The trick with Mothership is that you ONLY roll when stakes are really high. The numbers don't reflect how good you are at, say, jury-rigging. They reflect how good you are at jury-rigging while also an alien is rushing down the hall at you spitting acid. The new version makes this explicitly clear in the Wardens guide.
Good review, I've been lured in by Vaesen's art and it's nice to know there's a solid game under there. Also, you're absolutely correct to dunk on CoC's sanity flowchart. That's some rude work to be putting on a GM.
Hey brother, on my research on Vaesen I watched a out a dozen videos this is by far the best hands down. Like you I have a no nonsense approach and am pretty blunt I appreciate breakdown. I laughed out loud when you mentioned mothership I'm actually a 3pp creator author of Rane in Blood among others, and it's true the biggest complaint I have about mothership is how much you fail. I was looking at creating some 3pp material for Vaesen with the open license from freeleague as a tip from a friend, your video really helped sell me on notion. Thanks brother cheers!
Thank you so much for the kind words! And I just checked out Rane In Blood and I'll have to grab that actually, that genuinely looks sick. I'm a fan of the scenarios that get made for Mothership but I think I'll be looking at Death In Space, Alien & Stars Without Number for running sci-fi scenarios lol.
If you like the flavor of Call of Cthulhu but not the crunch you should check out Trail of Cthulhu from Pelgrane, it's much more investigation forward and a lot less dice rolling and chance. I'm about to run Vaesen in a couple weeks and haven't been this excited about a system in quite awhile.
This seems super cool, mate. Thanks for sharing! I'm completely new to TTRPG's and would love to play something with my partner (she's also new). Any game you'd recommend just for the two of us that allows a good deal of imagination but it also pretty easy to setup and learn/play?
@@wasabiburger3047 ahh rad, thank you! I think horror is most definitely more our type of thing, so things like Call of Cthulu definitely sound tempting. If you have any other recommendations then please throw them across! And if you're ever looking for some guinea pigs for a TTRPG playthrough then you know where I am, haha
@@DelanceyThrone For sure! The nice thing too about Call of Cthulhu and how much support it has because it's been around forever is that the base era is 1920s-30s cuz of the work it's based off of but if you're more interested in modern day stuff there are books for that or for the cold war, ancient Rome or the Victorian era and many, many more so you have a lot to choose from and once you know the rules, a lot of it is just reflavoring for the most part :) And absolutely, I love getting new people into the hobby! My discord server link is in the video description if you want to join, that's where I run a lot of single session games!
I bought Vaesen a while back but I have some reservations about running it. Although the mystery structure is a good thing I'm concerned it would get stale once the pc's have solved a few mysteries. Because it's so structured, the pc's may easily fall into the a metagaming mindset of going through the various stages leading to the confrontation. Any thoughts or insights ?
That's a tough one to answer without knowing your group but what I would say to that is there are built in mechanics for really developing the character's stories with their relationships to each other, their dark secrets and all that. I think things will stay fresh by keeping their stories engaged and developing and focusing on that. I wouldn't stress yourself out with doing that all the time but with narrative games there is more suspension of disbelief for stuff happening so incorporating their dark secrets or backstories into opportune times that can throw a monkey wrench into the situation or their plans could be fun for dramatic reasons. On top of that, different creatures act differently and have different abilities. If your players are okay murdering things every session, I don't like telling people how to play but that is kind of missing the point of balancing these sentient creatures vs humans. It's harder to metagame an adventure with the same structure when killing or banishing rituals worked for the violent werewolf and the hostile ghost but that might not be the answer to a story you're running where a human is in love with a vaesen or killing a vaesen causes a chain reaction of killing innocent people. If this wasn't helpful, the other thing I could say to break up the stories if you're doing this in a campaign is have downtime sessions where problems arise at the castle or follow non-Vaesen related stories. Hell, using the structure and twisting it after they have done it a few times could be extremely effective for throwing them and surprising by maybe having the Vaesen appear early or having a red herring. If you have any further questions, feel free to ask, I'll try to help as best I can but I hope that was at least somewhat helpful! :)
Hugely helpful; thanks for your reply. I hadn't considered the downtime blowback angle; that's very encouraging. BTW which state are you in ? I'm NE England near Stockton On Tees@@wasabiburger3047
Ah sorry dude. Should have asked which state/Province ! You sounded American, apologies for that assumption. Where I live accents change every 10 miles. @@wasabiburger3047
@@DiomedesRangue Whiffs have been rare in my time with the game, and pushed rolls deserve a lot of credit for that. We always found enough clues to solve the mystery, but our pushed rolls meant when we finally confronted the vaesen, everyone had one condition or more and the encounter became that much riskier. That mechanic turns a failed roll into something that costs you later, rather than something that stonewalls your progress now, and I love it for that. That said, I once saw another player push at a critical moment, rolling 18 dice in total to interrupt a dark ritual - and not one of them turned up a success. Sometimes you just have to laugh.
Yeah, the free league initiative system is gimmicky and bad. Also, i agree with you on mothership. mothership is praised for the layout, not because the game is good. It's pretty awful. I think my favourite sanity system is dark heresy 2e. I love it. Call of cthulu's isn't great. Shows its age.
Absolutely! I do think it might need some tweaking. Such as giving the solo character a few extra skill points to round them out a bit more and potentially having some friendly NPCs near the mystery locations that might help like a kind farmer, etc. It might take some trial and error but I think you could absolutely run this for just a solo player :)
I'm glad you enjoyed it! And me too! Within a month of getting it from the KS I immediately made plans to start running it lol. And I am as well, I'm hoping to step stuff up a bit this coming year
