The Rochester Society
The year is 1900 and the location is Rochester, New York. The Second Industrial Revolution has been transforming Upstate New York for decades and changes continue to come thick and fast at the dawn of the new century. The Erie Canal, a 350-mile engineering marvel finished in 1825, has connected Rochester to the Midwestern states through the Great Lakes to the west, and to the Hudson River , New York City , and the entire globe to the east. Fortunes flow along its length, enriching the cities along its route.
But this rapid industrial expansion has come at a great cost to the natural world. Forests disappear as wood is used to build homes, carriages and warehouses, while the hillsides are stripped of coal, iron and other previous minerals. Networks of roads, railways, and canals crisscross the countryside, and factories dump their poisonous waste products into the rivers and streams. Things far older than humans still inhabit these lands and, due to the chaos of this new world being born, these long-forgotten occult creatures have awoken.
A small and clandestine group known only as The Society have taken it upon themselves to protect humans from these supernatural creatures that now roam the countryside and occupy the dark recesses of urban jungles worldwide. The Society recruits detectives of the occult, known as Thursday's Children, to investigate, mediate, and potentially eliminate conflicts between humans and these supernatural denizens known collectively as VAESEN.
VAESEN is a tabletop role-playing game published by Free League Publishing. The header art is from the Vaesen Core Rulebook illustrated by Johan Egerkrans.
All non-player characters (NPCs) descriptions and images were generated using ChatGPT .