Vaults of Vaarn #1

Vaults of Vaarn is an ongoing series of zines for science-fantasy tabletop RPG gaming. The second 48-page issue is a city-based adventure supplement for the setting, expanding on the far-future world outlined in the first issue. The reader can visit the city of Gnomon, a decadent and dangerous trade hub.

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.

The acclaimed Vaults of Vaarn series returns for a fourth issue of psychedelic science-fantasy roleplaying. Vaarn is a ‘dying earth’ tabletop RPG setting, drawing from novels like Dune, Hyperion, The Book of the New Sun, and the artwork of Moebius. Vaarn is a surreal and colourful world: a post-apocalyptic, post-human landscape, where the dividing line between flesh and machinery has blurred and the borders between magic, science, and faith have likewise been obscured. This fourth installment takes readers beyond Vaarn’s sky-blue deserts to the Great Wall, a towering megastructure so large that it contains entire civilisations within its ancient, decaying bounds. The Wall is inspired by the superstructure depicted in Tsutomu Nihei’s manga Blame! and the overgrown industrial environments of the videogame Rain World. The Wall can be used as a palette cleanser in a long-running Vaarn campaign, or it can be a campaign setting in itself, with the PCs hailing from the societies that have established themselves within the colossus.