60 Minutes of Thoughts: Veins of the Earth comments: How do you make something insanely good better?

 Patrick Stuart recently announced that there's going to be a remastered edition of Veins of the Earth, and asked for comments, suggestions, and reviews. 

For those who don't know Veins but somehow do know my blog, it's the one book I would point somebody to who said that the OSR was all a tired aping of the 70s-90s editions. (Not the only book proving that by a mile, but the easiest proof for sure). You should probably read it before this review? Unless you're one of my player, in which case don't worry about it you'll learn one day. My micro-review it goeth thusly: Veins is a sourcebook of (mostly) monsters and environments for OSR campaigns taking place underground, replacing or supplementing any previous 'underdark' setting with a hellish nightmare-land of scarcity and darkness filled with creatures that will, if you're really lucky, kill you. It's a very modernist setting in many ways (contra stupid ''artpunk' OSR is postmodern' attacks), both surreal and deeply rooted in unchanging, unmerciful materiality, with a dozen cataclysms looming in the history and the potential future. It was originally written up for Lamentations of the Flame Princess but is easily adaptable to pretty much anything. It has beautiful, scrabbling, desperate, mad art by Scrap Princess. The layout's fine, not much to say here. It has systems for mapping, for types of darkness, for using light as currency and initiative. All of the writing is purple prose worthy of Lovecraft and it ROCKS. I've stolen so many ideas from it and I haven't even persuaded a group to play in the Veins yet (sad face). Form 5/5, function 4/5, overall score 4/5.

It's one of my favourite RPG books of all time. It's massively popular and - I would say - transformative in its scene. It should clearly be a 5/5 overall.

Where are the gaps?

N.B. I've tried not to comment on specific game rules too much here, because I have no idea what system Veins Remastered will be in but I kind of imagine it might not be LotFP.

1. The Large-Scale Mapping System - Veins provides, as its mapping system, a set of rules for generating caves (love 'em) and a large-scale map that looks roughly like this, divided into up-down and sideways sections. It's meant to always be a little bit abstract, but to me it just doesn't work.
   

   

   From Patrick Stuart's blog, False Machine

   There's no scale given per hex, in time or space. That'd be fixable, but I strongly suspect it's there for a reason addressed in another passage called 'wait, is that an eight-mile waterfall?' - because you start having to answer some really odd questions once this component arrives. That section says the route leading down in an up-down section might just be steeply sloped, but the fact is that this isn't obvious, and still feels quite odd depending on the precise scale chosen. I'm not as bothered by the fact that there's a degree of up-down linkage, but it feels like that linkage would work a lot better on an unsegmented hexmap with 'up-down' and 'along-across' hexes rather than on a rectangle with specific sections for each. OR using Guy MacDonall's Hex Globe Template for wrapping your hexmap around an earthlike object and then putting layers in (even easier in settings using a flat earth - just layer like a dungeon).
   None of this to knock the types of passage presented, warworks, underground superstructures etc. Those are great, and if anything could use a tad more support - their own generic encounter or local cave tables, maybe? The space currently used explaining the segmented map could be repurposed for this... or anything, really.
2. More on the cultures - Veins presents loads of underground monsters, along with six 'Cultures in the Veins': the Ælf-Adal (Drow but worse), the Deep Janeen (Dao genies), the dErO (Derro but their generic 'madness' is incessant conspiracy), the Dvargir (Duergar but incapable of emotion, only of efficiency), Substratals (earth elementals but racist), and Gnonmen (Deep Gnomes but eerie and fascinating). Comparing them to the classics isn't an insult - they're all incredible takes on them. They do however entirely lack for two things:
1. Stats. Please give us stats. Especially for the ones that can't be run as just 'basic humanoid profile' (the Deep Janeen, the Substratals), and the ones that have weird tech and weapons that won't be in a standard book (the Dvargir and probably the dErO and Substratals), but at that point it's 4/6 so why not all of them?
2. How they interact with each other. Could be just a VtM-style 'stereotypes table,' but what I'd really like is a short section on the military, diplomatic and trading relationships of the veins. What are the demographics of groups like in different types of terrain? (Doesn't need to be specific enough to disrupt the nebulous vibe). If they go to war, what are the effects?  Where and what are the frontlines? What monsters will each side co-opt to fight with them? What if any relations do these folks have with the surface, and why won't they let the PCs use them to get home? Dungeons are at their best and most interesting when they have lots of competing factions with clear avenues of conflict and differing objectives, right? And the veins may as well be a big megadungeon given its rather constricted routes. A lot of this stuff can be extrapolated from what's there, but I find myself turning a lot to this article in so doing (when planning Veins games I haven't in fact run) so maybe a sign that some more conceptual density could be crammed in here.
3. Minor nitpick, but I'd really like an Intelligence and number encountered/ecology brief for all the monsters. It can often be extrapolated from elsewhere in the text, again, but that doesn't help when you've just rolled up a random encounter and need to skim a statblock. The Intelligence would even add an opportunity for more descriptive weirdness!
4. Example adventure? Less bothered about this than the former three, but we know Patrick can write damn good adventures and I'd be fascinated to see what he would do as an introductory scenario that takes PCs into the underground. (I guess Deep Carbon Observatory is sort of this? or could be. But too long to be introductory, probably. I mean more like a basic 'first hook to get you down there and then introduce you to the rules of the Veins. Editing to add: obviously there are also the random ways into the veins provided on a table in the book, but they're hooks not intros.)

One minute speedfire round of things I especially love and would not change at all:

1. Everything in the Madness and Change section
2. The types of Darkness
3. The small-scale cave generation system
4. The Rapture
5. The Psychomycosis Megaspores
6. The Archaeans 
7. The Ultraviolet Butterfly
8. The Silichominids
9. The Tetracharcharodon (I made a playable species for one of my games based on this!)
10. The Anglerlich
11. The encumbrance system incorporating all the stats to one degree or another