2025 Reviews: Where the Sun Dies
Alright, I think I can squeak in one more review this year, increasing my 2025 output by 33%... anyway, let's talk about Where The Sun Dies, an adventure for Vaesen, part of the "Lost Mountain Saga" campaign book. The lead writer of the book was Ellinor DiLorenzo with editing and additional writing by Tomas Härenstam and Kiku Pukk Härenstam. Illustrations are by Johan Egerkrans and Anton Vitus.
This one was a bit of a departure for me, being that I've had such a strict OSR regimen for the past couple of years. However, I'd always been interested in the themes presented in Vaesen, and this past fall at GameHole Con I finally got to play it and see how I liked the system. As you can see, I liked it and picked up a copy of the book while I was there along with a book of nominally linked adventures.
The premise of the campaign book is a bunch of investigations set in Sweden and Norway, really focusing on trying to capture the mythology and folklore of that country and translating them to a game like Vaesen. While the intended use is for the five adventures to be linked together into one overarching story, I found that they were all perfectly capable of being run a standalone games; I chose this one (chapter 3 in the book) in particular for my annual Halloween game since it felt kind of spooky.
Where The Sun Dies presents us with an isolated island off the northern coast of Norway that has stopped responding to communication, and the ship that went to investigate never returned. The next ship encountered a frozen sea around the island far too early in the year to be natural, and a frozen corpse in a lifeboat. Naturally, the authorities need to contact a team of experts in unnatural phenomena-- the PCs. Eventually it is revealed that the inhabitants of the island had an arrangement with a frost giant which has been broken, and the wrath of the giant has locked the island in a premature and presumably permanent winter.
Getting it to the Table
As I mentioned, this was a huge departure for me not just in the tone and pace of the game (Vaesen is definitely intended to be a more "slowly building dread" sort of investigation game, similar to Call of Cthulhu), but also in the way that adventures are presented. I must admit, I struggled with this quite a bit when preparing for the game.
The way that Free League formats adventures for Vaesen is almost completely alien to the way that I like to read them-- it honestly presents them almost as a linear narrative, so that by "reading" the adventure you are "experiencing" it almost as the players would. Each location in the adventure is detailed in a present tense prose description that often includes dialogue from NPCs written as you would see it in a novel. For example, "The Inn" is described thusly:
What was once a cozy, welcoming inn is now in shambles. All the windows have been boarded up. Broken furniture lines the walls. There's a rotten stench of unwashed bodies. There's a fireplace with embers, radiating some heat. Five survivors from the naval corvette Freja have taken shelter here. They are hungry, desperate, and terrified. The player characters notice a pile of something that looks like human limbs. "We've been starving," one of the men says, defeat and desperation in his voice. All five of them are looking down. "We didn't know if anyone would come for us. This was the only way." He points towards the pile. "Only the ones who were already dead. who she had already killed. We were desperate..." He starts to sob and sits down.
The way this is presented is strange to me, because there is no clear guidance as to how you set the scene for the players when they come to a particular location. All of the description is here all at once, and it moves from outside to inside, directly to the point where the PCs are noticing things and presumably talking to NPCs.
Once the initial "scene setting" for each location is finished, the standard presentation is to have a list of "Clues" which detail the ways that the PCs can interact with the location and find out more information. This gives us a little more to work with-- bullet points that indicate the important features of a location that can help drive the story forward. However, a lot of it is still presented in present tense prose.
Part of my issue with it may simply be personal preference, but I can't help but feel that a new GM would struggle quite a bit when trying to prepare an adventure that is written like this for the table. The Vaesen core book describes investigations consisting of "scenes" where the GM has the prerogative to "decide when a scene starts and when it ends", but that is incredibly vague when applied to the way that adventures are given to prospective GMs.
One aspect of the Vaesen adventure presentation is the concept of "Countdown and Catastrophe"-- essentially it's an escalation timeline that is used to ramp up the tension and push an adventure towards a confrontation with the particular vaesen which is causing the mystery. The GM is given a fair amount of latitude for when these new events should trigger, so it's a good tool for pacing the game (which would be invaluable for a convention setting).
What Worked?
- Great premise! While most of the adventures in this campaign book could theoretically be played as one-shots, this one was solidly in that "monster of the week" category. Winter storms, isolation, stuck on an island with a creepy thing killing people-- all of this is a great way to get a game going.
- Countdown and Catastrophe. This is, for me, the central touchstone that has really helped me grok Vaesen adventures, since it gives me a sense of what is supposed to happen and how everything is supposed to converge.
What Didn't Work?
- Prose presentation. I had to do a lot of note-taking and parsing of text to pull out the important information so that I wasn't just reading a book to my players.
- Beautiful maps that weren't really that useful. We're given a map of the entire island, but only one area is keyed because all of the action only takes in one area. The one area that is keyed only has three points of interest, leaving about 80% of the map decorated with things that have no meaning or purpose.
- Discrepancies between the vaesen from the core book and this particular vaesen. It's unclear if this was intentional or not as a way to make this particular frost giant different from normal giants, but I feel like that is a risky move to make in a game where one of the primary goals is to learn specific features about these creatures and then use this knowledge to help either defeat them or eliminate the conflict that is causing them to be unhappy.
Final Thoughts
All that being said, I actually had a very good time running this adventure, to the point where I could see myself running an entire Vaesen campaign. I think that the way that the Year Zero Engine is being used in this particular game results in a good system for handling a slow-burn investigation, and it honestly feels like the way I want Call of Cthulhu to run.
You can get The Lost Mountain Saga, which this adventure is part of, at the Free League web store. Thanks for reading! See you in 2026 with a slightly more regular schedule.