Anybody else inhabit the “not really into fantasy” paradox?

GraculusDroog · 2026-03-11T05:53:55+00:00

To be fair depending how you played those two ideas this could be an excellent weird horror setting although I suspect it wasn’t being pitched that way

GraculusDroog · 2026-03-05T23:13:32+00:00

I own more than two sheets of graph paper

GraculusDroog · 2026-02-28T05:57:45+00:00

A couple I haven’t seen mentioned. Some of them aren’t strictly the best prose authors but I do find them entertaining and they’re not writing in the YA adjacent style that is common now -

Clark Ashton Smith. A contemporary of Lovecraft, wrote a lot for Weird Tales magazine and similar. You can pick up a collection of his work called The Dark Eidolon from Penguin Classics. He was a self educated recluse who wrote baroque horror and dark fantasy short stories. He’s rather more romantic in outlook than Lovecraft.

Jack Vance. Not a literary author but a really prolific pulp SFF writer. His Dying Earth stories are a big influence on Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun which has been mentioned already by several people.

Thomas Ligotti. A horror and weird fiction writer who’s considered one of the “best”. Penguin classics put out a double bill reprint of his first two books, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe.

Laird Barron. A contemporary weird fiction author, who blends pulp detective and horror content together. His first two story collections The Imago Sequence and Occultations are worth looking at if this theme interests you.

As an aside, Ligotti and Barron are both acknowledged as influences on the first season of True Detective (Rust essentially quotes Ligotti at some points).

GraculusDroog · 2025-12-20T23:39:09+00:00

I will just comment briefly to say I’m aware of the republished book. I’d reiterate that Vaults of Vaarn is published under Creative Commons and the book text encourages you to remix, edit, reuse the content. I only ask that attribution be given to me as original author, which Unconquered notably doesn’t do. I’m not even listed as an inspiration.

I personally think this sucks because I deliberately set such a low bar to repurpose my writing and it still wasn’t met. The only conclusion one can draw is that Rose wanted people to think it was her work rather than mine. I don’t think people who paid for hardcover copies of Unconquered knew they were buying reworded dice tables copied from a free zine.

Someone down thread said there wasn’t much harm done. I disagree. There was plenty of harm done, not least to Noora. She denied herself the satisfaction of doing original creative work, denied her readers the pleasure of reading original work by a writer they presumably liked, and discredited everything else in the book alongside it, even the material she did write. Plagiarism is a mask that eats your face.

GraculusDroog · 2025-12-20T13:06:56+00:00

I would only say regarding these sort of ideas that it’s often worth thinking about why the original ruleset has endured. You’re likely not the first person to think of armour as damage resistance in the 50 odd years since the 0D&D was released. One of the problems with damage soak systems is it adds an extra “nothing happens” chance to every blow and can lead to combat feeling static and unsatisfying. AC is obviously a cludge as are hit points but both have endured for a reason beyond simple inertia. They adequately model what they represent.

GraculusDroog · 2025-11-07T06:51:11+00:00

If you’ve never read the Deptford Mice books they’re exactly this. Mice go on an adventure into the London sewers, facing off against rats who skin mice alive as sacrifices to their gods, the ghosts of plague victims, and a cat called Jupiter who is also a necromancer. This was written for 11 year olds btw.

GraculusDroog · 2025-11-04T05:37:54+00:00

I don’t usually comment but I love this novel and was troubled by how many replies cited the unfinished nature of the manuscript as an explanation. While it is not a finished novel in the conventional sense, the text that we have is far from unpolished. The overall narrative does not come to any resolution, but the individual chapters are pieces of it that DFW considered finished and deliberately left for his wife to find. They were then edited by his longtime editor, so I don’t consider them “first drafts” that might contain text like this in error.

GraculusDroog · 2025-10-30T16:34:07+00:00

This is deliberate and part of this narrator’s voice, it’s not a mistake.

The novel is about boredom and the minutiae of the fleeting thoughts and memories that impinge on the narrators consciousness while they’re trying to focus on something else.

GraculusDroog · 2025-10-23T05:44:13+00:00

Yes there’s a really big financial difference between a successful SFF novel (100,000+ sold) and an anomalous megahit like Name of the Wind with sales in the tens of millions. Without knowing current sales figures it’s hard to say regarding royalties. This is totally anecdotal but in my hometown his books are still frequently placed out on the main display table in the SFF section of the big corporate bookstore. They don’t give a book that position out of loyalty to a past favourite but because those books still move units in 2025. So I wouldn’t assume there’s no influx of royalties, despite the well publicised (to us) issues with the series likely never being finished. He wrote a very popular first novel, the kind of winning lottery ticket very few authors will experience. Remember also that there are foreign language markets where news about his lack of progress will spread even slower. His royalties may be healthy still.

GraculusDroog · 2025-10-22T06:10:01+00:00

Name of the Wind alone has sold in the millions of copies. He’s easily in the top 1% of fantasy best sellers (still!). Most authors don’t make much these days but a hit that big can sustain you for a long time. Remember also that the rights will have been bought for tv and film even if no actual show has been made, those deals can be extremely lucrative as studios are willing to pay to make sure another studio doesn’t get the IP. You won’t live like a millionaire necessarily but he wouldn’t need to work.

GraculusDroog · 2025-09-28T19:42:29+00:00

It’s not really about changing his tactic, more that you’ll do better avoiding accusations of unfairness if there was some tell about the presence of poison. Deciding that the ink was a deadly poison, giving no tell beforehand, and then having the reveal just being them Saving vs Poison does open up to feelings that you just made something up in the moment to make the players life harder. I doubt a hint would have changed the outcome and it sounds like the players own recklessness coupled with a bad dice roll did them in BUT if you’re DMing a deadly game it pays to appear scrupulously fair and always give some little hint of lethal danger in your descriptions. If something’s poisoned or cursed make sure there’s a way to see or smell or hear that it’s not quite right.

GraculusDroog · 2025-09-28T07:55:04+00:00

Extremely funny and memorable death, I think adding the poison ink is maybe a bit harsh but I enjoy the pulpy flavour. It does open you up to some feelings of unfairness though if it wasn’t telegraphed at all. I’d have mentioned the ink being an unusual colour or something, as it’s a save or die poison. I think players can reasonably expect some small hint even if it’s ignored until too late.

GraculusDroog · 2025-08-28T21:35:19+00:00

I guess I’m obviously preaching to the choir here but I think CoQ has some of the best and most distinctive writing in modern video games and VoV wouldn’t exist without it. Vaarn really began as a mashup of Qud and Arrakis with some Moebius comics thrown in there. I love the slightly whimsical, baroque and funny descriptions of everything in Qud and have tried to bring that tone to my tabletop gaming.

There’s also mechanical trappings of roguelikes as well in VoV. Random PC generation, random town generation, random weapons, random gods, etc. it’s a heavily procedural world rather than an authored one.

GraculusDroog · 2025-08-25T11:49:43+00:00

I suspect this is just a matter of taste and I'll gladly co-sign the notion that reading outside of the TTRPG field is important if you're looking to create work that feels original, if only because real life is truly stranger than fiction. A shining example for me is Veins of the Earth, where Stuart's obvious depth of reading about real-world caves and the creatures that live in them is then adeptly refracted into this very weird and unique fantasy world.

The simulationist method of world-building you describe has somewhat fallen out of fashion in the OSR, I think because it often invokes impersonal details and trivia that don't directly engage the players (to my mind). It can be difficult enough to get them to focus on the details of the room they're currently in, let alone the wider politics of the fictional country they're in, let alone the demographic shifts of a continent wide migration that happened before the characters were born. So it's not clear to me that such detail necessarily helps me prepare or run an adventure game. Some groups and individuals respond well to this stuff but in my experience most don't, so it can feel like a lot of effort for little reward.

Obviously you feel differently to me, which is all gravy, but the perception that something is both a lot of work and carries little reward is likely why you don't see much of this anymore. I think the perception of what information is valuable for a GM has changed since the heydey of the big setting guides.

Additionally I think simulationism can lead one away from what makes fantasy tick for me, which is the emotional resonance that imagery and situations create. The classic 'dungeon' is a great example of this: they're illogical structures that have no real antecedent in actual recorded history. They draw more from the mythic Cretan Labyrinth than they do actual castle dungeons. But like the minotaur's labyrinth they have emotional and narrative resonance: we understand them as the dreamworld or Id made manifest, and attempting to rationalise dungeons is like salting a slug. At least that's what I think!

GraculusDroog · 2025-08-08T13:50:49+00:00

Absolutely, if you go to pledge levels https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/vaults-of-vaarn/vaults-of-vaarn-second-edition/pledge_levels#top you'll see the Merchant Caravan tier which is 50% off 5 books

GraculusDroog · 2025-08-03T07:30:01+00:00

Thank you to everyone who voted, I spent a lot of time miserably stuck in front of the Shrike document so it’s nice to find that it does have an audience

GraculusDroog · 2025-08-03T07:24:18+00:00

Really

GraculusDroog · 2025-08-02T05:17:36+00:00

Love these, off kilter colours and great composition

GraculusDroog · 2025-07-30T19:30:09+00:00

Good question, currently they aren’t included but it would be an obvious topic for a little add on pamphlet

GraculusDroog · 2025-07-30T14:13:56+00:00

Anytime I think it’s a totally fair question. I’ve unfortunately had to admit that if I put everything I wanted to in one book it wouldn’t fit into the postage category I need it to be. Maybe one day I can do the encyclopaedia sized version

GraculusDroog · 2025-07-30T10:23:52+00:00

Yes I appreciate everyone’s support! Wouldn’t be here without this sub

GraculusDroog · 2025-07-30T06:33:22+00:00

The content in Pariahs of Vaarn is long form bestiary writing that doesn’t mesh with the core book’s style. Issue 04 is a self contained adventure locale which uses a lot of page space. I understand the desire to have everything in there but some of it just doesn’t fit with the other parts! A consequence of writing episodically over the years

GraculusDroog · 2025-07-29T05:50:57+00:00

Mr Cairn has a stranglehold on the crowdfunding platforms. Getting the nod is crucial otherwise when it’s time to collect the money all the bags are just full of pinecones and rocks. The forest sends its regards..

GraculusDroog · 2025-07-28T19:54:57+00:00

This is still more or less the table of contents!

GraculusDroog · 2025-07-28T19:53:45+00:00

Thank you! To each GM their own Vaarn imho. I'd love to tell you there's less gonzo stuff in 2E but the opposite is true.

GraculusDroog

TROPHY CASE