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Dirty Vortex: The Best Games You’re Not Playing
This week, I’m taking a break from old Games Workshop memories to talk about some newer games.
Once in a while, I come across a game that impresses me to much that I write to the publisher out of the blue and offer to write something for them. For Vaesen, this was Mythic Britain and Ireland. For Dirty Vortex’s game Solemn Vale, I basically said “I’ll write whatever you need – just let me do something!”
I recently reviewed Solemn Vale in a post for free and paid members of the Monster of the Month Club. It’s a rules-lite, highly atmospheric game inspired by British folk horror of the 1960s and 70s. If you grew up in Britain around that time – and I’m guessing that most of you didn’t – you would have been immersed in shows like Quatermass, Doomwatch, The Strange Report, and Counterstrike. You might even have come across one-off TV plays like The Stone Tape, which explained hauntings as psychic vibrations from the past that had been trapped in the crystalline structure of old masonry. You’ll almost certainly recall the original 1973 version of The Wicker Man, with Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward.
Solemn Vale captures that vibe perfectly: everything seems mundane on the surface, but is very creepy underneath. The art – by author and DV proprietor Mark Kelly, who did a lot for Vampire and it shows – supports this tone and atmosphere perfectly, and the Wyrd Abacus system that underpins Solemn Vale (and its 80s, X-Files-meets-Stranger-Things American-based spinoff Summer of Strange) is quick, clean, and flexible, which is everything a rules-lite system should be.
Apart from the mechanics, the structure of Wyrd Abacus adventures is worth mentioning. It sets out several hours (or several sessions) of play in just a few pages, giving the Narrator all they need without drowning them in details. As a piece of design, I’d put it up there with Robin D. Laws’s Dramasystem and James Wallis’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
Now, I said that I’ve written for Solemn Vale (and for Summer of Strange), so am I simply shilling for Dirty Vortex to make some cash? No. I was paid a flat fee for everything I wrote, with no royalties. I’m writing this post because I believe in indie ttrpg publishers – now more than ever, given the increasingly unsettling news from Hasbro – and Dirty Vortex is one of the best.
On their website (https://dirtyvortex.net/) you’ll find a lot for Solemn Vale and Summer of Strange, plus Deco Dice, The Sigma Syndrome, and other goodness. There are also some intriguing tools, such as character and rule generators, which can be fun to play with.
To order Solemn Vale and Summer of Strange (plus the Solemn Vale adventure collection Tales from the Wyrd), you have the following options:
Physical and digital books are available from Backerkit. Many people like it for its trusted payment processing. The page is here.
The Dirty Vortex Webstore accepts PayPal and credit cards.
DriveThruRPG has most (but not all) products, in PDF form only, including a Pay What You Want file of the Wyrd Abacus standalone rules, for those who want to try out the system, or just read it.
Trust me – it’s worth your time.
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2024: The Year in Review
Image stolen from the Hallmark web site. No challenge intended to copyright holders.
So here we are, at the end of 2024. It’s the time that many people look back over the year, so I thought I would do the same. Ups and downs, to be sure, but some bright spots and a couple of things that I’m really proud of. Here they are, in no particular order.
MythWalker
In 2022, I was hired by NantGames to help with the worldbuilding and narrative design for a mobile geolocation rpg. Think Pokémon GO meets World of Warcraft: as you walk around the real world, you use your device to view the fantasy world of Mytherra, where your Hero takes on monsters and follows quests from multiple unfolding storylines. Along the way you can level up, craft and upgrade gear, and do everything else you’d expect from an MMORPG.
What sealed the deal for me was the plan to base the fantasy world of Mytherra very heavily on Earth’s own myths and legends. If you have followed my career over recent years, you’ll know that the creatures of mythology and folklore are a lifelong interest of mine. The game has much more to recommend it, of course, and the team is, I can safely say, the best I have worked with in my entire career. The fun, light-hearted tone of the game is also a nice change from the grimdark fantasy of Warhammer and other titles from my past.
MythWalkerTM is available now for iOS and Android. For more information, go to MythWalker.com, look up @MythWakerGame on social media, or check out the game’s Discord server at https://discord.gg/xXFNp5YfkF.
Solasta II and the Solasta 5e Sourcebook
In 2018-2022, I helped Paris-based Tactical Adventures develop the setting and storyline for their “true to the tabletop” 5e-based crpg Solasta: Crown of the Magister. The game did well, winning a French award and spawning several years’ worth of downloadable content.
Along the way, we put together a 5e tabletop sourcebook for the setting. Initially available only as a Kickstarter reward, it was recently reissued in an expanded form which includes all of the DLC and is now generally available: in physical form from Modiphius Entertainment, and digitally from DriveThruRPG.
But that’s not all. Solasta II was recently announced, and although I won’t be able to work on it, I’m immensely proud that the game and setting turned out well enough to merit a sequel. It will be available for PC on Steam early in 2025.
Solasta has a thriving online community including a Facebook page, a Discord server, and all the usual social media platforms. I posted last month about my role in building the world.
The Monster of the Month Club
Earlier this month, I launched a Patreon campaign to support a publishing venture of my own. I’d spent more than a decade tinkering with a system-agnostic format for ttrpg monster descriptions, and thanks to a valiant band of playtesters and beta readers, I was able to pull the trigger at last.
The Monster of the Month Club offers members a new creature from world myth and folklore each and every month, in a detailed, 4-8-page treatment that includes baseline stats for 3d6/d20 and d100-based systems, as well as common comparables (e.g. Strength: as ox; Intelligence: as normal human; etc.) to help GMs derived stats for their system of choice quickly and easily. Detailed notes on basic and optional abilities support customization to taste and permit the creation of elite versions. Adventure seeds are provided for fantasy, historical, and modern settings, and are supported by case studies from literature where available. Also provided on an as-available basis are notes on variants from across the world: for example, December’s Monster of the Month treatment, the Irish/Scots/Manx Leannán Sídhe, includes notes on the Lamia and the Empusa of Classical myth, as well as the Baobhan Sith and Galistig of Scottish folklore.
Paid memberships start at US$1/month, and free memberships are also available. There are free samples available to download, so you can try before you buy, and from time to time I post other material relating to monsters and folklore. In December, for example, these posts included an article on converting stats between rpg systems that I wrote in the 1980s, some thoughts on creating monster-centric adventures, and even a review of a recent movie that had an unexpected (and impressive) folklore element.
The Monster of the Month Club Patreon page is at https://www.patreon.com/MonsteroftheMonthClub. There is also a Discord server (https://discord.gg/J3dbnav5YJ) which will be getting a serious overhaul some time soon, and a Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61566896375147. On other social media, look for @MotMClub.
Solemn Vale and Summer of Strange
Some adventures I wrote for this pair of indie horror games from Dirty Vortex saw print this year. Solemn Vale takes its inspiration from British folk horror of the 1960s and ’70s (think the original version of The Wicker Man rather than the Nic Cage remake), while Summer of Strange looks to American supernatural horror from the ’80s. They are powered by Dirty Vortex’s house system, the Wyrd Abacus, which is refreshingly rules-lite and uses an adventure format that is both easy to understand and easy to write for.
The books are available direct from Dirty Vortex, while PDFs can be found on DriveThruRPG: Solemn Vale Core Book, Tales from the Wyrd, Summer of Strange.
…And also, this Blog
I’ve been trying to post more regularly over the past few months, and readers seem to appreciate that.
By far the most popular post this year was the one on Space Nuns and Dongnoids, a very silly memory from the GW Design Studio during the early development of the game that would become Warhammer 40,000. I don’t often post about 40K because I was only peripherally involved in its early development, but the response to this little tale has prompted me to trawl through my memory for anything else that might be of interest.
Next most popular was this post with my memories of Castle Drachenfels, Flame’s last publication for WFRP 1st edition. If you don’t think killer dungeons are compatible with WFRP’s style and ethos, this one will change your mind.
Almost as silly as Space Nuns and Dongnoids was the story of how the Knights Panther got their name, based on a very weak pun in The Enemy Within and a few details in this painting by John Blanche. That was the third most popular post this year, making it very clear that what readers find my memories of GW in the 80s compelling. I’ll see what else I can trawl up in 2025.
Also of interest to a lot of people has been the series – still in progress – presenting some unpublished material for Advanced Heroquest that I wrote all the way back in 1991 and recently rediscovered on an old disk. It was my original submission for the Undead supplement that was published as Terror in the Dark, and a great deal of what I wrote was not included in the final publication. The first instalment is here, and each one includes links both forward and backward.
Compliments of the season to all, congratulations on surviving 2024, and all the very best for 2025!
Graeme Davis 