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Well I’ve finally got another blog post up.
For the Vaarn Summer Jam 2023 I’ve been working on several different pamphlets. My goal is to encourage a “quest for it” mindset. Ever since I read Dungeon Crawl Classics, I’ve loved the idea of players driving a campaign by seeking out what they are interested in. Want more spells? You better start asking about strange wizards and spellbooks. In practice I think this can be hard to accomplish. If we look at DCC, the easiest way to run it is with a linear set of pre-published modules.
With these pamphlets I want small dungeons and locations that can be placed in the world for the purpose of providing players with new tools. Because it is for Vaults Of Vaarn, those tools are mystic gifts, mutations, and cybernetics. Vaarn has a heavy focus on finding exotica (magical artifacts), but I feel like those are well covered by existing adventures.
The first of these pamphlets is Dead Sun Spider. 
I live in New Mexico, so I’ve been lucky enough to encounter sun spiders a few times. They are absolutely dreadful and wonderful critters. Not spiders, or scorpions, but their own thing. As a teen I caught one in my house during the Winter and I didn’t want to put it outside in the snow, so I kept is as a pet and fed it meal worms. The sun spider would lunge at the worm, pierce it with its four mouth parts, and drink the meal worm essentially. It was revolting, but has always stuck in my head.
I thought it would be great to craft an adventure in Vaarn around sun spiders, and this was what I came up with. 
The general idea is that a group of cultists found an ancient bio-vehicle in the shape of a sun spider. They’ve formed a religion around these creatures and believe they have the perfect form. In the desert they captured a gigantic gleaming sun spider that they’ve imprisoned inside the bio-vehicle. The sun spider gleams because of the huge quantity of mystic gifts it has consumed. This is the source of mystic gifts for the players. If they can get past the cultists, and survive encountering the sun spider, they can drink its saliva and gain a mystic gift.
In the dungeon is mostly a series of traps, as the cultists want to feed people with mystic gifts to the sun spider alive. My hope is that there could be a number of different outcomes. Players could work with the cultists, get their mystic gifts and leave, try to free the sun spider, or even try to reawaken the bio-vehicle. I tried to embrace usual good OSR practice with Jaquaysed loops, two (sort of three) factions, and no set ways to approach traps.
If anyone runs it, I’d love to hear how it goes!
Before the jam is up I need to post one more finished pamphlet, finish a third pamphlet, and if I have time I want to put together a little setting that combines all three of the pamphlets.
