April 25th V Day

This should be an easy day, since I am running a Norse campaign, and it's V day I know I get to do Vikings anyway. The odd, shifting weather here has left me kind of sick and tired though and not really feeling it, plus I know I won't be playing this weekend because I have talked every single gamer I know into going to the local gaming convention at SUNY Oswego, Arcon XI. Seriously, this con has the shittiest advertising on earth, I made it to Arcon I and II, only because I had a friend still going to SUNY Oswego AND I still bought my gaming stuff at the Oswego Comic shop, which gets a flyer for the con roughly 2 days before the convention. They advertise on the stealth principal, I was a sanctioned Hackmaster GM for Oswego for years AND they wanted to run sanctioned Hackmaster events there, and I never got a call or an email. But once you get there it's pretty good.

So, anyway, V is for Viking, which is a verb, not a noun. You go viking you are not a Viking, etymologists can argue about what the word originally meant, what it's original derivation was, but I think we all can agree that it came to mean "raiding by way of the sea".

V is for Vættir, which are supernatural spirits of any kind, really a catch-all name for everything from Aesir to Trolls and everything in between. Mostly people speak of the Landvættir though, the spirits that inhabit all the trees, rocks, water and everything else around us in the natural world.

V is for Valkyrie, the choosers of the slain. Wagner probably makes them out as somewhat more angelic and beautiful than their names and the stories about them would seem to suggest.

V is for Vanir, the "other" Norse Gods. Their cultic centers would seem to be more prevalent in Sweden than in western Scandinavia.

V is for Valhalla, the "Hall of the Slain", one of the places where humans get to dwell after death in Asgarð.

V is for Vanaheim, the homeland of the Vanir.

V is for Vitki, which technically means something akin to "wise-one" or "sage", but carries a real connotation of Wizard, and that's how I intend to use it in my campaign.

V is for Valknutr- this funky, cool symbol.

Well friends, I am beat, I had another six entries I deleted because I didn't feel like typing them out, maybe after April is done I'll go back and cover all the Norse stuff I cut out for time and space concerns; or maybe I won't. Sometimes I get mercurial and I have a lot of other gaming stuff I am peripherally working on too. This is what happens when I get too many weeks off from my D&D game in a row. I was all set and ready there, chomping at the bit; now I am picking up old projects, dusting them off and fixing them too. We'll see some new OA stuff coming from me soonish I am thinking, because everyone else working on the project seems to have stalled out.