also design my own investigations I'm a busy man although if you get into vison now you don't have to play Adventures you can also buy a new campaign book they've just released a whole big Saga the Lost Mountain Saga specifically and what's extra call is this campaign book is written by Elanor D Lorenzo and it is based on her actual play series of the same name super fun so yeah I just like to take these investigations with the nice maps and the nice photos of NPCs and then I would make it my own by considering what locations needed a bit more Zing maybe bring the area to life just a little bit more as if I'd ordered a cheap oven pizza and then covered it with my favorite topping I'm aware that this being my favorite topping is a red flag but here's the really cool part of vion you also get as well as these investigations special scenes in a Barbie Dreamhouse okay and Adams Family Dreamhouse basically part of publisher fre League's design philosophy seems to take an RPG bung the mutant year zero rule set underneath it more on that later and then make the players r mates in vion the campaign starts with players inheriting a rotting mansion that their secret society used to own before the last batch of investigators mysteriously vanished and then between investigations you have manyi Adventures set in and around your haunted home as you renovate it and discover secret passages and Posh Neighbors come around and would like to be convinced that you're not a secret society right when of course you are or better yet the GM can bring home to you unresolved problems from your past investigations like that time you shot a niss with a revolver and it's not just your characters that level up after investigations your house does too you can add a butterfly house or a library or a stables or a Difference Engine unlocking permanent Buffs for the whole team and of course the house gets its own character sheet we love to see it there is so much fun stuff in vion's chapter on the home you all live in that I want to fully lift out and put into other games I love that the players get a profoundly creepy Butler who's been serving the society for Generations there's a pledge for them to say that my players began reciting aloud at the butler's orders and then all Panic stopped on the last line just very funny and also you have to assign your secret society's vaunted titles among the group which is super goofy cuz there's Eight titles and probably like three players you can imagine how much fun players have with this like I am the treasurer of our secret society and I'm telling you stop buying scones but on top of the house being just unambiguously fun it's also a smart bit of structure just like how Delta green encourages players to do scenes of their ailing home lives between investigations the house scenes in vion are there to help the investigations pop you go out into darkest Sweden you get hunted by a brook horse you roll on a critical hit table and someone rolls crushed genitals seriously why the is that even in this game what player wants that to happen ever then you go back to your Adam's Family house and you get scenes of like arguing who gets which bedroom and what up grade to get next and you get storytelling on a much smaller domestic scale my players really enjoyed whenever they met like particularly W begotten NPCs saying hey come back to our house till you get back on your feet and the reason this is so clever segmenting the game into two halves is it lets you build up tension and action and horror and then the tension is released as you go home and because the tension's gone you can build it up again don't know why I'm cleaning a window there and then as the cherry on the cake the game suggests you add an overarching investigation to your campaign of Vicon about what happened to the secret society that owned this house before you did however there is a Twist in this investigation that I did into vion you see as excited as I was when I read this book and heard all the exciting things about it online when I played it I actually came away more disappointed than I did [Music] impressed are you going to do an advertisement for the patreon oh sorry I was hooked if you've been enjoying this review don't thank me thank the members of the Quinn's Quest fan club which we had to launch after discontinuing the official Quinn's Quest VHS cassette tape containing the first ever Quinn's Quest reviews and a lot of you have been asking if you can see the old reviews on this tape so I think we put together a clip show for you this isn't going to make me look stupid is it it's 1976 and I'm calling it Dungeons and Dragons had a good run but it's over now because TSR because TSR has just released their next game metamorph metamorphosis Alpha just look at this back page you ever encountered a moose with quills or a teleporting woodpecker with a double brain and a poison beak how about a nearly Invincible Jaguar complete with the ability to change its body density and metonic shriek but which fears Birds there's no doubt about it TSR has their finger on the pulse of what Gamers won this game has so many smart changes to D and D Charisma is gone as the stat thank God it's it's been replaced by something much better radiation resistance this sci-fi setting just feels so fresh quins am I going to just be fighting bears and Hawks again no get ready to fight bids and haids and watch out for new enemies dark fungus stabber small Warrior and deer but the deer is toxic Quinns I don't stand a chance don't worry Big Daddy did I mention you can make your player character mutant with such cool mutant Powers as Wings quills short or gas generation let's see the cougar roids deal with that you heard it here first I don't think TSR will even be making Dungeons and d and d by 1977 or at a push 1978 the future is bright the future is metamorphosis Alpha can't state that clearly enough I believe and know D and D is over thank you very very much live long and prosper [Music] over over on the fan club today we've got a video uh that contains like we've been doing lots of tips for gmms but we've got a video containing one of my favorite tips for GMS and for players the idea of being a fan of other player characters you might not have heard of this tip before but actually I think it's probably one of the most important tips of all time it's really going to help you bring your game to the next level you okay there don't worry about me buddy I'm fine absolutely Dandy do you want to get on with the review all right uh so um yeah I was super excited to play vion and importantly in getting me amped up enough to call out my friends and organize a whole ass campaign I just want to flag that vion did succeed at the most important thing an RPG can do that 90% of games fail out which is get you excited enough to organize a campaign however I did choose to end our campaign early after about 15 hours of play not because I wasn't enjoying myself this is a cool game and as a GM I loved the opportunity to take classic Freaks Like banshees and leprechauns and give them the star treatment and make them scary as one of my favorite moments from any game I have played in the last few years was when my players finally found the church Grim they were looking for in a pitch dark Church in the dead of night and one of my players simply hit the bricks he didn't fail a roll or anything he just decided now I'm out and walked straight out the door bashing his shin on every church pew on the way out hilarious moment I loved it but with evenings with my friends around the table being my scarcest Resource as a ttrpg reviewer I felt that I'd seen what I needed to and that those evenings would be better served playing a different game so in play I hit two serious problems with v and the first one is that I think the rules are simply not fit for purpose Publishers free League are big fans of the rule set used in their first hit mutant year zero and I think this game's cool if you haven't heard of gen lab Alpha I would give that a Google very cool little campaign but since then the mutant year zero rule set has been used in such free League games as The Bleak fantasy of forbidden lands the sad teens of Tales From The Loop and tales from the front as well as all of their license claims like alien Blade Runner and dune and these rules were straight up good 15 years ago today I think they are mediocre so what they're best at is giving players like exactly what they expect from an RPG and nothing more you've got some skills and you've got some stats and then when you do a skill check you take dice according to your stat plus dice according to your skill you roll them and if you got one or more sixes that's a success otherwise it's a failure what you don't have in this dice system is what powers most modern RPGs which is the juicy o you succeed but that you see a lot in games like blades in the dark and powered by the Apocalypse so the mutant year zero rule set simply generates a lot of failure what it does have is the option of pushing yourself you roll everything again and your quest for sixes which makes you worse at stuff until your character has a lie down here's my problem the rules in mutant year zero are at their best when your players are going to be doing a little bit of everything whether that's fighting or negotiating or orienteering or jumping over a car in a schemo bile but in vion players are almost exclusively going to be investigating and talking which is is these two skills here the game strongly hints that you should not fight vion it outright tells you that the vion don't want to fight you in none of the official Adventures is the solution to fight a vison and yet this game has giant stat blocks for weapons and like ghosts as if you were playing D and D except that every Monster's stats ends with a little thing saying yeah basically they can't die the degree to which vion's rules do not match the game you're playing can be seen in one published Adventure where you're going to think I'm exagger ating but I'm not every single skill check on the adventure path is a manipulation role great for the one player around the table who put points into manipulation and could feasibly solo The Adventure really very bad for everybody else who stupidly assumed that if a game gives you 12 skills they will all be equally important but on the plus side if someone falls off a 20ft building or hits a mermaid with a poleax I'll know exactly what dice to roll but my problem with the rules isn't that there are rules I don't need to use that's fine my problem is that the r rules that are here make the game worse there is a reason that dedicated investigation RPGs often don't make you roll dice to find stuff they just say have you got the skill are you looking in the right place great you find it unless like you're looking in a hurry or in a pitch dark location because as written players have to roll to find a clue or tell if someone's lying players fail to get that stuff all the time and so vitally important details can escape the players or doors can slam shot in their face leading to frustra from everybody around the table including the GM that the party was on the right track and through no fault of their own that track has just run out and now the GM is thinking oh what do I have to do to fix this and the players are experiencing this fricative dissonance because they as players know their characters have missed something but if they're role playing those characters have to assume they haven't missed anything and go on to the next location ultimately of course and this is one of the greatest things about RPGs is that as a GM you're free to try and fix this problem like if an important dice roll is called for on your players fail it you could say okay you do get the clue but your situation gets worse maybe the vice an acts the next stage of its Sinister plan or maybe the villagers nearby decide they don't like the player characters and start chasing them out with literal pitchforks however worse than the expansive rules I don't use worse even than the rules that make the game worse is the stuff in this book that simply isn't here at all namely this is a game about investigating Folk creatures and there is almost nothing in it about the practicalities of investigating folkloric creatures for example you've told me that the player characters have the sight right that lets them see vison so what did Giants trolls and AST wives look like to people who don't have the sight I'm left to figure it out this is another absurd sentence to say but where are my tips for embodying a mermaid talking to a Vic is often the dramatic high point of any vion investigation but nowhere in this book is advice on a mermaid might say or their body language or their motivation once again I'm left to figure it out but most damningly the most important thing in any vion investigation is figuring out what vion you're up against right if this was a TV show and TV is always my closest point of reference when I'm gming the TV show would be all about the investigators thinking like okay what vion could it be what evidence are we looking for how are those Vice and defeated how do we keep ourselves safe what items do we need to bring spring just practically speaking and like I'm made to feel like I'm nuts but that's nowhere in this book at all despite the players being vion investigators there's nothing about what their investigators might know about vion there's not even a skill relating to visce and knowledge there's just the skill learning which covers all of human knowledge and so this game takes so much of what makes its own idea great of what inspires the very artists down to the cover art and then Le it on the floor like so much sawdust for GMS to pick up and trying to shape into something that resembles the game's core Vision I can't help but wonder if maybe the Trap this game fell into is that its closest relative is K of cthulu right and in those games players have no idea what they're up against it's unknowable it's Cosmic horror and they said okay we'll do that but we'll have them investigating folkloric creatures except folic creatures by definition we all know about and that's before we get to the idea that the player characters do this for a living and live in a house full of books about vion in all the written investigations players just Potter around like protagonists in a haunted house movie looking in dark Corners until abruptly the GM will say something like oh you find a piece of evidence that looks like a brook horse and the players go okay what's a brook horse and then the GM tells them and those players did nothing smart or characterful to reach that conclusion it's wild to me but all of the official Adventures read like this they just give you a setup and then at some point there is like the vaguest thing thest hint for a GM that like maybe at this point the players might figure out that it's this monster which felt to me like being a babysitter and then the parents on their way out the door are like oh yeah by the way at some point our child should go to sleep and you know what else all the vion have this cute little secret that's like a lovely little lore detail that would be really useful for the investigators to know but it's a secret right how do they find it out the book doesn't tell you that secret is supposed to be from the players don't keep that a secret from me the G and the reason I'm putting so much weight on this this problem wasn't something that like I had to deal with Once in an evening and then move on it ran like a shrimp's poop vein throughout the entire evening so here's what I did instead this was fun and kind of stupid but my players got a kick out of it I printed and then censored a bunch of pages from The Game's GM bestiary representing stuff my player characters might have read about or knew about to give them very untrustworthy fragments of information and most importantly to get their imagination going about what might be waiting for them out there in the forest or in the dark corner of their hotel room and like I don't mean to brag but in my humble opinion this stupid idea I had led to some of the best most thematic role playing of the campaign it meant that as my investigators were going around they were like what if this little girl's a fairy I'm going to touch an iron coin to her forehead or like what if we're up against an ashry wife I'm going out into the forest and hammering a nail into into every ash tree I can find and that stuff was pure on theme colorful spooky ass action it made my player characters feel like suspicious weirdos for 90% of the time then in that final 10% they looked like Heroes it was totally vion just you know didn't come from the book and listen it's weird reviewing RPGs right because one of the amazing things about them is that games that are good not great can be repaired with the duct tape of human ingenuity I didn't have any duct tape so I'm not saying don't buy vison if you think this game sounds cool there's not a shadow of a doubt in my mind that at your table it will be cool and that you'll make these beasties sing and howl and bargain and kill and maybe your players will still let him go after deciding that man is the real monster and like I said right at the start in this game getting me amped enough to actually want to play it and then also amped enough to try and in my mind fix it that means it already has surpassed 90% of the games on the market Vice and developers if you're watching this I think you made something super cool but just something that won't be seeing anymore play at my personal gaming table unless of course I get lucky and you gift me with a second addition that fixes some of my problems and for everybody else watching this know that I've got a review of an investigation that I do recommend coming up in Quinn's Quest season 2 perhaps you're surprised I could be so harsh on a TT RPG when it is after all a mere game a light bit of fun but someone has to stand guard between your imagination and those who would seek to fill it with subpar fantasies perhaps history will judge me a villain or perhaps a hero good night down

Channel: Quinns Quest

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Length: 26min 17sec (1577 seconds)

Published: Wed May 22 2024