veins of the earth at the table: a review now that the campaign is over

the good:

• generally all the pariahs were cool and functioned like a charm. even very weird ones like the arachnopolis rex. spotlight dogs were a good awesome introduction! many interesting moments from pariahs like these.
• light as initiative: simple, gave the PCs a much needed boost, drove home the importance of light. they loved this
• inspiration: you can fit anything in the veins, and moreover, I felt inspired by the mix of off-realism and dirty fantasy to design a lot of cool shit like dvargir tanks. with the pariahs and the flavor and everything a definite original tone came across, like one player said repeatedly, "this isn't dnd".
• I created so much content on the backs of this setting and tone, you can see it on my blog under the "veins" label or compiled here
• I genuinely feel that the chaotic nature of anything-goes OSR style play was really supported by the alien architecture of play. I threw a modern day mall in, it was a little kitsch but it was also uncanny. They had troll teeth that could grow infinite food and several infinite sources of light; they had vehicles; all of these things came to ameliorate and negotiate a series of disturbing and perhaps impossible challenges which created very varied play.
• quoth skerples: "You'll carry a sword that can cut a syllable in half but your face will be streaked with clay and muck. You'll cut your hair off and file your teeth into points, but you'll also find a machine that spins music into cloth."
• players enjoyed the effects table and constantly asked to roll on it

the middling:

• I only used two of the cave systems. I made a lot of them, put a bunch of hours into designing many and many different representations thereof, only used 2. Mostly because:
• wasn't exactly sure how to link them up with the overland travel system
• I felt trepidation about caving; climbing or squeezing challenges specifically
• In retrospect I wish I had tried to use 'em.
• overland travel system was a mixed bag. it works ok but some standing questions like how do you navigate weren't really answered and I didn't feel like the quad-directionality of the charts ever came up. Moreover, what the routes looked like was only lightly detailed in the book and this left me with little to use frequently.
• some ambiguities were particularly bad, like the patterns of broken underground cities across the two segments of the map don't seem to match
• the exploration table: both good and bad. good because it was good at generating consequences and it would direct you over to the "one hundred encounters" table which was great but bad because some of the consequences were tricky to implement or repetitive. "Separated by a traverse/pitch" or "one player gets lost" came up a lot and coming up with a climbing challenge or navigation difficulty on the fly was a struggle. I usually ignored "act as one level lower" results because they're all level 1 heheh.
• I was frustrated by the ambiguity of when the table should came into play since it had such severe consequences for the players.
• I wish I used the rapture more.
• lumes and inventory mostly were in the background.

the bad:

• over time I ended up not liking the stiffness of the pages of the book and I thought the art was printed murky, ironic, I know. I first got to know the book through PDF and I had a lot more appreciation for the art at that point. Like I've said before I wish the book was A4 although you gotta take what you can get
• I wish I had some framework for designing settlements and regions, at least a little. It's my fine conclusion that part of the essence of the veins of the earth is a big question mark when it comes to things like "economy" and yeah you can slot whatever you want in, it does indeed function like an ak47 as the back of the book says. that being said there's virtually no starting point in the book for designing locales
• Ultimately the method for designing cave systems is pretty shitty. Lots of long, thin tunnels, no dead-ends, it's even kind of awkward to roll the dice and note where they go. I found it's easier just to sketch a bunch of caves
• As regards the book's races, I only ever used the Aelf-Adal (at least up close, the dvargir did most of the architecture of my campaign, the knotsmen were in the distance but not encountered in person). Honestly it was hard to roleplay Aelf-Adal from the included texts, didn't feel like I got a big juicy bite. Most of the time I just used "humans". w/e

conclusions:

• biggest complaint: overland travel was ambiguous. second biggest complaint was cave systems seemed kinda inaccessible. the other stuff (no details for settlements, fucked up nature of the economy) sorta just threw me in the deep end and I learned to swim.
• undeniably this was a successful hexcrawl. I had a great moment about 2/3 of the way through where I had written enough and I could just let the rest play out. there was this ultimate selection of priorities that the players had, they could choose between weird things. and everything was very weird. plus they actually managed to survive, for a while
• you definitely have to hack a bunch to make veins work (as intended)
• the excellent off-realism/dirty fantasy tone fucking functioned