Table-Tested Review of Vaesen’s "Seasons of Mystery"
Over the course of a year, I ran Seasons of Mystery — a quarterly Vaesen game where each adventure unfolded in a different season. The book contains four scenarios, each tied to spring, summer, autumn, or winter, written by different authors (listed below) and published by Free League.
We managed to play on one of the two snowy days we had in December, had a spring session in April, weathered the heat in August and finished with an autumn session in October.
In this article, I’ll share my impressions of the adventures. I try to keep spoilers to a minimum, although I'd still discourage players from reading this.
A Dance with Death
by Gabrielle de Bourg
my rating: 7/10
In the scenic province of Dalarna, the PCs will be introduced to Swedish dance and folk music tradition.
Usually Vaesen pushes peaceful resolutions (and it is still very much achievable in this adventure), this one almost ended with a fight for us.
Out of all the adventures, this had the least interesting things going on for me, but it’s still a nice adventure.
And it has a dance contest, with the high stakes of “not making a fool of yourself”! That was definitely my favourite scene. Generally, it’s an adventure with a lot of social interaction.
Fireheart
by Tomas Härenstam
My rating: 8/10
Wildfires and heatwaves ravage the southern woods of Smolandia and the PCs are called to help a pair of brothers who own an ironworks.
This has been one of my favourite Vaesen to encounter. It’s a classic well done.
I very much liked the NPCs in this one, they were a delight to portray. They also had a lot of interesting mysteries to discover between each other.
The Devil on the Moor
by Andreas Marklund
My rating: 7/10
The PCs are called to the desolate moors on the west coast of Jutland, where modern engineering threatens to take over.
This was the one adventure I was a bit hesitant to run. It features some very heavy content that was mentioned in our agreed upon Veils (topics the group prefers to fade to black rather than depict directly), but can't really be warned about, since it's the resolution of the adventure. I warned them that there will be some content today that was listed in our Veils but can't disclose and we had an x-card on the table while we played. They agreed to try and all went well!
I liked this adventure especially for its sandboxy nature. There are many different locations to go to, and choices definitely matter a lot in this adventure. The contrast between spooky moor and modern engineering is a great setting.
A Winter's Tale
by Kiku Pukk Härenstam
My rating: 9/10
In this adventure the PCs find themselves in the snowy forests of Ingria.
This was definitely my favourite. It had this wonderful combination of cozy cabin in the woods and harsh and deadly snow on the outside. Vaesen often wants players to find peaceful resolutions, but even more so in this adventure.
Also there is a pretty obvious reference to the tv series Supernatural in there, which was absolutely hilarious.
Good pacing, great mystery, would run again.
Conclusion
Overall rating: 8/10
All in all a very coherent adventure collection. It suffers from the same problem all Vaesen adventures suffer for me, which is the general difficulty of running mysteries with a fixed solution without railroading players into solving it. I always ran them with slight spontaneous alterations to fit the player's choices, but the adventures work well within the framework and I didn’t encounter any particular problems.
As a horror game, most, if not all, adventures do feature some kind of more difficult content, but they give a heads up to the GM at the beginning of each chapter, which I appreciated. Safety Tools recommended.
The physical book is gorgeous (as always with Free League products), with thick paper and amazing artwork inside. Each adventure has, as usual with Vaesen adventures, a few handouts to print out, as well as 2+ maps for each adventure.
I had a lot of fun running this, and I can very much recommend running the adventures during their corresponding seasons. It definitely added some charm to it. 🌱☀️🍂❄️