Vornheim: The Complete City Kit Review Part Two

     Vornheim: The Complete City Kit
      Art & Writing by Zak S.
      Published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess
      64 page Hardcover, also available as PDF

The steed I rode that day.  She's in someone else's stable these days.

I rode my bike to the UPS Hub on a crisp January day in 2013 to pick up my copy of Vornheim.  At the time, I lived in an apartment building populated with package thieves, so anything that didn't fit in my mailbox required an expedition to one of the shipping facilities.  I had to "pick-up" a visiting friend at the train station right afterwards, so Vornheim sat unopened for the weekend while we all went to another friend's show and then played Skyrim.  When I finally dug into the package, I was instantly impressed by the map on the inside of the dust jacket and the die drop tables on the front and back cover.  There is no wasted space in Vornheim, whatsoever.

One of my Skyrim characters.  An Argonian.

At this point in time I was running Changeling: the Lost, so Vornheim's first use in my gaming life was as inspiration for an NPC table.  I spent days making a City NPC table for the Salt Lake City portion of my Changeling game.  The tool for making connections between NPCs was the next useful bit.

NPC connections in SLC.

I was already reading Zak's blog Playing DnD With Pornstars.  Getting the physical copy of Vornheim piqued my curiosity about it's publisher, so I was soon reading the LotFP blog by James Raggi.  By the time Free RPG Day 2013 rolled around in June, I was pleased to grab the LotFP offering that year, Better Than Any Man.  Meanwhile, I was losing interest and motivation to keep the Changeling campaign going and started talking about switching up the game with my group.  There had already been an aborted attempt the year before to start an AD&D 2nd edition game with me DMing, but scheduling conflicts on a main player's part and general " how do you do this again?" flailing on my part resulted in some characters getting rolled up and some drinks getting consumed.

We moved out to the boonies an hour north of Portland in 2014 and the Changeling game went on hiatus.  In early 2015 I started my LotFP campaign "Year of the Goat."  I've used Vornheim's "Navigation Shortcuts for Busy DMs" to create my city maps representing neighborhoods and main thoroughfares for the three large cities of my campaign.  The die drop table to see the most use in my game is the one that generates common game elements, the front cover of the book.  I've used the books, fortunes, and "I search the body" tables.  And the d100 buildings table.

Chizhova, capital city on a volcano.

Halwic, western industrial mill city.

In conclusion, this has been the book to see the most use at my game table, besides the LotFP Rules & Magic book.  I haven't used everything in Vornheim, but I've used so much that has added to my DM enjoyment and hopefully my players' enjoyment of blasting around cities in my setting.  Thank you Zak Smith, your mind is a glorious treasure!