Solo Vaarn - Part 1 - Vault Generation

Vaults of Vaarn is one of the coolest, sleekest, most imaginative settings out there for tabletop RPGs. Set in a dying world of blue sands and indigo skies, the eponymous Vaults are the ruins of past civilizations, deep beneath the earth, and the object of lust of many factions of fortune seekers, the curious, and the cruel.

I’ve been eager to play Vaults of Vaarn for a long time, but there are too many games, too many settings, and far too little time with my friends at the table. My Land of Eem campaign is a joy, but it does consume my current hobby time-budget.

But as I have developed a new love and fascination with solo gaming, I have the time to explore these settings and games.

And Vaults of Vaarn, which is getting a much anticipated second edition, is excellent for solo gaming. The entire setting is told via tables, lists, bestiaries, and procedures. There are no canon locations or adventure sites - they are all generated by the GM, and so those tools are made with quite a bit of love, care, and expertise.

In this post, we’ll generate our first Vault. In upcoming posts, we’ll generate the starting settlement, place those two locations on the map and fill out the rest of the region with Region generation procedures, adding interesting factions, locations, and NPCs. Finally we’ll build our character (or characters?) and when the stage is set, play a few sessions and see how it goes.

I will be playing Vaults with the rules from the book, but adding on top of it the venerable Mythic GME. I’ll also be experimenting with a few other tools. The “Unfolding Machines” - the Scene Unfolding Machine (SUM) and the Game Unfolding Machine (GUM).

Starting with vault generation is an interesting choice. You can see the philosophy of “start local and build outwards” at play here. Vaults, of course, are Vaarn’s take on dungeons, and it assists the GM by providing comprehensive tables of just about everything you want to see in a vault - monsters, features, flora and fauna, traps and secrets, treasure, strangeness, interesting things to play with, properly looped paths, and more.

It took me about an hour, a piece of paper, and a few dice to generate an 18 room vault that had interesting contents, and when I was finished, a sort of story around what the vault was began to form. The guide encourages you to not avoid the weird and whacky, and to not try to justify or come up with explanations for the odd ecosystem. This place is an antediluvian madhouse.

Before you generate the rooms, you roll up an entrance, the nature and aesthetic of the connections between rooms and nodes (what kind of tunnels, corridors, or passages are there), and what the site used to be - immediately helpful in creating a mental image of what’s going on.

Here’s what I rolled for those:

• Entrance: Air Filtration Vent

• Tunnels: Filled With Garbage

• Used To Be: Military Command Post

Right away, this feels cool to me. I’ve got an interesting mental image of what’s going on in the vaults.

Next I generated all 18 of those rooms. I won’t enumerate them here - if I end up sharing some play reports, you can find out what the contents of the vault are then!

What would I change for solo play? The game has you generate three clusters of 6-room “nodes”. Once you finish all three, you have the fully structured dungeon. For solo, I might generate either one cluster at a time or one room at a time. This lets me generate the vault as I go, leaving things in a quantum state until I encounter it, which I appreciate in solo games. But even that’s a very optional change; I’ve run Shadowdark dungeons solo, even with full knowledge of what’s coming up in the next rooms, and enjoyed it just as well.

In the next post, I’ll build the first settlement, and learn what’s happening in our particular set of blue sand dunes.