As someone with ADHD, somewhat limited impulse control, the desire to support creators I like and years of regret from missing purchasing books when I was young only to find them to be absurdly beyond my means now, I am unfortunately the perfect mark for interesting TTRPG projects. I've been running Charlie Ferguson-Avery's Ave Nox for several months now to fair-to-moderate success with my home group using The Electrum Archive as the base game. Tonally, they're not completely mismatched - there's probably something to be said about doing a full system conversion to smooth over the weird patches when it comes to lore, but honestly there's enough overlap with the lore and setting of each that any inconsistencies are usually pretty easy to either say "Eh, maybe this doesn't exist in our game" or else go "Yeah, it's weird there's all these kind of conflicting overlapping things, let's just pick one and stick with it." There's some times where the overlapping mechanics make for a deeper story - for example, combining the encounter rules for both base game and module means that I can do things like say "Well, this says you don't get an encounter, but the other roll says you do, so I'm going to say that this puts you in an advantageous situation/the encounter is non-hostile" or so on. I love an expanded matrix of situations, and it ramps up the tension at the table which is always fun.
Taking all that into account, I recently saw that Charlie had restocked The Vast in the Dark: Expanded and was glad I'd not given into the urge to try to find a copy whilst it was out of stock. As someone who's been rotating the final form of a depth crawl for a project now like two years over the deadline, I'd been meaning to grab VitD:E as a way to finish crystalizing my own concepts after reading through Emmy Allen's The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library and ending a particularly heartbreaking Mothership campaign by playing through Gradient Descent, so luck was upon me. So I grabbed a copy, read it, and I thought it was pretty good (and also very much obviously written during the Covid-19 pandemic because holy shit is that bleak, but also like yeah man I get it). I realized I'd never really get a good feel for it in practice unless I found a way to play through it, and while I could wait until my home group wraps up Ave Nox, I figured this was as good a time as any to bust out another game I'd purchased that I'd seen very little about online aside from its award win - Outcast Silver Raiders.
IN THE GRIM DARKNESS
OF THE GRIM DARKNESS
THERE IS ONLY GRIM DARKNESS
Much like my previous pairing, both games have a lot of surface level thematic and mechanical overlaps - both present a fairly grim setting: O.S.R. being set in a fantastical Pseudo-Scotland circa 1200 CE and otherwise being a setting where magic is rare and horrifying, the people you meet on the road are just as likely to mess up your day as the frankly despicable beasts and demons that lurk in the dark places of the world, and with a general impetus towards collecting and securing treasure as the main method characters have to level up; with VitD:E, the beasts you find may be slightly more unhinged and horrifying (but just as harvestable for goods, if you're not squeamish), the land may be less hospitable, and the ominous lodestone pillars rising out of the infinite blackened desert sands probably aren't great but, y'know, it's only marginally worse. In that way, it's not unlike the criminally underappreciated Wristcutters: A Love Story: you were somewhere your life sucked, and now you're somewhere where your life sucks in a new, more interesting way but with the knowledge that there is no exit. Mechanically, there's other ways they overlap: both assume you're doing a hexcrawl and have roughly the same traversal mechanics, both assume you're likely to run into bands of freaks and weirdoes or weird weather when out exploring, they just have...shall we say, different freaks and different weather patterns. There's the same assumption of stats, 90% of the mechanics and statblocks are directly translatable as long as you're fluent in B/X-ese.
Really, the only places where there's any sort of chafing or misalignment mechanically is where VitD:E has explicitly set out to simplify or reframe mechanics: there's the inventory system (both use a slot-based inventory but go about determining your loadout a little differently), HP is swapped for GRIT and FLESH which can make Warriors stand out a little less when it comes to how durable they are, and there's the general overland traversal mechanics which have been lightly besmoothened (and also that there aren't really beasts of burden in The Vast, what with it being a liminal nightmare voidrealm and all - hard to imagine a horse finding its way here even if they are beings possessed of pure evil by their very nature). There is one very important Lore Problem here, though - the world of O.S.R. supposes that the things that power magic are literal demons from literal Hell. Does that mean that magic in The Vast is now powered by the horrible things that live there instead? Does that mean triggering the mishap table in a way that might normally cause demons to come out or open a portal directly TO Hell might need to have some other kind of effect? Maybe! We can burn cross that bridge when we come to it.
