Charlie Ferguson-Avery's
The Vast in the Dark: Expanded
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| My copy of The Vast in the Dark: Expanded. |
Introduction
The Vast in the Dark: Expanded, is a short but oversized zine focusing on providing the tools for a GM to build a unique but very specific kind of world on the 'fly'. The zine also provides a menu of sub-systems tailored for the setting's flavor as well as the tools to generate the world, dungeons, and encounters. All of these can be used in part or wholesale, though it is likely some of the flavor and themes would be diluted if too many of the systems were cut out. The themes and tone of the setting are masterfully crafted with the art, layout, and text all building off each other in a manner rarely seen in triple AAA titles.
Art, Intent, Layout, and Tone
Ferguson-Avery goes out of the way to make it very clear in his "From the Creator" section on the very last page that, "The Vast in the Dark was originally written in 2020, in the middle of the global pandemic, as I was trapped in home, and while I was dealing with some other scary things in my personal life" (pg 40). In that same section he further elaborates that, "Working on the expanded edition it has has become very personal to me and far more expressive than I had planned" (pg 40). Therefore it makes perfect sense that the sum of the art, layout, and tone of The Vast in the Dark: Expanded is in a word; bleak. It is other things too, it is hopeless, terrifying, and anxiety inducing as well. To the point that I am surprised that it does not include any kind of mention of safety tools, or content warnings.
Even before I got to the last page and understood just a little of the context for the work, I was floored by the emotional energy of the sum of the zine in a way that a TTRPG has never made me feel before. Moreover, it conveyed its emotional energy in such a visceral manner I have rarely felt from even world renowned pieces of art. The context of time, place, and creator, is to my mind, crucial to my understanding of why The Vast in the Dark is as bleak and hopeless as it is.
All of that being said: the art, layout, and text in The Vast in the Dark is all excellent, both technically and at keeping the themes and tone consistent throughout. Blues, grays, whites, and a healthy dose of black predominate throughout the zine. The cover, a somewhat abstract image of three wanderers being erased by the environment of the 'The Vast', is an excellent sample of the both the style that predominates throughout the zine and its tone.
There is a distinct contrast between the brutalist architecture of the lodestones and ruins, versus the 'human' character figures scattered throughout the art in the zine. The ruins and lodestones shown, explicitly inspired by brutalist architecture, have a deeply alien, and cyclopean quality to them. Moreover, the ruins as described are fractal and liminal in their emptiness, populated by equally strange body horror monstrosities. Whereas, the images of the humanoids are messy, dirty, covered in odd little bits, and very well, human and vibrant - they clearly have personalities and are resisting erasure. The style of the humanoids more closely resembles the knight creature from the IV page of Into the Cess and Citadel, than it does the landscapes throughout the The Vast in the Dark. This contrast works well at illustrating that the environment is alien and hostile to humanoid life. This is further elaborated on by the image of a party of delvers discovering the 'Thespian', an unmoving multi eyed giant (presumably a member of the ruin building civilization) found only in a randomly generated room of the ruins (pg 22). The delvers are tiny and insignificant compared to the alien monstrosity towering above them.
The only image of the body horror monsters, referred to collectively as 'The Crawl', that make up the non-humanoid population of the The Vast in the Dark is hellish in appearance. It is a grasping thing of fingers, chittering skulls, bodiless legs, and eyeless cyclopean skulls all with thin skin stretched across the mass. Frankly, it looks like the sort of thing the cenobites from Hellraiser would have designed. One of 'The Crawl', the innocuously named 'Griffon' is described as, "Dozens of hands writhe in the guise of wings and a face. Fingers twitch hungrily around drooling jaws..." (pg 39). All of the other descriptions are equally unsettling. The special abilities of 'The Crawl' are equally disturbing and some of them provide setups for truly challenging and trying encounters. For example, the Wyrm can mimic any mortal it has heard perfectly, "It prefers to ambush, luring with its many tongues" (pg 39).
Core Systems and World Building Systems
Core Player Facing Systems
The rules content provided in The Vast in the Dark are designed to be system neutral, but have a distinct old school feel to them. This is reinforced by their implied high lethality and in the choice of recommended systems provided on page 2.
Ferguson-Avery does make it very clear early on that, "The Vast in the Dark was made with the intention of being modular and easily adapted into any game" (pg. 2). Despite this, the zine does include some systems which make it what I might call a 'partial system' if they are all included wholesale. These include a system for replacing hit points called, "Grit and Flesh" which is designed to be, "a representation of superficial harm and pain tolerance versus serious injuries" (pg. 5). A draconian slot based inventory system that is reminiscent of Old School Revival (OSR) games like Shadowdark. And, perhaps the most crucial system to the tone of the setting is that of memory loss implemented in a devilishly simply system called the "Harrowing." Essentially characters enter the setting with a set number of memories and when they suffer an extreme hardship they lose one, and when they are out of memories they are essentially out of the game, as their mind is too shattered to continue. There are very limited ways to recover memories in the setting, and at least one of them involves stealing memories. The memories system, I suspect, would induce a fair amount of anxiety in players as their characters very self is slowly whittled away by their time in 'The Vast'. Which is the point. The final sub-system is more functional, and details the use of a D6 and various compounding resources in an innovative way of representing navigation in a world of only landmarks and no means of utilizing compasses or stars. It is frankly, brilliant, and I intend to use it in other equally strange settings where more conventional means of navigation would be unavailable. These rules taken collectively seem like they would do an excellent job of reinforcing the sense of hopeless struggle a party 'adventuring' in the setting would and should endure. But as Ferguson-Avery makes clear above they are modular and can be mixed and matched at will.
Ferguson-Avery uses phrases throughout The Vast in the Dark like "Save vs. breath" but nowhere that I can see in the zine are these defined. I happen to know what is meant because I can look it up in my copy of Into The Cess & Citadel - it means a save related to "moving and dodging" or in simple terms a dexterity check. This is a little frustrating and I suspect that the page explaining this terminology, present in both Into the Cess & Citadel and Into the Wired and Wyld was left out to reduce page count more than anything. This is a minor issue, but an issue none-the-less.
Worlding Building and World Building Tools
At is core the Vast in the Dark is a series of tools for creating a unique world and tone in a very specific setting. Thus it makes sense that the bulk of The Vast in the Dark is filled with tables and rules for randomly generating the world. The Vast in the Dark builds its world map using the same system found in Into the Cess and Citadel, that is to say a high level hex map generated using the random throw of a handful of D6s. With smaller scale hex maps generated for each of the larger scale hexes as needed. When the D6s are rolled they are rolled on top of the hex map and the face up number then equates to the contents of that hex. Each hex can contain one of three things: empty wastelands of sand and rubble, ruins of a truly alien cyclopean precursor civilization that sometimes contain settlements of bedraggled residents, or vast monolithic pillars of lodestone that hold up the distant ceiling. While the back page of the zine describes the system as "No-prep World Generation" I think trying to do this at the table would be time consuming. However, I have found that this system is great at providing a detailed starting point for fleshing out the world. It fires up my mind creatively speaking.
Each of the three core biomes (ruins, settlements, and pillars) is then further procedurally generated using D6s and the occasional other types of standard TTRPG dice. The pillars are the simplest to generate and use a system of D6 rolls to simulate a series of tunnels and caverns. The ruins are more complex to generate using a combination of a two D6s (ie D66), a D20, and a D12. Given the number of possible combinations a GM might benefit from creating ruins in advance and making them a little intentional - especially if a specific plotline is being explored. One of the more interesting mechanics presented for both the pillars and ruins is a system for escalating the results of the die rolls higher, to ensure that as time goes on things get worse and stranger, to simulate the increasing alienness of the locations. Because of this escalation mechanic, the 'Pillar Events' table goes to 15 on a D6 roll, the 'Ruin Encounters' table goes to 22 on a D12 roll, and the 'Ruin Features' table goes to 31 on a D20 roll. The settlements are generated using a D6 and a D12.
If you were expecting the settlements in this setting to offer a break from the despair and hopelessness that runs rampant throughout zine, you would be wrong. For example, the most 'hopeful' of the entries from the settlement atmospheres table reads in part, "...The hedonistic denizens make their homes and work in communal spaces, most growing anxious or frightful at the prospect of being alone" (pg 14).
Each biome, other than 'The Deep', has several factions associated with it. Each of these gets a short write up, quest seed, and reward/ mechanical benefit associated with gaining its approval. The 'Travelers and Denizens' page of the settlement section contains some of the shortest and most evocative descriptions of NPCs I have seen. These entries each include a colorful quest seed that hints at a potential larger plotline.
The ruins do have a unique feature found nowhere else in the setting; the potential to generate an entrance to 'The Deep'. 'The Deep' is essentially the setting's high level or 'end game' area, albeit a tonally consistent one. Unlike the rest of the setting which can be generated randomly, 'The Deep', is set in the challenges it contains and the order they are presented in. Perhaps my personal favorite element of the zine is the monster that hunts the party in this region, I won't spoil much of it other than to say that it bears a passing resemblance to Machin Shin, "The Black Wind," from Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. Similarly, I won't spoil the six challenges of 'The Deep', but suffice to say they are all a combination of challenging, depressing, and anxiety inducing, with the final one being perhaps one of the most emotionally brutal things ever written for a TTRPG from a PC's perspective.
Conclusion and Recommendations
The Vast in the Dark: Expanded is a system neutral zine from Charlie Ferguson-Avery of Feral Indie Studios, it clocks in at a reasonable and very art heavy 40 pages. The atmosphere created by the conjunction of the art and text is that of a barren alien wasteland eternally decaying in an endless night. The bleakness is only punctuated by the futile attempts of the pitiful residents to survive and retain a sliver of who they once were, while their personalities slowly decay. The rules and world building systems in the zine reinforce this atmosphere exceptionally well building, with minimal word count, a world that will create a sense of anxiety and despair in any party unlucky enough to get trapped in this liminal hell. To that point, I actually have reservations about running this setting for my main gaming group, because I feel to do it well might run the risk of triggering some of my players, and perhaps even triggering my own depression. As disappointing as that revelation is, it does not preclude me from admiring the zine for its obvious merit as a work of art and tabletop RPG setting.
As much as I would have enjoyed reading more about the world of the zine, I can see that the setting presented by The Vast in the Dark is complete as it is - focused and done with clear artistic intention. Any additional content provided would have run the risk of diluting that expressive focus. In the same way that Eat the Reich is a masterclass in how to make a self-contained game and adventure, so too is The Vast in the Dark a masterclass in building a self-contained setting.
As much as I like this zine, and I do, I think my recommendation should come with a caveat: it is depressing, dark, and hopeless in tone. That's sort of the point. It deals with and focuses on themes that people can find difficult to deal with, yet must contend with in their daily lives. Even more so in what seems to be an increasingly hopeless and bleak reality in 2026. If your group does not like deeply dark settings then this is not something you should run for them, at least not without a very serious conversation about safety tools ahead of time. Despite this, I strongly recommend this zine for GMs that want to add a deeply bleak setting to their repertoire. I would also recommend it to anyone that appreciates a quality piece of dark emotional art, as I do.
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