Now Live: The Vampire for Vaesen

October 2024 Series – check out the rest of the series!

A shorter post this week, as I encourage you all to check out my newest product release instead. This product is, in keeping with the month's theme, a Vampire creature--but not for D&D. The Vampire for Vaesen is now available for download exclusively on DriveThruRPG, through the Free League Community Content program. The product is Pay-What-You-Want, but any amount you're willing to pay is hugely appreciated – your purchases support the upkeep of the site and allow me to continue writing free articles every week.

The Vampire is a supplementary creature for Vaesen, a Nordic Folk Horror TTRPG from Free League Publishing. The base game is also available on DriveThruRPG. It's even on sale for the rest of October for Halloween, so now really is the ideal time to pick it up. Please note that the Vampire is intended for use with the Vaesen rules supplement, Mythic Britain and Ireland (also on sale through the end of the month).

My vampire supplement comes with all the rules to implement a Vampire as a Vaesen in your game. It is inspired by Dracula, and readers of the novel will likely recognize the influence of the novel on some of the scenarios provided. I drew the powers of the vampire from Dracula and from folklore that I described in the first post of this series.

Checklist of Vampire Horror

I do want to go through the list we made two weeks ago about what makes vampires "scary," and use them as a lens for my product.

1) An Air of Mystery. Vaesen as a system is designed for this sort of atmosphere. It is a game of investigation, primarily, trying to figure out what monster is causing the effects and the tension happening in the story. This lends itself perfectly to a vampire. A GM using my supplement should not reveal that the party is facing a vampire; in fact, "bloodless corpses" probably should not even be the first clue due to our modern knowledge of vampires! I also made sure that our vampire, in keeping with some of the original version of Dracula, has powers and weaknesses that might not be obvious to someone with a more common cultural understanding of vampires. This will hopefully keep players a little more on their toes, unsure of what creature they are dealing with, when they see their supposed vampire walk out in the sunlight, for example.

2) A fear of the undead. I'm once again using Vaesen's system for some of this work. Player characters in Vaesen have the "Sight", which allows them to see vaesen normally invisible to humans. My vampires are not invisible, but to those with the Sight, they are giving off a sense of "wrongness" and "unearthliness". This is a big part of how I'm capturing the undead sense. Part of this though will have to be a GM job in how they describe their vampire at the table.

3) A human appearance so that it is unclear that you are dealing with a vampire. That's accomplished in part by the scenarios, and by the fact that even to those with the Sight, a vampire should not be instantly recognizable as such. They should be off-putting to those with the Sight, and completely normal to those without it. Other NPCs in a mystery involving the vampire should simply see this person as a mortal, with only the players able to tell something feels "off" about the person... without it immediately being clear that the thing that is off is "vampire."

4) Fear of others. I've mostly tried to include this element in the example scenarios that I provided. Each scenario is tied to a theme present in Dracula about how Eastern Europe is "corrupting" Victorian England. One is centered around politics, with a vampire trying to kill members of the British Parliament, and is connected to themes of imperialism and its consequences. One is centered on a rogue vampire noble coming in and wooing the fiancee of a British noble--connected to that "violation of sexual norms" fear of the Victorians, and one that I think could be turned on its head interestingly if the fiancee was unhappy with her husband-to-be. And the third is centered on the fear of aristocratic absolutism, of corrupt nobles with absolute authority over the people who lived on their land, which had largely faded in England by the late 1800s but which was more present in the East. In each of these scenarios, I've tried to preserve central elements of what made the vampire threatening to Victorians, while not making it an overtly racial, negative depiction as Bram Stoker does.

Conclusion

You can pick up my homebrewed Vaesen vampire on DriveThruRPG for any price that you choose! Any amount you're willing to pay is hugely appreciated – your purchases support the upkeep of the site and allow me to continue writing free articles every week.

Next week, the blog returns with a review of one of the most popular and award-winning solo TTRPGs: Thousand Year Old Vampire, which is available on DriveThruRPG if you want to play it yourself before hearing my thoughts.