Where folklore meets the table - the art of Vaesen

Open the book and the first thing that meets you is not a rule, but a face. A creature looking back at you from the page, half human, half something older, drawn with a precision that makes it realer than you would like. This is no monster from a manual. This is something that always stood in the forest, and only now looks up at you.

There is a roleplaying game that began with exactly such drawings. It is called Vaesen, and it grew not out of a story or a rules system, but out of a picture book.

A book full of beings

It starts with the Swedish illustrator and author Johan Egerkrans. He made an illustrated book about the creatures of Scandinavian folklore, called vaesen, in which trolls, church grims, nisser and water spirits are not fantasy monsters but inhabitants of the landscape. Egerkrans drew them not as enemies, but as something that had always been there: old, rooted, and tied to a place. His folklore books presented these beings as a living part of the land, not as ghouls to be defeated.

The publisher Free League saw a world in that. Writer Nils Hintze, also known for Tales from the Loop, built a game around it, and in 2020 Vaesen: Nordic Horror Roleplaying appeared. What makes it special is that the art did not come to illustrate a game that already existed. The art came first. The game grew around it.

What the drawings and the game share

Beneath the images sits an idea that carries the whole game. Egerkrans' creatures are frightening not because they are evil, but because they have a reason. They belong to a stream, a graveyard, a wood, and they turn dangerous when people disturb their place. That is precisely the engine of Vaesen. You do not play a hunter who cuts monsters down, but a member of a society trying to understand them. Bullets and blades achieve nothing. To drive a vaesen off, you must know what it is, where it comes from, and why it is angry.

The game is set in the Mythic North, an alternate nineteenth-century Scandinavia where industry is advancing and the railways are spreading. The old world is vanishing, and that is exactly why the creatures grow dangerous: they resist the change. That bittersweet feeling, of a world losing something even as it moves forward, comes straight out of the mood of Egerkrans' plates. The drawings are not beautiful despite the menace. They are beautiful because of it.

The rules reinforce that. Vaesen runs on Free League's Year Zero Engine, with a pool of six-sided dice, and puts the emphasis on investigation rather than combat. You gather clues, you look for the weak spot, and even when you win, you carry the scars. It is horror you do not overcome, but understand.

Where it grinds

Honesty first: the strength of Vaesen is also its weakness. The art is so defining that the game sometimes labours under it. Anyone who already owns Egerkrans' original folklore book will find the very same plates in the rulebook, and the same images return again and again on the cards and the screen. There is much that is beautiful, but it is not always newly beautiful.

And the game is harder to run than its clean design suggests. Setting up a good mystery takes preparation, and the investigative rhythm does not suit every group. Anyone who loves fast action and clear enemies will grow impatient here. Vaesen asks for patience, and a table willing to listen to what a creature actually wants.

Who should try this

If you have ever looked at a drawing for a long time and wondered what story sat behind it, you already understand Vaesen. Where this series opened with the unknown made cold and faceless, and its second piece let the world perish in noise, Vaesen does something gentler and perhaps more unsettling: it gives the monster a face, a place, and a reason. Open the book, look the creature in the eye, and find out who was there first.

The creatures were always there. You are only the first in a long while to truly see them.

Where Vaesen asks you to understand the creature, another game asks only that you survive it: where sci-fi horror meets the table.