VAULTS OF VAARN: A BOMB FOR THE BARON

The Water Baron of Gnomon has been making it known that it has some work for a brave band of adventurers willing to travel  out of the safety of Gnomon, through the blue sands and on to the Head of Briareus, an uncompleted synthetic colossus's head which was abandoned many aeons ago. The Baron has heard that there is something very precious in one of the towers rising out of Project Briareus's synth-flesh. Something that could change the balance of power in Gnomon. The Baron wants it, and it's willing to reward you well for success.

VAULTS OF VAARN is a rules-light science-fantasy setting for tabletop RPGs and speculative fiction by Leo Hunt (@infrabeige). It's based on Knave by Ben Milton. It draws from numerous sources, but primarily the work of Gene Wolfe, Dan Simmons, Frank Herbert, Moebius, and Decadence Comics.

Play as TRUE-KIN, SYNTH, NEWBEAST, MYCOMORPH or CACOGEN! Scour the brilliantine blue wastes of an Earth millions of years into the future! Explore nanomachine-infested dungeons! Try not to get killed, eaten or worse by the monsters and factions scraping out their own survival in the endless desert!

FROM THE INTRODUCTION TO VAULTS OF VAARN
The sun is dying and the wreckage of countless eons litters the parched wastes of Vaarn, the desolate country that common folk call the blue ruin. It is said that these sky-coloured sands hide the graves of the Autarchs; have swallowed the buried arcologies in which the true seed of humankind was preserved through the Great Collapse; conceal forgotten crypts of memory, decaying crystalline lattices of ancient ego-engines upon which the dusk-blue dunes encroach without pity. From the New Hegemony to the south come drifters and dreamers, desecraters of the tech-tombs that lie sunken beneath the azure wastes. Light-years overhead, aurum-sailed ships ply their tender routes between the spheres, and miles below a pilgrim’s feet, strange wombs are kindled once more with life undreamed of. These are the hinterlands, where humanity’s great works have fallen to everlasting decay, where machine and animal and fungus think to crown themselves our equal. The phthalosands, where newbeasts hunt proudly with boots upon their hind paws and chromepriests chant unending binary devotions to their nameless synthetic god. Only the desperate or the mad would seek to make a life here, to roam the blue desert in search of the secret VAULTS OF VAARN.