City of My Nightmares

Welcome to City of My Nightmares for the Vaesen roleplaying game. This four-part campaign shifts the focus from the dark forests of the countryside to the bustling city and the vaesen lurking in its alleys. It also gives players the chance to experience mysteries that deviate slightly from the established format in terms of time, space, and structure.

The plot of City of My Nightmares spans over a year, and you can easily slot in other mysteries between the four parts of this saga. To truly make the campaign your own, we recommend that you as Gamemaster connect key NPCs to the players characters and their backstories. Some NPCs appear several times throughout the campaign and may become the characters’ friends and allies – or enemies.

Fiction and Reality

As is often the case with Vaesen, City of My Nightmares is a mix of fiction and real Scandinavian 19th century history. Many of the people, places, and events described in the book have a historical basis, but most of the details are made up. Some historical figures and events have been altered or shifted in time and place, and the story itself is of course entirely fictional.

Remember – this is the Mythic North, a fantasy world where vaesen are real, and it makes no claim to historical accuracy. That said, we did a lot of research while writing this book, and historical figures and events were major sources of inspiration. We encourage everyone to look up the locations depicted in the book in real-life Stockholm and its surrounding area – most of them really exist – or study Carl Linnaeus’s fascinating expeditions to Lapland and Dalecarlia.

If your gaming group prefers a more historically accurate 19th century, you are free to adjust any details that seem too far removed from reality. After all, it is your game, and you know best what works for your group. Enjoy!

The First and Last Owner

This section sets the stage for City of My Nightmares. It focuses on two people of great importance to the story – the famous botanist Carl Linnaeus and the cork magnate August T. Lysander. These men are the first and last owners of the spertus (page 154 of the rulebook) that plays a central role in the campaign.

Carl Linnaeus

Linnaeus was a leading member of the Society for many years. During his famous expeditions in Lapland and Dalecarlia, he cataloged plants and animals as well as stories of vaesen. He recorded all the knowledge he gathered about vaesen in his secret journal, Homo Ferus, before he inexplicably left the Society. You can read more about this on page 81 of the core rulebook.

What is not mentioned there is that as a child Linnaeus found a spertus in a stream near his home in Smolandia. Already fascinated by nature, he asked the strange creature to grant him the ability to see all of God’s creation so that he might describe and document it. Suddenly he could see the natural world in its true splendor, including its supernatural elements – in short, Linnaeus was given the Sight.

He took good care of the creature, and as an adult he kept it in a golden snuff box bearing his monogram. In return, the spertus brought him luck and success, and his career flourished.

During his 1730s expedition to Dalecarlia, funded by County Governor Nils Reuterholm on behalf of the king, Linnaeus and his apostles encountered the powerful vaesen known as the Neck (page 144 of the core rulebook). Playing a strange lyre, the Neck had bewitched an entire wedding party into dancing themselves to death in a remote village. Linnaeus and his apostles managed to banish the Neck, whose lyre was left on the riverbank.

The lyre looked ancient and was engraved with characters that Linnaeus recognized as ancient Greek. Could this be the lyre of Orpheus himself, the one he played so beautifully that even Hades, god of the Underworld, was moved to compassion? Either way, Linnaeus realized that the lyre was a powerful magical artifact that needed to be protected.

When he returned, Linnaeus proudly reported his discovery to Reuterholm, but the governor’s reaction was not at all what he had expected. To his horror, Reuterholm declared that the lyre was to be confiscated by the Crown – he would not risk such a powerful object falling into the wrong hands. As if that were not enough, Reuterholm also seized the snuff box containing Linnaeus’s spertus, which the botanist had carelessly told him about. Despite his fear and hatred of the supernatural, Reuterholm could not resist taking the spertus for himself.

Without his spertus, Linnaeus lost the Sight. Devastated by this setback, he left the Society and hid all his writings in a hidden cellar vault, fearing that someone might use them for nefarious purposes. He staged a fire at the Society’s headquarters and claimed it had destroyed all records of his expedition, so that no one would look for them. Only Hedda von der Burg, Linnaeus’s most trusted apostle, was told the truth, to preserve his knowledge for posterity. Using her esoteric expertise, they sealed the secret library with a magic lock.

Linnaeus devoted the rest of his career to the study of more mundane creatures, but when he died many years later, his inquisitive spirit lingered in this world. He became a restless ghost that continued to haunt the secret library where his journal, Homo Ferus, still rests.

The spertus brought Reuterholm some success, but he despised the creature and treated it badly. Whether by chance or by the spertus’ own will, the snuff box fell out of Reuterholm’s pocket during a boat trip in the Stockholm archipelago and vanished into the deep. It would be a hundred years before someone found it again – and became the third owner of the spertus.

Campaign Overview

In this campaign, cork magnate August T. Lysander desperately seeks a way to control the spertus or break its curse. His plan is to gradually reach out to the Society and other individuals with knowledge of vaesen and use their insights and abilities to save his soul.

Below is an overview of the four mysteries of the campaign. They must be played in order, although it is possible to insert other mysteries between them. Naturally, the course of events will depend heavily on the player characters’ actions.

Mystery 1: Scent of a Killer

August T. Lysander contacts the Society under the pretense of needing their help with a series of grisly murders in Stockholm. The police are at wit’s end, and Lysander suspects that a vaesen is responsible. But all he really wants is an excuse to meet the player characters and see what they are made of.

The capital is in turmoil and the characters are drawn into the hunt for the killer, which becomes a race against time to uncover the culprit before more bloody victims are found in the autumn darkness.

This mystery features several NPCs who will reappear in later mysteries – in addition to Lysander, Police Commissioner Gabriel Utterson, the poet Erik Johan Stagnelius, and archivist Sigrid Holgersdotter at the National Archives.

Mystery 2: Song to the Moon

August T. Lysander contacts the Society again and invites them to his summer residence on Goose Island in the Stockholm archipelago. He has convened a Conclavium Sub Rosa, a secret gathering of individuals with knowledge of pacts and dealings with vaesen. His purpose, of course, is to find a way to break the spertus’ curse.

But the pleasant visit to the island is interrupted by a shocking death, which is soon followed by others. It soon becomes clear that a terrifying vaesen from the east is responsible, and the player characters must step in to solve the mystery and save the island’s inhabitants. Clues point to Lysander’s own family, and dark secrets are revealed.

Mystery 3: The Haunted Library

Following the events on Goose Island, Lysander continues his attempts to free himself from the spertus’ curse. During his research, he makes a remarkable discovery: the first owner of his spertus was none other than the renowned botanist Carl Linnaeus, which explains the “CL” monogram on the snuff box.

Through descendants of Hedda von der Burg, Lysander also finds out that Linnaeus’s lost writings on vaesen may be hidden in a secret library beneath the National Archives on Knights’ Isle in Stockholm. The problem is that only a person with the Sight can find the hidden chamber in the catacombs. Once again, Lysander needs the player characters’ help.

What the cork magnate does not know is that the National Archives is haunted by the ghost of none other than Linnaeus himself. The ghost causes a great deal of trouble during the characters’ visit, and to access the secret library, they must seek answers in the specter’s memories – experiencing the history of Linnaeus’s expedition to Dalecarlia, his spertus, and the Neck’s lyre.

Mystery 4: City of My Nightmares

In this fourth and final part of the campaign, the story comes together around August T. Lysander. The player characters are once again summoned to the increasingly turbulent capital, this time by an unexpected new acquaintance who brings them into contact with the ghost of Carl Linnaeus. The ghost knows that someone is after the lyre of the Neck, which has been in royal possession for over a century.

Through their investigations, the characters eventually realize that their friend and patron Lysander intends to steal the lyre from the Royal Palace and return it to the Neck, hoping that this powerful vaesen will help break the spertus’ curse and save his soul from eternal damnation.

It becomes clear to the characters that with this powerful artifact, the Neck would unleash unprecedented chaos and bloodshed in the city and truly turn Stockholm into a city of nightmares. Lysander must be stopped. But can the cork magnate escape his fate?