Enchanted by the elegant and mysterious pages of Vaesen Mythic Britain & Ireland, we had the wonderful opportunity to exchange a few words and bring you this interview with Graeme Davis, the author of this magnificent expansion and a well-known British game designer.
Graeme is a renowned author who has written numerous role-playing games, including the iconic The Enemy Within campaign for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. He has also contributed to Colonial Gothic, Vampire: The Masquerade, and video games like the Total War series.
In this interview, however, let’s find out what Graeme Davis had to say to us about Vaesen Mythic Britain & Ireland!
Your career began with Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay; you took part in creating games that belong to the cultural background of most RPG players in the world. You recently produced, along with other great authors, The Well of Bones, a new setting for “all fantasy RPGs”. What was the approach to Vaesen Mythic Britain & Ireland? And what of your previous works was most useful to you in writing Mythic Britain & Ireland?
Well, I took something I’ve been obsessed with for years and wrote a roleplaying supplement about it. Is that an approach? I’m not sure. I’d done the same with my historical sourcebooks (AD&D HR3 Celts Campaign Sourcebook, GURPS Vikings, GURPS Middle Ages 1, d20 Mythic Vistas: Eternal Rome), but the closest in subject matter would be GURPS Faerie. Honestly, though, my folklore reference library did more of the heavy lifting than any previous roleplaying work. I included a short bibliography in Mythic Britain & Ireland.
Where did the idea of expanding Vaesen‘s world to these new territories come from? Was it the Free League that contacted you with this idea or did you propose it to them?
It was my idea. As soon as I saw Vaesen, I recognized it as something I’ve been trying to do, in various forms, for most of my career. The published work that came closest was probably GURPS Faerie, but Vaesen was such a perfect fit that Iabsolutely had to do a Britain and Ireland sourcebook. That’s what I told Free League, anyway, and I’m very glad that they believed me!
The bibliography at the end of the manual is really well supplied; what are the texts and / or games and / or other works that inspired you the most?
Medieval bestiaries are always fun, but I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from films over the years. It started with the Hammer horror films of the 1960s and 70s, most of which were set in the 19th century, but in recent years I’ve noticed a wave of folklore and folk horror building in the zeitgeist, from the Nicholas Cage remake of The Wicker Man to Troll Hunter (itself not a million miles from The Blair Witch Project), to TV shows like Grimm and Sleepy Hollow that have included elements of folklore, and so on.
What is the main news in the manual? Is there something particularly “revolutionary” or something that is particularly important to you?
I’m the wrong person to ask, because the idea for the book has been in my mind for decades-it just wasn’t for Vaesen until recently-so which ideas are new and revolutionary I’m not quite sure. Certainly my main goal was to give decent coverage of material from Britain and Ireland rather than to innovate. Vaesen gets it right, I think, and there’s no reason to mess with success!
The manual mentions the presence of Sherlock Holmes and other characters belonging to English literature, not included in the core rulebook; why have you decided to introduce these nineteenth-century literature characters in addition to those of English folklore? Can these characters be used as NPCs? If so, what advice would you give to a narrator who wants to exploit them?
There is so much that is iconic about a setting in 19th-century Britain and Ireland – and especially Victorian London – that it would have been a crime not to mention Holmes and the others. And because I have a particular love of interweaving fantasy with history, I had to drop names like Walsingham and John Dee into the deeper background. To a GM looking to use them, I’d say to trust your own judgment. If you feel that a particular character will work well as an NPC in a particular adventure, use them. Beware, though, of forcing a guest appearance simply for its own sake. Make sure everything serves the needs of the adventure. These NPCs are not going anywhere, and with a little patience you’ll find the right time and place to use them.
How was choosing which creatures to use and which ones to discard? Did you want to avoid repetitions with the core rulebook in terms of monster design?
Repetition was definitely a concern, so creatures that were close to those in the core rulebook – and there were many, because the Anglo-Saxons came from Scandinavia originally and the Vikings colonized large areas of England, Scotland, and Ireland – were covered in a summary format that focused on the distinctive differences. Johan Egerkrans and I had a long discussion about which creatures should receive a full treatment, based on which ones would make the best images as well as offering the most to the GM.
Reading the manual we noticed that a very careful job has been done in linking fantastic elements to real history; was the help of an external historical consultant asked?
I’m a history geek and an archaeology graduate, so I served as my own historical consultant. We got some very good feedback from playtesters, though, especially in Ireland, where the history is not always clear-cut (especially to someone like me who learned it in English schools!) and deserves to be treated with care and respect.
The differences between the two Societies are interesting, especially because of the different geopolitical context. Do you think a long campaign where the characters move between continents is possible?
I see no reason why it shouldn’t be. Having lived in the United States for the last 30-odd years, I’d love to see (or even write) a Mythic North America sourcebook. The 19th century was, in many ways, the time when intercontinental travel first became feasible.
Are there any other collaborations with Free League in your future? Are you already working on something else?
Not at the moment, although I have been publishing a few creatures on DriveThruRPG through the Free League Workshop and I have a few proposals in to Free League awaiting their consideration.
We want to thank Graeme Davis once more for taking part in this interview, but keep in mind that this is not his only current project. In fact, he has his own independent publishing company, Rookery Publication, through which he has collaborated with Andy Law, Mark Gibbons, Andy Leask, and Lindsay Law to publish adventures and supplements for any system. As of right now, they are working on a large, multi-part campaign and city setting that can be incorporated into just about any fantasy world and be played using any rule set.
You can find them on their DriveThruRPG page, Facebook page, Twitter account, and YouTube channel. They also run a Discord server and have a Patreon page.
You can watch him live on the Inside the Rookery weekly stream, where he converses with TTRPG related guests.