The Vast in the Dark: Expanded

The sky is black as night, a tectonic rumbling can be heard overhead; the ruins sprawl out with a fractal madness, their shapes incoherent and puzzling; and a vast sea of colorless sand stretches out into the darkness, broken only by the titanic pillars that disappear impossibly into the lightless sky.

This is The Vast, a liminal realm hidden far away from our own. Always waning and on the verge of collapse, it is host to countless lost souls and alien treasures hidden within its crumbling ruins.

Originally published in 2020, The Vast in the Dark is an exploration setting for the world’s most popular role-playing game and takes place in a crumbling alien wasteland filled with brutalist mega-structure ruins. It includes tools for generating massive areas to explore as well as unique player options and gameplay changes to keep the focus on player choice and ingenuity over dice-rolling and chance.

• Brutalist Alien Flavor: a lightless wasteland populated by brutalist megastructures. Small societies of and factions have cropped up and settled within the various ruins attempting to survive and remain sane.

• No-Prep World Generation: provides Referees a toolbox to build massive hex-crawl maps, a local areas within each hex, and dungeon complexes within those smaller local areas quickly and easily enough that you can do it on the fly (no prep work needed).

• Become a Traveler: 20 feats and perks with flavor, from Psionherd to Vacant Amygdala; designed to give weird tools for the player to use and exploit.

• Explore and Survive in the Vast: simple and quick rules for navigating, exploring and surviving the wastes of the Vast. Run games without worrying about micromanagement and instead focus on cunning choices and calculated risks.

• Commune with Survivors: Settlements and their factions lie scattered across the vast, each offering unique opportunities for exploration or exploitation.

• Delve the Dark: Mine or spelunk the titanic lodestone Pillars, crawl the twisted megastructures of the Ruins, or breech the unknowable edges of the Depths; each setting holds their own quirks, dangers, and treasures.

• Beware the Harrowing: The Harrowing is a form of ego-decay, a slow erosion of the psyche that befalls all who find themselves trapped within The Vast. Linger too long and you will lose memories, joys, and even the drive to leave. It is only a matter of time before you become one of the Crawl...

• Discover: 10 Monsters with horrific quirks and abilities, 34 Artifacts to offer dangerous gifts, 15 Spells if you can stomach their price, and more...