I started the Vikings game with the PCs
arriving on the mystic isle of Dvergrholm and presenting themselves
to the Dwarf-King of the Northern Clans, Frodi Jarnhamar, and then
accidentally accepting his commission to be protectors of his people;
essentially to become members of his warband, his Huskarls. One of
the PCs had died in a random encounter on the way there, the party's
only Wizard type, a Necromancer whose name I don't remember; he was
killed off the coast of Norway by a small band of pirates that the
rest of the party managed to kill, but he died well.
I ran the One Page Dungeon "The
Dodsbakken" by Bard, which was one of the submissions for the
contest I am running; with some minor changes for flavor - "Ivar
the Boneless" became "Andvari I", because I set the
burial mound outside a Dwarven settlement, but other than that it was
unchanged. I had eight PCs enter the Dodsbakken, Grimhild the Gentle
and her sister Ingebjorg the Kind (both Fighters), Sjolf
Skullsplitter the Berserker, Dagvaldi the Doomsayer (a Runecaster
with the "Seer" gift and a horrible attitude), Ragnhild
Red-Tresses, Brynhild the Swede, Aesa Fjoradottir and her brother
Gust Fjorason, all four Fighters. Viking campaigns are a Fighter
fest.
I won't give away spoilers, in case you
guys are players and have GMs that might want to run this adventure,
but it was fun and it was fast and for all the fighter heaviness of
the party, we could have used a Cleric, which the 2nd edition Viking
Campaign Sourcebook specifically prohibits, or a Mage of some sort in
the party. There were three near deaths and one death in the party,
poor Ingebjorg, she died during the final encounter. I guess if you
have to go, that's the way to do it.
Everyone who has submitted a module and
sent me their postal address, I missed the Post Office on Saturday
with the Magnets because my son John had a Cross Country meet and my
wife decided to do some original artwork on each envelope, so enjoy,
you all get a Mona Dowie original as well as a cool refrigerator
magnet. Anyone who HASN'T submitted a dungeon yet, there are still a
LOT of magnets left. If you DON'T want to submit a dungeon, but still
want a magnet, I'll send you one if you volunteer to judge the
competition with me and the other volunteers, ultimately I'd like to
get up to ten judges for the contest so every judges personal opinion
doesn't carry overwhelming weight. I'd also like to thank everyone
again who mentioned my contest on their blogs and, lastly, point out
that you aren't limited to a single submission for the contest; if
you don't mind competing against yourself, I don't have a problem
with extra entries, so that answers that question.
Now, also going on in my gaming world,
I've been a little busy working on 43 AD, actually working on the
game with Paul Elliot, the game's designer. 43 AD will be going to
print soon and it should be my first print RPG credit, although
mostly as an editor, since the print deadline didn't give much of a
chance to do much else; but if a revised edition ever sees the light
of day my buddy Darryl and I have a lot of ideas we'd like to see
incorporated into it.
I have also been working with Darryl on
OUR project- The World of Garnia, a home-brewed, Celtic themed
campaign world that we have been designing for the last thirty years
together (and apart), that we have decided to actually put together
for real, down on paper and make available for other people to use if
they want. He has finished primary cartography for the new world map
as of yesterday and I have been piecemeal presenting things on my
other blog for months,
go check it out. He posted some pictures of
the maps with continental outlines drawn in, the blog has some
timelines and other cool bits of our process. The idea here is to get
other people interested in this too, so we can make this creative
endeavor more crowd-sourced- get some short fiction set in the world,
have some people that can convert stuff to other game systems, just
have other creative people join our design team.
