Vaarn! I curse each letter of the name.
I curse the blue sand that infiltrates every pore of my body, the creeping sand, which each night swallows a little more of the final camp we have erected upon the face of this pitiless azure desolation. I curse the red sun that rises each morning to scorch the skin from our scalps; that great and gory globe, which the sages tell us is dying, yet seems to me, hanging above the lapis wastelands, to be full of malevolent life.
Vaarn! I curse you! I curse this land that has stolen the tears from its peoples’ eyes, this land that swallows armies and poets and aeons as if they all, every work of every man, were but one more grain of mazarine sand. Vaarn! Three times I curse you, for I fear I will see no other land again.
- Final testament of Idris Ida-Null, Hegemony Cartographer.
***
Vaults of Vaarn returns for a third issue of science-fantasy RPG content, providing further support for referees who wish to set their game in the blue deserts at the very end of time. Issue three focuses on the Vaarnish Interior, the endless sand-sea that intimidates even the hardy souls who live in the dry and dangerous badlands.
No accurate map has ever been drawn of the Vaarnish Interior: the territory seems to defy rational organisation. This is a place without borders, the horizon between blue sand and blue sky no longer a stark dividing line but rather a molten membrane that swims and drifts woozily in the sun’s wine-red heat, the land making and remaking itself just as a lizard sheds its skin. The blue sands retreat from the wind, revealing structures that have lain dry and deathless and undisturbed for aeons, and then those same restless dunes shroud the ruins once again, before a living soul can name them. This is a country vast and blue, as deep with secrets as the ocean and twice as capricious.
Included in Issue 3:
- Information on three of the cultures that exist in the deepest of Vaarn's deserts: the nomadic Faa, the raucous Cacklemaw, and the motile crystal scholars of the Lithic Lyceum.
- Playable ancestries for each of these cultures, allowing you to embody a Faa nomad, Cacklemaw exile, or Lithling scholar at your gaming table.
- Travel procedures, a dynamic weather generator, and an extensive regional map generator, allowing you to create huge areas of the desert for your players to explore.
- More than twenty random tables, allowing referees to quickly create desert ruins, settlements, anomalies, underground vaults, holy sites, Vaarnish graves, Cacklemaw dens, Hegemony outposts, Faa nomad campsites, and more.
- New science-fantasy monsters to stalk the wastes, including the Argent Shepherd, the Lambent Lynx, the Quill Spider, and the majestic Vaarnish Sandworm.
- Four new vehicles and a selection of powerful and mysterious exotica.
Fully illustrated throughout with evocative black and white line-art. Printed in black and white with colour covers.
Also available: Issue One and Issue Two
What Others Have Said
'While the aesthetics are 100% zine (in a good way), the content is a full fantasy adventure game in a weird, post-post-apocalyptic world inspired by books like Dune, The Book of the New Sun, and Hyperion, as well as the art of Moebius.' - The Viridian Scroll
'A cool setting with a lot of opportunity to pull from both your favorite standard fantasy resources and science fiction compendiums in order to build out a wild mash-up world.' - Perplexing Ruins
'The setting is wild, it feels like the author took Numenera, Gamma World and Dune and got them drunk, put them in a big vapourwave-themed hotel room and let them go at it.' - Pod Of Blunders