Vagrus – The Riven Realms

Developer: Lost Pilgrims Studio
Publisher: Lost Pilgrims Studio
Release: 2021
Genre: Turn based RPG / Management
Art Style: Drawing
Platforms: Steam/GOG

Do you like vast games that offer you an open world to traverse and take whatever path you think is the best? How about text-heavy stories with deep lore? Vagrus can offer both at the same time!

It was created by Lost Pilgrims, a Budapest-based dev. Its founders have been playing tabletop RPGs together for over 20 years with a group of friends and this hobby spawned The Riven Realms universe. This game is the blend of all their characters and adventures over the years in a single cohesive experience!

In Vagrus you play as, you guessed it, a vagrus. You’re are essentially a caravan leader leading your own comitatus in a dark fantasy version of a Roman Empire that fell due to divine wrath. The prologue, that acts as a tutorial, is a streamlined story in that world. However, the true form of the game is free of constrictions.

You create your vagrus at the start, based on a choice system to get initial skills. Afterwards, you’re thrown in the world with a basic comitatus. It is your job to travel the world, interact with people, choose jobs, find and hire new companions. If you follow the starting hints you can get a bit of an easier start, or you can go off the grid right away, it’s your choice to make.

Surviving is the key. The overworld map is a node-based system where you spent up to a certain amount of points to travel per day. Each node might have some events hidden in (text-based choose-your-own-adventure) or even random battles to be fought either with the companions in classic turn-based combat or with the whole caravan, having to decide strategies and what you wish to protect most! So you might find yourself trying to avoid fights where you can.

Everything has a cost. Your comitatus needs food daily, as well as wages for the non-slave workforce. You might upgrade it with items to lessen the costs but that itself has a cost of its own. As such it needs a robust trading system to handle all this and help you make money. And it has one alright. Covering every single city and outpost, with different prices changing with time, random generated jobs to take, workforce and animals to hire/buy. It’s a management gamer’s dream!

I can keep on and on about the game and its mechanics, but I think I’ve told the gist of it. If you wanted to play an expanded and more story-heavy Battle Brothers, a turn-based Mount & Blade or just the closest simulation of the best DMing you can have in pen & paper RPGs, this is the game for you!

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The game was provided to Indie Game Picks for review purposes.

You can read an edited version of the review in October 2021’s issue of The DIG here.