Short Update/Thoughts on Arden Vul

    I've been running a game of Arden Vul for a while now, since my last Incunabuli group fell apart, and now that we're nearly 20 sessions in, I thought I might dust off the old opinion-machine and write about my thoughts. 

 

This image is found about halfway through the original pdf. imagine I credit the artist here instead of just copy/pasting a link to someone pinching it for their WorldAnvil 

 

    Arden Vul is impressive, for sure. My complete PDF copy something like eleven hundred pages long, and every page is deeply packed with information regarding the dungeon and its inhabitants. Sometimes, honestly, most of the time, however, the way it's displayed could use some work. From what I've seen online, this is a common sentiment. In order to get my PDF in workable order, I had to run a github program that adds hyperlinks to every page in the text, and once I was running it, I often had to call time so that I could rifle through it looking to see who knows what and where, and once my group wanted a break from the dungeon, the included hexmaps and info about Burdock's valley offer little info about the area around Arden Vul, even though the setting is often very different from the base fantasy assumptions of many players.

    I don't have my notes with me at the moment I'm writing this, but if I recall correctly, I've run about 18 sessions, and my players have not stepped foot in Arden Vul since before session 10. Now, I think a good amount of this is probably my own user error, but I've also had my players tell me that they haven't really enjoyed the dungeon-crawling aspect, which is totally fair, and also completely fatal to any dungeon-centric campaign.

     This was all building up to the end of the campaign, I had spoken to some of my players about their thoughts ending it, and then before I could bring it up at the next session, I lost power for a week. This has given me the time I needed to think.

    While I can recognize the immensity of Arden Vul, something about it always felt a little bit... off to me. I can appreciate a good dungeon, and I can appreciate the old school style, I really never found myself "hooked" by Arden Vul. The setting, in my opinion, was too similar to the "kitchen-sink" settings I always find myself turned off by, and I found the lightly Byzantine coat of paint applied over it to be too kitschy for my tastes. Those who know me know that I am the worst sort of history nerd, and I often found myself struggling with the theological doctrines that are required by the gameplay.

    Which... well, it sucks. I was happy for the opportunity to use new tools and grow my skills as a GM, as this represents the first time I have used the app Obsidian for my notes and the Fantasy Calendar website for my timekeeping. I also made a pretty nice pdf for my OSE home rules, which I do not think I can share publicly, but of which I am otherwise very proud.

    That's pretty much it for my vibes. Next up are my future plans.

     A week is a long time to go without power. I had a lot of time to darn clothes and read. I ended up pulling this book on Pirates, which offered an excellent analysis of what life was like, and how they grew to occupy such a romantic part of our culture today. So maybe I'll steal Skerple's Wavecrawl, or Jar of Dirt. Before the outage, I was thinking about transitioning into something reminiscent of more classic hack'n slash dark fantasy, but right now, my mind belongs to the sea, and that has morphed and mutated into another beautifully awful desire to run Incunabuli again. Time will tell, I'll try to include my thoughts here again, but I suppose the curse of blogs is not updating them regularly.