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Dark secrets in the North - a Mephisto review
The Lost Mountains Saga
The Lost Mountains Saga is another adventure book for the Vaesen role-playing game. The campaign comprises five individual adventures with several connecting elements. At the heart of it all is an ancient secret, traces of which are found in the form of unusual crystals in northern Scandinavia. However, the mine where these crystals were mined has been closed for a long time since an accident. Nevertheless, there are several parties that are following the trail of the crystals and have their own goals for these artifacts.
The book begins with a brief introduction that provides background information for the game master and presents the various people and power groups involved. The adventure Duty and Despair then gets straight down to business. In the first adventure, the player characters are asked by another member of society to help him investigate incidents in a mining town. When the player characters arrive there, they witness how the conflict between the miners and the town's reverend intensifies in the town. As usual for the Vaesen role-playing game, this is just one of the conflicts in the adventure. At its core, of course, it is once again about a vaesen that must be found to stop it and prevent a major catastrophe.
After this intro, the players have the opportunity in the second adventure, The Beginning of the Fall, to start some investigations on location in Uppsala. In the process, they discover that an influential industrialist and his young wife want to reopen an old mine in the north of the country that promises technical wonders. This allows the characters to immerse themselves in the larger story and find out more about their partner from the first adventure.
In the third adventure, Where the Sun Dies, the player characters are sent out to search for an island where contact with the local community has been lost during the winter, and an icy and deadly threat awaits them.
The fourth adventure, The Prince and the Witch, is again set near Uppsala. Here, the player characters have to help free some people from the clutches of the so-called Prince, who lives deep in the forest.
At the end, the eponymous adventure The Lost Mountain Saga leads to the heart of the story and the grand finale, where the various storylines are brought together, and the final confrontation takes place.
Without revealing more about the content of the adventures in detail, it can be said that the stories are woven together in such a way that, although they are part of a larger campaign, the connecting threads are often not clearly visible to the player characters at first. The players will probably only recognize the connections at the end, which in my view, is more of an advantage than a disadvantage. In fact, this campaign could also be combined with other adventures, thus building up the themes very subtly.
The individual adventures are designed quite differently. They range from the introductory adventure, which classically follows the basic Vaesen pattern, to the city adventure in Uppsala with its many investigative approaches and social interactions, to the survival adventure and the grand finale, the course of which also depends on the players' decisions.
In my opinion, The Lost Mountains Saga is an excellent campaign for Vaesen with five varied adventures in which the players will probably not recognize the common story elements at first, increasing the tension. Even though the core of the campaign revolves around larger secrets, it is only at the end that it becomes clear what is at stake. The well-written and coherently illustrated book thus offers Vaesen gaming groups adventure material for several evenings and can therefore be recommended.
(Björn Lippold)
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