This is the Vaults of Vaarn deluxe edition (2022), which collects material originally published in the first three Vaults of Vaarn zines by Leo Hunt. It is essentially a setting toolkit, but one that operates withing a set of clear aesthetic boundaries.

Vaarn is a post-human world — people are still around, but, they aren’t really recognizable as human anymore. The line between organics and machines is blurry. Ruined arcologies dot the desert. Petty gods and magic compete with science. It’s a very strange, very exciting world defined primarily through random tables that generate the things you find and the folks you encounter in the wasteland. The only conventionally firm details in the book accompany the character types (True-Kin, Synths, Newbeasts, Mycomorphs and Cacogen), some description of the city Gnomon and the handful of example adventure sites. Beyond those borders, Vaarn is infinitely mutable.

The game’s influences are quite focused, to the point that I feel like the era of the game is meant to be considered a late point on a timeline that includes the events of the Dune novels and Wolfe’s New Sun novels — there are archlictors and massive AI gods (all dead, thankfully) and other features that seem like direct references. There’s stuff firmly outside those novels too (what NPCs we encounter feel peculiarly Gormenghast-y; they are also accompanied by advice on how to run them as friends or villains, which is a nice feature).

Vaarn was conceived for Knave, but there is not a ton of system specific material here; you can honestly adapt it to just about any D&D-derived system, lite or otherwise. And you should! Vaarn is the most exciting world to come out of indie RPGs since the Ultraviolet Grasslands.