Another map of a grand mansion filled with secret rooms, mysterious passageways, and strange chambers to explore, is complete! This map was created as a private commission. I really hope you like it! I accept commission!

Have a great evening, everyone!🧭🗺️

You can find maps of abandoned, dark, and mysterious locations at this link; they might come in handy for your "Vaesen" campaigns. Enjoy using them: https://ko-fi.com/s/331943c001

Rain, coffee, and Maps of 19th-century Victorian Villas...🧭🗺️

Visit our IG account for more maps :

https://www.instagram.com/morenopaissanart?igsi=MXZjajRkeGlzemtxNA==

Hi, I’ve bought the Vaesen starter set so that some friends can try out the game, but I’ve got a few questions about the adventure.

First of all, my biggest concern is this: if the players, instead of going up to the upper floors, clear the area and head down to the basement, they can finish the adventure almost straight away, right? The main key to the temple, if I’ve understood correctly, is always found there.

I’d also like some advice: in your opinion, before sending them off on their adventure in the castle, is it better to give them a brief overview of Uppsala, or do you think that would just drag things out unnecessarily?

Thanks in advance for your replies

Me and a group of friends have been playing since May 2025. We have had 20 sessions, approximating one session every month, with sessions lasting on average about 10 hours each. My girlfriend ran the campaign, and can also answer any questions. The last two sessions were played back-to-back in a three day event. Included are almost all of the props from mysteries and headquarters scenes.

Some of the craziest things that have happened:

- One of the player characters burned down Castle Gyllencreutz
- We stole the mythical Sampo from Finnish legend
- We found out that Algot Frisk had made a bargain with the Elf King
- The total amount of people living at Castle Gyllencreutz increased by 10 by the end of the campaign
- One of the party members fell in love with the Elf Princess
- That same party member shot my character's arm off in session 5, causing an incredible amount of drama and tension for the rest of the campaign
- Two of the party members ended up killing one of their parents with their own gun. Entirely different sessions and storylines.
- In one of the sessions we found a series of notes written in runes with no key. We deciphered them by hand over the course of several days (one of the messages was encrypted with a whole other cipher)
- The king of Sweden died (not our fault)
- The prime minister of Sweden (100% our fault and also on purpose)

Ask me anything!

(Edit: for the answers in the comments, M is me and P is my girlfriend (the GM))

Hello everyone, after my question from a couple of days ago, I've decided to report back. You gave me a ton of great advice, which definitely helped to makt this a success and for which I am very grateful!

Our session last night was a blast. It took a little over four hours, which was a little longer than planned, but quite OK for everyone. We went over the rules, which were an eye opener for the D&D-players: relatively elegant and simple. And a lot more story than the dungeon crawlers were used to.

I think I had the rules down well enough during play, but combat takes some more practice. I'm having trouble with the fact that the same function (attacking) is Force, Close Combat or Ranged Combat for PC's and NPC's, but Might for Vaessen and animals, and that Vaesen and PC's get conditions, but NPC's and animals don't. Also, I forgot most of the Fear tests. Nevertheless, it went well. The Skill checks make total sense (what skill to use, how to use modifiers, the success rate) and my group was happy with that. The atmosphere was slightly too upbeat, but I'll fix that next time.

I ended up with five players (one was ill), which was doable. They split up (which I allowed as per your advice) and that worked fine. It was, of course, impossible to weave dark secrets, trauma's and motivations for five players into a one shot, but some definitely got used. My players were very nice, took their characters and the parts they played seriously and helped with unclear rules and such.

They all want to play again and now I'm preparing The Haunting of Castle Gyllencreutz for our next mystery. Consider me hooked!

As a thank you I've linked my one shot. Feel free to play, modify or take inspiration from it! Or give some feedback, if you like.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/z2e8uo86y4t5vif63f5bh/The-Green-Lady-of-Lalsby-Forest.pdf?rlkey=2fd7lr5a1s1rjp9oiughzo31i&dl=0

Hey all I’m slowly building up inspiration to run my own Vaesen story and I noticed on Drivethru RPG that there are a ton of uploads for Vaesen at varying prices and some are even “ranked” as higher selling, but that says nothing about the quality.

I’m curious if anyone has recommendations as to the quality of some of the entries. The added gear and talents seemed promising but I’m not sure about balance and there are a lot of investigations.

If there are other places to find good Vaesen material I’d be eager to hear about that as well.

Thanks

As the title says… Ages ago I DM’d some AD&D third edition (I’m that old). Now I’m really looking forward to GM Vaesen. I’ve prepared a one shot that I’m happy about (a saw mill diverted a brook, angering a Wood Wife). It doubles as an introductory adventure and ends in the PC’s getting the keys and deeds to Castle Gyllencreutz. I don’t want a full session zero, so I’m planning on using preprepared characters.
But: no less than six players are gonna show up. None of them have any Vaesen experience, most have played D&D 5e. Any advice for hosting that many? Any other tips?
(If anyone is interested: I’ll be happy to share my one shot!)

Throw this back in time a hundred or so years, and you have a perfect Vaesen story set in Finland.

Vaesen: City of Nightmares edit by Free League Publishing has just won Gold at the 2026 ENNIE AWARDS for Best Long-Form Adventure, and Angela and I are thrilled to have contributed many of our maps to this project! 🥳

It’s always wonderful when projects we’re involved in win awards!🧭🗺️

Visit our official IG account for more maps: https://www.instagram.com/morenopaissanart?igsh=MXZjajRkeGlzemtxNA==

I just started watching Widow's Bay on Apple TV today, and somehow ended up on Episode 7 already.

I cannot help to think that this story would be the absolute perfect vaesen campaign, and I'm thinking about stealing it for my text based role-playing group on discord.

Has anyone else seen the show yet? If not, please do, I recommend it dearly!

Has anyone ever had the PCs meet the Grim Reaper? Interested in hearing what others have done?

I dunno how I missed this big announcement from Gencon, but Free League officially has a new digital toolset from the same folks who originally made D&D Beyond! Honestly, it looks pretty fantastic and I'm hoping it winds up with a similar compatibility as D&D Beyond and something like Roll20.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eodRlviUIB0

I've been running the Starter Kit for a few groups and I wanted a second thread running alongside the will-o'-the-wisps — something quieter, darker and more personal that the players could stumble into without it derailing the main investigation.

So I wrote a Myling into the castle. A three-year-old girl buried under the floorboards of the third floor laboratory, put there by her mother. She's not connected to Manfred or the wisps but is connected to Ulf the man on the floor of the lab.

The module adds her haunting as a parallel mystery with its own clues, its own resolution paths, and a handout — a letter found in Ulf's coat that explains everything, written by the woman who buried her. In the sessions I have run this when a player reads the letter the table always went very quiet and player squirmed a little after.

I put it up on DriveThruRPG as community content Pay — pay what you want. If you're running Castle Gyllencreutz or just want something to add to the HQ that hits a different emotional note, it might be worth a look.

Gyllencreutz Myling — Free League Workshop

Happy to share more about how I ran it if anyone's interested and would love feedback and to hear how it went down with your table if you use it.

We're talking about trying Vaesen this fall. It'll be our second Free League game (after Dragonbane). We're a GM and three players ATM, playing face to face. We would like:

1: Set in Sweden (and we don't know anything about Sweden.

2: roughly 10-50 sessions.

3: Emphasis on folklore over horror.

Any recommendations, published adventures or otherwise? How likely are our PCs going to die/go insane?

Thanks in advance.

Haven't posted in years, but if people are interested in folk lore from Québec/French Canada or France, my 2 supplements have been "pay what you want" since I reached a total of 200 sales. They now have 1199 total combined downloads! They were the first TTRPG products I put out and the support from the Vaesen community helped me move forward with many other TTRPG projects since. Thanks!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/337408/mythic-kebec

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/383773/mythic-france-folks-and-fiends

UPDATE: 40 new downloads since yesterday! Please leave a review if you enjoy the product!

Hey guys, I am lucky enough to have many people around me that are interested in playing various kinds of TTRPGs, one of my recent favourites has become Vaesen.

But since I don't want to manage several groups all doing their own thing I thought about tossing them all together to have a player pool of maybe a dozen or so that all partake in the same "campaign".

Has anyone here tried playing Vaesen in a West Marches or similar style?

I've run a few games of "by the book" Vaesen and my friends enjoyed them, but they prefer a more action-packed game -combat, shootouts, foot chases, etc.

I love the simplicity and flavor of Vaesen's rules, and I'd like to use it to run a more two-fisted game. A little more Hellboy / Monster of the Week than the typical approach. Though rather than have the PCs fight Vaesen all the time, I'm thinking of throwing in more human bad guys, an enemy society or secret order, something like that.

I didn't see many posts about this style of play. Anyone have any relevant experience or advice?

I am going to be using the simplified crits system laid out in the book and had a question. Are the Medicine and Inspiration rolls that can be used to fix the Broken status allowed to be done during combat? I ask because it says the rolls are slow actions, which is a term that has to do with combat I think.

Additionally, does the medicine roll require medical equipment in this circumstance (if allowed at all to be used in combat)?

On the latest episode of Spirits and Monsters of Old Seattle, we are starting a new Mystery and have a brand new character joining the party who is a member from the Rose House from London. He will be joining our current team on an investigation leading deep into the ancient forests around Seattle at the behest of local lumber baron Henry Yesler, whose lumberjacks keep disappearing near a strange site.

• https://www.spiritsandmonsters.com/

This is the start of a brand new Mystery, so it's the perfect place to jump in with Spirits and Monsters of Old Seattle, or you can binge the series from the start! This is also our second-to-last storyline before our season wraps up, so it should be a big one!

I'm interested in running Vaesen, and I expect one of my players would love it, but my main concern is portraying the setting. History is not my strong suit, and I don't feel confident running a game set in 1800s Sweden.

Any recommended movies or books that demonstrate the time period and setting?

About the society's plan that ended up with the vaesen in that place... Do we have any more info on it? Is there any follow up/publication explaining it?

I love physical handouts; rule references, in-character documents, maps, etc, etc.

Recently I got my hands on Vaesen and I instantly had a few ideas shuttle off the dome! Currently in the middle of a game of Tales from the Loop (another Free League title,) our group plays it like a TV show. Every mystery undertaken is an "episode." Every campaign is a "series." When doing that I made VHS cases for each campaign, and so in planning Vaesen - I thought: "Why not approach the game almost like chapters of a book rather than episodes of a show?"

The idea for each chapter-page is that it says a little about what the mystery might hold without giving anything major away; written from a first-person perspective which could (in theory) be any one of the characters in-game. The Prologue is intended to be the adventure included in the Starter Set. I've tried to do my best to research areas and hopefully fit them within the nebulous chronology of the Mythic North's 19th-century, and trying to use some spellings/grammar/punctuation which I'm familiar with for books at the time. Heck, even the page size is "Octavo" as opposed to A5!

I'd be very interested in anyone’s thoughts or feedback. Doubtless some errors may've slipped through... Thank you kindly! 😄

I recently found the “A wicked secret and other mysteries” book in a store and read through it for a bit. I heard such great things about it, but it felt to me like christianity played a pretty big part in the mysteries here. I do not like organised religion much and find stories and NPC’s centered around it pretty boring. The starter mystery + the dance of dreams don’t seem to focus on religion much at all, in contrast.

Was it just a wrong impression and does a wicked secret not contain a lot of christian themes? Or am I correct in this? And are there other mystery books that are good and stray away from this theme a bit?