Graeme Davis

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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