Review: Veins of the Earth by Patrick Stuart & Scrap Princess

tl:dr; awesome stuff, go get it.

I had the great good fortune in a recent break between local lockdowns here in Vienna to walk into my Friendly Local Games Store and spot Veins of the Earth sitting in the midst of their RPG shelves. One of the easier purchasing decisions I have ever made - I have heard of this book spoken in legend, I even considered buying it online but the shipping scared me off until here it was.

And looking at it, I see why shipping was an issue.

So beautiful, an artefact of a book like few others I have handled recently. Reading through its tales of eldritch underground horrors and leaping subterranean predators has been just the palate-cleansing pick-me-up I have needed from the news during this hell-scape of a year.

The first half is a bestiary with such wonderful entries on creatures and cultures that I have been bugging my SO by reading the best bits out to them. The second half is on running a campaign in the Veins; modifying rules and giving a toolkit to create your own exploration set.

The art by Scrap Princess is magnificent throughout to give the aesthetic, similar to DiTerlizzi for Planescape or Brom for Dark Sun.

What I love most about this, is the voice. From the initial statement of logic about why the book came to be - because we know more about caves now and we know they should be tougher and weirder than walkable caverns of yore - there way that Patrick Stuart lays things out is great to my mind. He tells you the why, and the intended feel, or look, or atmosphere. I like this principle driven way of doing a setting a lot - here is why we are changing this thing, encumbrance, light, climbing - there is detail here, because it is important for the feel for these reasons.

I know I am very late to the table on this - I have seen people rave about Veins of the Earth on the OSR blogs for years, but now having read it all I can say is the hype isn't wrong. This is one of those things that I just cannot explain, you have to pick this book up for yourself. I have held a few beautiful artefact books this year, but this is the honored ancestor. Go see for yourself.

If you want a more detailed breakdown of the content plus some actual play see the Luminescent Lich if you want to read or Questing Beast if you want a video.