Meditations on Veins of the Earth
I ran a three-month campaign of Veins of the Earth, which to my understanding makes me one of the select few who actually attempted to run that beast of a book! Unfortunately, the weekly game ended up being slightly less than weekly, so of our 13 hypothetical sessions, we probably only had 6 to 8 full sessions' worth of play, but I still got some useful data.
Methodology, or How I Did It
Patrick Stuart's Veins of the Earth is not a module or a gazetteer but more of a menu for GMs to grab things they like to put into their games. Skerples' Veinscrawl is a free hexcrawl based on the concepts from Veins which attempts to assemble it into a ready-to-run sandbox. I admire Skerples' attempt to make sense of Veins, but think that Skerples' aesthetic sensibilities are quite different from Patrick Stuart's and that things like Veinscrawl's density of content detracts from some of the things I find cool about Veins. I ended up combining aspects of Veins, the Veinscrawl, and my own idiosyncratic material.
I also updated the overworld setting to 1980s Thailand and ran the game in Liminal Horror, which is pretty substantially different from the setting either Stuart or Skerples expects, a more classic West European medieval fantasy setting. The biggest changes I made to the Veinscrawl were replacing Skerples' faction of giant ant-people with communist guerrillas from the 1960s who don't know 20 years have passed aboveground for time-stretching reasons, and replacing Skerples' ghouls with the Knotsmen from the OG Veins. I also tweaked the descriptions of other factions like the Drow and the Dvergr/Dvargir, though this didn't end up mattering much cause the PCs never encountered them.
What Happened
Here's a very broad summary of the story of our campaign:
After a system of underground tunnels was discovered while breaking ground for a shopping mall in Bangkok, a shadowy organization named The Archive started sending expeditions down into the depths. Two ex-pats working with The Archive, Gram and Mabel (PCs), descend along with Amphon, an employee of The Archive and handler of sorts (they are later briefly joined by Blaze, another PC). They quickly encounter a species of sentient, cannibalistic salamander-people who are surprisingly friendly, and they are led through the territory of these Olm by Dancer-Liar-Memory, an Olm who can talk to Gram through their shared language of Pali. At the end of their tour, they are brought to the Grand Sump of the Olm and offered the great honor of getting eaten by them. Their polite rejection of this offer goes south and results in Blaze and Amphon getting blown to shreds.
Gram and Mabel flee with Dancer-Liar-Memory, who basically defected to their side. They find two women, Lilly and Delaney, who ended up in the veins through an alternate entrance. They group up and attempt to escape through the alternate entrance. Along the way, they find the aftermath of a bloodbath involving human soldiers wearing old-timey uniforms. They attempt to bring the only survivor with them, but encounter more lost guerrillas who refuse to allow the injured man to leave the veins. The arrival of a giant mantis shrimp changes this dynamic somewhat as Delaney saves the guerrillas by unloading a machine gun into the invisible hunter. The PCs take the injured guerrilla and an old man from the other group back above ground, where they are debriefed by The Archive.
On their second expedition, the group explores around the alternate entrance, briefly encountering some Weeping Knights of the Knotsmen, which they ignore due to Dancer's warnings about dealing with them. They continue exploring, and come to a difficult climb, where Lilly is knocked unconscious abseiling. The group brings Lilly back to the surface, and our campaign ended here.
Content
This was pretty great. One of the reasons I think Veins is so popular despite not being very immediately useful is that the combination of Stuart's (evocative) writing and Scrap Princess's (evocative) illustrations means that you read about a concept and immediately want to do something with it or have some vague idea of how you could use it in a game. A player told me at the end of our campaign that the very first encounter with the Olm, seeing these tall, pale, red-mouthed horrors shucking oysters, was an image that stood out to them and stuck in their mind. And I think that Veins has a lot of these really powerful images. And a lot of the things I like about Veinscrawl are places where Skerples is able to place these bits of really resonant imagery into a context where they're able to shine or stand out in some way.
Unfortunately, while the positive space of Veins is very powerful, I think negative space is understandably but frustratingly undefined. We're led to believe that characters are climbing and squeezing between areas, constantly measuring light and food, but unless you run the caves as a megadungeon (that you'd have to create yourself), there's not a lot of mechanical heft to support anything more zoomed-out than the moment-to-moment level of the fiction.
Mechanics
This section is mostly my fault, and to a lesser extent Stuart's fault. I had to make certain decisions about how to adapt Veins to Liminal Horror, which I think I mostly did a good job of. If I ran it again, I would probably pick a system that lets me run the monsters and some of the 6 stat-dependent mechanics more "out-of-the-box" rather than having to adapt to the Oddlike combat system. One piece of halfway decent impromptu game design (in my opinion) was making a derived stat for "Caving" equal to Dex+HP+number of unused slots under 10, which was used for things like fleeing and difficult climbs.
I really struggled to figure out how to insert the climbing rules from Veins, which, to be fair, Skerples doesn't really attempt to do either. The rules for climbing have really brutal consequences, even for very gentle climbs, and I'm not entirely sure how I would bridge the gap of making climbing the subject of interesting choices. I think you could adapt Veinscrawl into more of a pointcrawl, where different paths are "locked" by difficult climbs or other kinds of checks, or just making the climbs only matter if the PCs are getting chased or something.
One problem I had was trying to figure out how to format the hexcrawl, because I didn't want the party to be tripping over things every couple minutes in an area that's supposed to feel vast and barren and lifeless, but I also didn't want things to be boring. I used kind of a riff on Mythic Bastionland's system, where I rolled a d20 to decide if the PCs encounter the hex's obvious feature, hidden feature, a d10 table of "travel shifts," or a random encounter. I had a 50% chance of anything happening, which I think might have been too low; I think I could have had a 50% chance of an encounter or feature and then the other 50% chance being a travel shift. On the other hand, if I had made things much less likely to be encountered, it would have made things like food and light management more impactful, whereas they basically never mattered in our campaign.1
How Do You Make Play Scary?
One thing a player brought up in our debrief is that the Liminal Horror Stress & Stability rules almost never came up. I think that's both a function of how short our campaign was (not a lot of chances for the Veins mutations) and how kind of janky CoC Sanity-based systems are. Losing HP can be tense and exciting, but it isn't really scary, and so having an HP bar that depletes very slowly and permanently is kind of the worst of both worlds. I'm sure there are ways to make "sanity loss" an exciting and scary mechanic: my first thought is either incentivizing PvP or crossing abilities off your character sheet, but I also think the concept of having the GM tell you that your character is shocked and horrified is less impactful than deciding for yourself that that is the case.
How I Would Do It Again
I've thought a bit about how I would attempt to run this again, and the biggest hurdle for this campaign was having to juggle players joining and leaving or not being able to attend sessions. Managing to fit Veins into an open table, West Marches format is a bit of a tall order, but I had an idea that leans into the malevolent government agency angle and takes a page from Annihilation, where at the end of each session, whether a day or week passed in-game, the PCs all black out and regain consciousness some indeterminate amount of time later, getting debriefed by their handlers at the Archive.2 Then, each session would begin and end back in headquarters. For this structure, I would also have it so PCs could progressively find more and more entrances/exits to the Veins while exploring so that they gain new jumping off points for expeditions.
For some mechanical support, I think I would use something like Sam Sorenson's Lowlife, which has much more formalized rules for crawling. I think I would also use a pointcrawl or hexcrawl structure similar to the Veinscrawl, but where PCs have to first find a path to move between two zones. When the PCs find a path, it's associated with a certain difficulty of climb or crawl,3 and they can either unlock that path by getting through it or reroll and spend time trying to find a different path. All of this takes time and has a risk of generating encounters. I would probably also make encounters very infrequent, something like 1-in-20 every 3 hours, with shopping for a tunnel taking 3 hours, and a chance of the encounter happening in the middle of caving or climbing depending on your speed.
Veins Basic
I was trying to figure out which OSR system I would use and then I realized that since Veins is meant to be compatible with any 3-18 stat, d20 attack roll system, I could basically just codify those assumptions (though I ended up adding a few little flairs of my own):
Simple B/X-ish System: Roll 3d6, recording each individual die, for each of Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Add the lowest die rolled for each stat to get your max HP. Add the middle dice rolled for Strength, Constitution, and Dexterity to get your Attack Value. Add the middle dice rolled for Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma to get your Spell Value. Add the highest dice rolled for Strength, Constitution, and Dexterity to get your Inertness. Add the highest dice rolled for Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma to get your Certitude.
Determine your character's name and background (you may do this randomly from i.e. the tables in the Liminal Horror investigator's guide.)
When your character mutates, reduce your Stability or Endurance by 1, and choose one: Increase an ability score (STR, CON, DEX, INT, WIS, CHA) by 1d6, or Increase your Attack Value or Spell Value by 1.
To attack, roll equal to or under your Attack Value and over the opponent's Armor Class (Leather = 2, Chain = 4, Plate = 6, Shield = +1). If you succeed, roll for damage.
Inertness and Certitude are used to make saves and represent physical and mental normalcy, respectively. Roll under when attempting to resist bodily or mental changes; roll over when attempting to be particularly durable or sensitive. Rolling your stat exactly always succeeds but triggers a mutation. At 0 Inertness or Sensitivity, your character is irreversibly transformed into something inhuman, and becomes an NPC.
Footnotes
I'm realizing one of the recurring themes of Veins is this idea that everything kind of functions as HP in that everything is fine until you have 0, which means you're either bored (because you're doing a lot of management for no reason) or you're basically dead. I'm really interested in better ways to make the management of these things fun and exciting, and I'd expect that this work has already been contemplated in the OSR space.↩
Which could interface interestingly with the dEr0's whole shtick.↩
Lowlife has three difficulties for caving, which maps nicely onto the reaction table (2: No path, 3-5: Choke, 6-8: Squeeze, 9-11: Crawl, 12: No roll necessary). There are four for caving, so I would make 2 a Ceiling (most difficult), and then have it be 50/50 whether the PCs have to climb or cave.↩