'Queen Mab's Palace' will be moving to layout soon. My gigantic review of Hugh Cooks 'Chronicles of and Age of Darkness' is done. What will False Machine be working on next?
Veins of the Earth - Remastered
And by working on, I mean that I have started work, not that we have a book ready right now. This is the beginning of a long process.
The new Veins will probably be A4, to fit in with other False Machine books, and will have new content, a new layout, hopefully some new images.
But what needs to be added? What needs to be changed? What didn't work for people last time? I have some ideas but I also want your input.
Drop your comments
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Adventures ?
ReplyDeleteSeconded
DeleteMore readily gameable stuff in general. Some ready made cave systems with NPC factions and encounters and hazards and loot and a dungeon or two.
DeleteVeins owns, but damn is it difficult to run off the hook.
I doubt a lot needs to be changed. Although I will admit Veins of the Earth holds a really special place on my shelf, I may not (I know I'm not) giving the critical analysis it deserves.
ReplyDeleteIf I could see anything new in the book, I'd love to see some random NPCs you can come across in the Veins. That, And some new killer art. Either way I'm excited to see what comes next!
Giving the Aelf-Adal/Dvargir treatment to Mind Flayers would be pretty rad. If you're considering giving additional attention to some existing entries, I'm most in love with the olm, fossil vampires, and pyroclastic ghouls.
ReplyDeleteLists of weird things are usually good. If you had a couple of pages of "random Veins-y mishmash that couldn't get fleshed out," I would consider those pages well-spent.
I don't see people talk about the climbing rules and that sort of thing very much, certainly not in comparison to the weird beasts and beings, but I would be sorry to see those go.
Climbing rules is some of the best stuff in VotE. I also agree that NPCs would be awesome.
DeleteOSR-like treasures that could tempt the players to delve deeper into the earth and search for them.
ReplyDeleteLocation based adventures would be sweet or some more Veins specific sandbox region generation procedures, looking forward to getting my hands on the new book.
ReplyDeleteEven knowing it's a long way off, this still has me excited! Thanks for the update!
ReplyDeleteI'll second Joel Hines' sandbox generation tools idea, it's the only thing I "miss" when reading VotE! Not sure if a Depth-crawl system (a la Gardens of Ynn) would be too much feature-creep, but even a simpler system could be a fantastic lever to help fledgling Veins GMs get our teeth sunk into the underworldbuilding potential of the book. A two-page spread of interesting cave tables could be a vastly powerful tool!
NPCs could be fun. Traders, hunters, explorers, miners, fugitives, lost folks on the brink of disaster, lost folks who have already resorted to cannibalism. Each with their own little one line quests, quirks, and mannerisms.
ReplyDeleteHey Patrick, just wanted to say that it's great that this is in motion. Veins is one of the most creative things I've read coming from the OSR.
ReplyDeleteSome ideas on things to add:
* Adventure seeds and ideas.
* An introductory short adventure. Kind of a proposal on how to introduce Veins in my run of the mill medievalesque campaign world, if I choose to do so.
* A short story or fictional writing taking up a couple pages.
Personally I don't use the climbing and slot rules. But I can understand why they are part of the book.
The factions are great and probably don't need stats for the same reason AC is non-numeric. But whats not covered is how their settlements are set up, what its like to pillage or burgle their treasurs. If you're going to write adventure sites I think that's your opportunity.
ReplyDeleteAnd OSR games are usually run on big stacks of coins. A hoard generator or alternate experience system to fill that role would compliement the still wonderful art object and body-looting tables.
More diegetic texts and adventure hooks
ReplyDeleteI used veins to add some color to the underdark portion of a 5e campaign, so my comments probably reflect the system I was using as much as the content of the book
ReplyDeleteThings I loved:
-scrapprincesses' incredibly evocative art and the flavor text around each monster did a ton to make it easy for me to bring the monsters and their utter weirdness to life around the table
-the climbing rules added a lot of strategy to navigating cave environments and making them feel unique
-i got so so so much value out of the cave generation rules. I even would sometimes hand my players a map drawn in the style you use in the book and they had a blast trying to decipher them
Things I struggled with/things to add:
-the lanterns and darkness. I loved this in concept but in practice I had a hard time making the lanterns they chose feel like a meaningful choice. I think it would be helpful to have some more guidance around how to actually use darkness in different spaces and have tighter integration of these systems into the other stuff in the book. This one at least partially comes down to me being kind of a noob dm
-more concrete tactical advice on how to use each monster and how a few different ones might work in tandem. Could be cool to have some scenarios in the book where you create a specific kind of terrain and populate it with a couple monsters, then show how they can be used together
-more items would be cool, and more ideas on what to do with them. I really liked the caterpillar earrings for example - had an NPC wear them who was visibly insane and the players loved it
Overall, very stoked to hear about this! I am definitely interested in getting a physical copy when it eventually comes out
Well, Veins of the Earth isn't really written to be played. It's written to be read. So actually playing it is a bit of a shitstorm, even if I like the concept.
ReplyDeleteChapter by Chapter:
Pariahs of the Earth -- all of these monster descriptions are fun little short fictions, but what I actually needed was the 5-sentence-summary version so that I could run these during random encounters without making my players wait 20 minutes while I tried to read the whole thing and they asked me questions the entire time.
Cultures in the Veins -- honestly, same issue, but either better (because I really might read each one first) or even worse (because they're even longer and I'm expected to need them even more) but either way, it's really evocative and fun to read while not really giving me basic d20 tables and/or one-sentence summaries (I need something I can use on the fly!) for the questions: where are they found?/who are they?/what are they doing?/how are they doing that?/why are they doing it?/when will they complete that and do something else?
Light and Dark -- The chapter is a lot of fun to read (though, like most of the book, the fonts are more focused on looking cool than being readable) but I could probably express your actual mechanics in a single page or less? Which would mean that I *could actually use them at the table* rather than *ignoring* them. I still might have, tbh, but it would have been nice to see the effort made.
Encumbrance -- Loftp ability scores are 3d6 straight down, and the mods work like:
3 : -3
4-5 :
6-8 :
9-12 :
13-15 : +1
16-17 : +2
18 : +3
In your encumbrance rules, you get a number of slots equal to the sum of the following:
5+con mod
4+str mod
3+dex mod
(2+int mod), if int mod is more than -3; else, 0
(1+wis mod), if wis mod is more than -2; else, 0
which is expressable as the sum of the simpler:
12+con mod+str mod+dex mod
(2+int mod), if int mod is more than -3; else, 0
(1+wis mod), if wis mod is more than -2; else, 0
with 3d6 straight down, the probability of getting each ability modifier is:
-3: 0.46%
-2: 4.17%
-1: 21.29%
0: 48.14%
+1: 21.29%
+2: 4.17%
+3: 0.46%
So you just made went through a bunch of steps to tell people that their number of slots is 13 to 17. I have to question if it was really worth it?
Exploration and climbing -- this is fine, but you could have removed a bunch of the words and gotten the same outcome.
Generating the Veins -- I never used it, I was using veinscrawl.
items, treasure, and spells -- ditto
Madness and Change -- good, I think, but it shouldn't be in the ass end of the rules. It should be with everything else that I'll need to reference all the time. Also, remove unneeded words.
Overall, it feels like this is ten thousand cool ideas that haven't been shaped by the optimizing processes of playtesting and rereading and a really good editor.
I decided my thoughts were best formatted in a blog-post, so wrote one up. I hope you don't mind that it focusses on criticisms - I absolutely loved Veins, missed my chance to buy the original and will undoubtedly be buying the new one almost regardless of what goes in it as a thanks for all the ways your work has been inspirational to me.
ReplyDeletehttps://aehelm.blogspot.com/2024/11/60-minutes-of-thoughts-veins-of-earth.html