Vornheim the Complete City Kit
written by Zak S.

Vornheim is a city creation kit and an adventure supplement published for the Lamentations of the Flame Princess game line. I originally picked up Vornheim from the head honcho of LotFP hisself James Raggi at a convention alongside with the LotFP Rules & Magic book and a freebie God That Crawls in 2018. Right of the bat let me say that Vornheim is definitely worth every penny.

Materialwise there's nothing special about it: the hard cover reader's digest size book is wrapped in a jacket that has the cover art in the tell-tale grungy style of Zak S., coupled with the usual back cover introduction, instructions on how to use the die-drop tables located on front and back of the book and a rather cubist looking map of inner Vornheim. The book jacket is printed on a glossy paper that has got worn and torn in the few years I've owned the book and hauled it to this and that game table. While it's one of the few gripes I have with the product, that's also a good sign, 'cause you can tell the book's seen use - A LOT OF IT.

"Use" is the key word with Vornheim. It's made to be used at a table and the entirety of the book, cover to cover, is filled with tables, mechanics for urban crawl games, lore of Vornheim and short adventures to place therein. The tables range from classics of corpse robbing to NPC and location generators. Trust me when I say "cover to cover" that means literally the front cover has a die-drop table to generate enemies on the fly, whereas the back-cover is used to drop a dice for every enemy combatant to quickly roll for attacks. I'll admit the latter hasn't seen much use by me, but it's a neat idea all the same.

And there are neat ideas a' plenty. Vornheim is advertised as the "Complete City Kit", and the looking at the slim size of the reader's digest book would have anyone question if it is indeed a complete city. Where a lot of supplements give you a ready buzzling city with fully fleshed out characters and big players to inhabit it with, Vornheim doesn't front load its reader with a buncha heavy text of this district or that, where's the tavern of local ne'er-do-wells and so on and so forth. To truly equip you to run a living, breathing, vast maze of a medieval fantasy megacity, Vornheim hands you the hammer and the chisel and a big hunking monolith to carve YOUR Vornheim into.

And the thing about Vornheim is that yeah it's got a lot of lore to go with it, but most of that's somewhere else, in other adventures or in the notes of the author, 'cause that's not the point of Vornheim. Most of the time as a GM you're a blind man leading the blind, at every twist and turn panickedly trying to cobble together that next street or room the players wanna poke their head in. Vornheim's got you on that. Take this bad boy to any medieval fantasy game and you can roll up a floor plan, a street map, a city district and fill them to the brim with interesting, out-of-the-box characters that make your players go "Huh? I wanna know more about that guy!" Vornheim speaks from the experience of not rail roading your players to the next adventure location, but rather having the tools to expand on your world at a whim, if and when your prep fails you.

For your convenience the author has also written three adventure locations to place in your Vornheim at your leisure: House of the Medusa, Immortal Zoo of Ping Feng and Library of Zorlac. As the assumed system is an old school style D&D rule set, the difficulty knob on these is turned to the 11. Most are for higher level characters, but with a caveat of "smart players can handle this." While that's true, the "Why go there" is left to the GM and without that solid reason they're pretty much another house on the block, but one that'll TPK the party without breaking a sweat if your players don't have their wits about them. I've only had the chance to run the second and the third one, with varying success and much like the rest of the book, a lot of customization on the individiual GM's part is needed. The locations are mapped out, with NPCs and monsters statted and if you're running the game on later editions of D&D for example, there's a conversion chart at the end of the book to help you update monster stats. As an added minus for me the artistic style of Zak's dungeon maps is somewhat difficult to read.

The few faults I can find in the book are overshadowed by the cornucopia of good stuff. Vornheim has become my go-to supplement to carry around with my notes and rules books wherever I run any sort of medieval fantasy roleplaying games set anywhere near densly populated areas. For the size that it takes up on your gaming shelf it's a wonder how heavy it is with gold standard game master tools.

Considering my way of DMing (sandbox campaigns) this book is incredibly useful to me.

One of my go to books for world building a sandbox campaign. Highly recommended.

Excellent product : useful tools to create neverending adventures...

I'm currently running an urban sandbox. I wanted to compare different ways of calculating distances and determining locations in an urban environment. I took one from Vornheim (words) and one from Into the Cess and Citadel (hexes). After a few playtesting sessions with both, I realized that players weren't exploring the city like they were in the wilderness, so I was wasting a lot of time writing notes about all the hexes. So I choose the first option.

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Vornheim is the backbone to my city games. If I can only have one book, it's that. The second is a Fritz Leiber Swords Against... just for prompts.

Quote from: MrTheFalcon on December 22, 2024, 02:27:26 PMVornheim is the backbone to my city games. If I can only have one book, it's that. The second is a Fritz Leiber Swords Against... just for prompts.

Fritz Leiber is so good!