Vikings and More!

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.