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Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Viking Equipment and Money




In explanation I suppose I should explain the shift in genres here, when I wrote last time I was GMing a Legend of the Five Rings game and waiting on word back from the designer of 43 AD before moving ahead with it. My son asked to play AD&D at home again, and, serendipitously, I had just handed the GMing reins over to Darryl in the L5R game. Autumn approaching, I decided to pick up the aborted Viking campaign that we had barely started with the pregens I made. The pregens weren't real popular though, so I decided to let everyone make their own characters to play and make this equipment list to print out for them. We're also adding in a few house rules. No Clerics, Shields Shall Be Splintered, D30 Rule, 0 Hit Point Rule, and maybe a critical hit table from Star Wars Gamer. We're going to use the no Demi-Humans rule from the Viking Campaign Sourcebook from 2nd edition as well as the new classes and the "Gifts". I am also going to secretly track Glory to see if they attract a God's attention or if they get to go to Valhalla when they die, I got the idea from the Saga minigame from TSR.

The simplified version-

I had written a much more complex version of this and decided to just rewrite the whole bloody thing rather than force my players to learn to wrap their tongues around all the Old Norse words, weights and measures. I am also altering the more complex coinages of the early medieval period down to, at least for the present, three and they are all Silver, Silver Pennies are equivalent to an AD&D Silver Piece (but weigh in at about 20 to the ounce, rather than 10 to the pound; or about the weight of a modern American dime); the Half-Penny, which is 1/2 the size and value, and the Arab Dirhem, which is twice the size and value. Most stuff is being repriced by me, because I like to make the equipment list representative of the actual Viking Age, rather than some generic fantasy version of it.

Armor-

Helmet, Plain (Spangenhelm) 100 SP
Helmet, Improved* 200 SP



Shield, Round (Medium) [Center-Grip] 45 SP

Jerkin (Leather) 50 SP
Byrnie (Chainmail) 750 SP
Scale/Lamellar** 1200 SP

*The "improved" part of the helmet is Oculars, or Cheek-Guards, or an Aventail, perhaps even a Full Face Mask- each improvement is going to add 100 SP to the cost of the helmet and the protective value of improvements is only going to come into play versus called shots or critical hits, so your mileage may vary.

**Scale and Lamellar are not native armors to the Norsemen and really are anachronistic to the early period in which we are playing, but in the interest of keeping PCs alive and having some more diversity of appearance, I am going to allow them. They come from the east, Byzantium and the Saracens, the steppes of Russia.


Weapons-

Great Axe (2-Handed Axe) 100 SP
Francisca (Throwing Axe) 40 SP
Bearded Axe (Battle Axe) 60 SP
Hand Axe 30 SP
Woodsman's Axe 50 SP

Throwing Spear 30 SP
Fighting Spear 40 SP

Broad Sword 500 SP

Short Bow 100 SP
Arrow 2 SP
Quiver (10 Arrow Capacity) 10 SP

Knife 30 SP
Scramasax (Cheaply made Short Sword) 150 SP
Dagger 60 SP




6 comments:

  1. have you repriced the non weapons and armor lists? Once upon a time I created a D&D campaign setting loosely based on Waterworld, set on a future Earth that was being inundated due to vsarious breaches from the Elemental Plane of Water. There was very little land left, especially to the east of the Mississippi (which itself was basically an ocean trench far off the coast of Colorado.) I was using a new currency based upon food and eating meals called squares. 3 squares would be enough food to comfortably feed an adult for a day. There was little currency naturally. Steel items were sometimes acavanged from what had been higher elevation cities in the pre-flood America. A new sub raqce of human had developed with water breathing and webbing at hands and feet for better swimming. I quit development around p. 4 of repriceing candles and whatnot in squares. I did cull the OG list a lot, but the campaign was set at a major floating "city" (actually the abandoned hulk of an ancient oil rig) so there was more commerce than other places. It got boring though, and I was living somewhere else and had no players anyway...

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    1. I was actually still working on that, but I figured that the players were going to be mostly concerned with their armor and weapons. I mostly wanted to get this posted before I decided I needed to start over again, but yes, I can post the rest of the equipment list too.

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  2. You could easily account for Byzantine armor through a Varangian Guard style mercenary company coming home from the East and trading with the native Danes and Norwegians. This would also, potentially, account for their cost!

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    1. Right, that was my thought. I had planned on setting this campaign at the dawn of the Viking Age, so I'd have more time to work with if it was popular, but I think I'll set it a little further in so I can expand the starting areas a bit and make contact with Byzantium already have happened. This actually makes sense because the campaign centers around a mystical island I have invented between the Faroes and Iceland, so I can make it a stepping stone on the way to the discovery of Iceland that was just forgotten to history; perhaps as a result of it's mystical nature?

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  3. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  4. who made this helmet and where can I buy one? johnsonbrentlee@yahoo.com

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