I thought I'd continue on with the second Zine for Vaults of Vaarn today.
This zine primarily focuses on the city of Gnomon, which provides readers and players our first pre-generated setting to interact with. It is described as the "gaudy jewel of Vaarn's southern badlands, the city of a thousand shaded bazaars, a thirsty bustling morass of dusty courtyards and guild halls and artisans' workshops".
It is the loved and iconic trading hub that any good TTRPG needs. D&D has cities like Baldur's Gate and Waterdeep, Pathfinder has Katapesh, and Electric Bastionland has... well, Bastion, the only city that matters.
For Vaarn, and by extension unofficially for Knave, we have Gnomon.
If something can be bought and sold, you can bet it is being bought and sold here. Information, goods, justice... everything has a price.
Some may come to Gnomon seeking justice, for this trader’s city is also the site of the Crimson Court, an ancient fount of bloody judgement. In this roaring crucible steelswathed and sweat-slick Advocates deliberate in the sight of Gods and beggars alike the merits of legal cases civil and criminal, and in the spray of heartsblood upon the blue sands can a contract be enforced or unmade.
And yet, with any good TTRPG city, Gnomon is offered to us as a starting place, not a final destination. This is a template for us to build off of, because part of the fun is making a uniquely one-of-a-kind version for ourselves.
Gnomon is a kaleidoscope of places, incidents, people, and organizations. The city wears many faces, and no two versions of Gnomon should be the same at different gaming tables. My vision of the city is in the end only a spark; you are invited to kindle it.
With an introduction to the setting, we're given some additional details that make for easy problems a game master might toss into their game.
Vaarn, as a desert, naturally has water scarcity. Mechanically, this means that as you're playing the setting you are encouraged to make consuming water matter. In modern D&D (let's call that 3e - 5e), resources like food and water aren't really something that matters. Even in Knave (which is a rule set that borrows heavily from old D&D) water and food aren't something that is generally tracked. It can be, but it's not strictly mandatory. This mechanic in Vaarn gives us reason to make it mandatory, and to make that mandatory addition fun. Because if we're going to make it necessary to track something like water, we should also make it fun (and relatively easy) to succeed.
Next we move on to a system of bartering - now, this is something that I'd personally be hesitant to take to a table of players. Solo gaming? Absolutely, I'd use this! But at the table? I'm a little more reluctant to use. Largely, my reason is that it slows down the game. If a loaf of bread is $3, that's an easy transaction that we don't have to think about. If it's $3 worth of trade goods, and you have to figure out what that equals based on what you have, you're going to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how many plated silver buttons are worth a loaf of bread, or how many loaves of bread you can get for a lightly used sword. In either case, it adds complexity and time that could better be spent doing what we got together for in the first place: Adventuring!
Again, I think this has a lot of value for soloists, but I think you'd have to be running for a special group to get much use from this at the table. Nobody likes "shopping episodes", and when one player could very easily spend ten minutes haggling on a barter while the other 3+ players twiddle their thumbs, it's a recipe for disengagement.
With Water and Barter complete, the next section is full of pre-generated NPCs and Factions that are important to the city. These offer drop-and-play NPCs that you can run and are already tailored to the current city setting. If you wanted to run custom NPCs on the fly, the prior issue had a ton of handy roll tables for generating quick, functional, and flavourful NPCs.
As with the prior issue, the remainder of this issue is primarily focused on GM-oriented tables for rolling up anything you might need to flesh out the city further. Buildings, Merchants, Mercenaries, Noble Houses, and Trade Cartels are just a few of the random tables available to reference for creating interesting people and places within your version of Gnomon.
The last thing I'll mention about this issue is the pages very close to the end of the zine where "Changes in Gnomon" is mentioned. This is an aspect that I think a lot of people, particularly new GMs and soloists, forget to include. Things change!
No city stands still, and certainly no city as chaotic and vibrant as Gnomon. If the players leave town for a while and come back, here are some things that might have changed while they were gone.
This is a brilliant addition that gives folks a handful of plausible changes your characters might stumble into when they next visit the city. Things like fires, hostile/invading/occupying forces, plagues... when you spend weeks or months away on adventure, it would certainly add some chaos to the mix if you came back to find out that the city you've always taken for granted as being an unchanging rock is suddenly in the midst of its own crisis.
That's going to be it for me today. As always folks, happy gaming!
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