Random Viking loot and gifts

Some time ago, I reviewed both The Sagas of the Icelanders and Mythic Iceland for this blog. One thing that I thought that was missing from both was a set of examples of items for gift-giving or Viking loot. Sagas understands the importance of gift-giving, but doesn't give you much of an idea what sort of things you might expect to give or get as gifts, while Mythic Iceland just gives you the amount of wealth you can expect to get plundering such-and-such a type of place.

So I had a bit of a trawl through my saga library and compiled a list of different gifts and loot items. I've also chosen some archaeological items that seem likely to be loot or trade goods. Obviously, these are typically high-end items (well, most of them), but they should give you some idea. I've compiled them into a series of random tables for your convenience.

Clothing

1. A cloak that once belonged to King Myrkjartan. 
2. A white headdress embroidered with gold thread. 
3. A shawl decorated with black stitches and a fringe. 
4. A cloak lined with white fur. 
5. A pile of beaver, sable and marten skins. 
6. A silk robe with gold embroidery and clasps. 
7. A full set of coloured garments made from English cloth. 
8. A fur jacket. 
9. A fine cloak from abroad. 
10. A pair of gloves with gold embroidery. 
11. A headband studded with gold. 
12. A Russian fur cap. 

Note that the history of clothing is important -- "a cloak worn by a king" came up so many times that I just stopped writing it down. Giving someone your old clothes isn't seen as a sign of cheapness, it's a sign of how close you are, so close that you would wear the same clothes. 

Clothing is also a good way to insult people -- in Njal's Saga, Skarp-Hedin insults someone so badly that a peace settlement collapses by offering him an inappropriate cloak as a gift. (It's probably to do with the idea that the cloak is unisex?)

Jewellery

1. A necklace of glass beads.
2. A gold bracelet. 
3. A gold arm-ring, "a big and good one."
4. A gold finger-ring. 
5. A gold brooch. 
6. A set of oval brooches. 

Not a lot of variety here -- gold arm-rings and bracelets turn up about a million times; arm-rings in particular are a very traditional gift from leaders to their followers. Interestingly, one of them has a spell on it; a queen gives it to her lover as a parting gift, but the spell prevents him from having sex with the woman he's leaving her for. Although we know silver jewellery was common, it doesn't turn up as a gift in the sagas much. Snobbery. 

Jewellery could be looted, too, so you get brooches or ornaments from Ireland or Britain or France or wherever in Scandinavian settlements or graves all the time, like this Frankish trefoil brooch: 

 

Weapons and armour

1. A fine sword and a gold-inlaid spear.
2. A gold-plated helmet.
3. An axe inlaid with gold.
4. A sword with a walrus-ivory hilt.
5. A gold-inlaid atgeir. 
6. A spear with a gold-inlaid socket. 
7. A knife with a walrus-tusk handle. 
8. An axe decorated with gold on the blade and silver mounts. 
9. A winged spear. 
10. "That sword which is called Dragvandil."
11. A shield depicting scenes from the old sagas, with strips of gold framing the pictures, set with gemstones. 
12. A spear that rings whenever someone is about to die. 

Again, object history is important here -- a lot of these swords have names, and the ones that don't begin that way wind up being called things like "King's Gift." They aren't necessarily good weapons -- at one point, someone -- I think it's Egil -- discovers that although the gold-inlaid axe a king gave his son is very beautiful, the blade is weak (although he also used it very carelessly). 

Cash money, capital, livestock, real estate, weird stuff. 

1. A wooden bowl with a silver handle, filled with silver coins. 
2. A ship, together with its sails, rigging and equipment. 
3. A twelve-oared ship. 
4. A trained fighting-horse. 
5. "A good big treasure-chest."
6. A hundred ells of fine-quality cloth and twelve furs. 
7. A jet-black ox, nine years old. 
8. An Irish dog. 
9. A black horse. 
10. A farm. 
11. An island with 80 oxen on it. 
12. A share in a trading ship. 
13. Timber to build a church. 
14. A stallion and three mares. 
15. A carved ship ornament. 
16. A set of walrus ivory chessmen. 
17. A banner with a raven on it. 
18. Three sea-snail shells and a duck's egg. 
19. A cheese. 
20. A magician's staff. 

There's also the category of monastic or religious loot, which doesn't turn up much in the sagas, but does turn up in the archaeological record. 

Religious paraphernalia

1. A bible or prayer book. 
2. A reliquary. 
3. A bishop's crozier. 
4. A pectoral cross. 
5. An episcopal ring. 
6. An exotic foreign religious object. 

Anyway, I hope that's handy. The important thing is that if you're going to give a gift it should have a history. A big bowl of silver coins, OK, that's just money, but in the sagas objects tend to be unique, to have a history to them. They're often the cause of strife or envy, or they can form a continuity between different parts of a saga -- Gunnar's halberd (which may be an atgeir, who knows) spends more time in Njal's Saga than Gunnar does. 

And of course this applies to every similar culture in fantasy settings. I spent a long time coming up with unique gift and trade items in my Orlanthi HeroQuest game, for instance. 

Maelstrom Domesday -- full readthrough

In a previous post I talked about creating a character for Maelstrom Domesday, an updated version of the classic 1980s British game with the setting moved to Yorkshire in 1086. You can find the game itself and its various supplements on DTRPG. (And Arion Games has a big sale on through new year, so you can pick them up cheap. I think I may get the scenario just to give the game a try.)

Having finished character creation, I thought I'd take a look at how the abilities I acquired actually work. 

So, skills: Skills are ranked from 1 to 6, with each level having its own effect. You roll against the relevant attribute (which you will remember go from 1 to 100, so this is basically a percentile system), and having the skill usually adds 10% per level to your score. However, it's worth checking, because some skills have different effects. For instance, higher levels of Herbalism allow you to use rarer herbs, speed up your prep time, and so on, while Combat Training adds to your damage, increases the protective value of armour, and that kind of thing. 

Combat is done by percentile, like skill checks -- you roll and compare your result to the other player's (each player has attack and defense scores) on a matrix sort of like the one used in HeroQuest. This tells you how much damage you've taken. Each hit heals and is treated separately. There are also serious and critical wounds, which have extra consequences, including being hideously scarred, losing an eye and whatnot. I haven't tested it in play, but combat looks lethal, with a big advantage for the guy with the higher skill and the better weapons and armour. 

There's the usual other stuff -- diseases, poisons, fire, falling, earning your patron's favour, most of it simple spot rules. Instability is the game's answer to Sanity, and is basically another form of damage you can take. 

Magic (or Magick) is at the centre of the setting, but player character magick is pretty subtle. You can't use it to do anything that would otherwise be impossible, so it's mostly things like avoiding detection, changing minds, putting people to sleep, spotting things, all that kind of thing. Even so, if you have a non-magickal method of doing stuff, you're better off using it, because magick use carries with it the possibility of a Maelstrom breach -- that is, a moment where the weird chaotic magickal dimension that underlies ours pokes through. This can mean anything from turning people ill-tempered for a little while to summoning hideous entities from other planes (though the odds of this are pretty slim on a simple spell). 

So rules (particularly character creation) take up about half of the book, and the other half is all setting and GM resources. The bestiary covers wildlife and a handful of different monsters, ranging from "minor" creatures like elves and boggarts and the undead to "major" ones like giants and dragons. I think it's understood that there aren't going to be a lot of common monster types in this game -- most problems are going to be caused by a creature that is, in proper weird fantasy style, unique. 

The original setting guide is not easy reading. 

Then there is a lot of material on daily life 1086 and Yorkshire in particular. Now, I feel pretty good about my grip on the world of the late 11th century, but this seems clear and well-organised, detailed without beating the reader to death with minutiae (although my tolerance for historical minutiae is probably in the top 5%). 

I really like the way Yorkshire villages are laid out -- a few facts from the Domesday Book, and then a piece of local folklore and an adventure hook for each. The setting section covers 37 manors in this faction, plus one small town (Selby) and one large city (York). The town and city get much more detail, with relevant NPCs and multiple plot hooks. 

Then you get the appendices, which cover diseases, medicinal herbs (a lot of medicinal herbs), a quick timeline and a glossary. 

Production-wise, the book is OK. The layout is clean and usually readable, the art is sparse but generally pretty good. I haven't looked at any of the electronic products, but if they're laid out like this I would assume they're easy to read onscreen and economical to print. There are some fuzzy bits of poorly-reproduced art, and at least one repeated piece, but nothing too jarring. 

When I bought this game, I initially thought that it would be something like Spaceship Zero -- essentially a high-concept campaign-in-a-box that I might run for a limited series of games and be perfectly content with. Reading it through, I find it has a lot of worky bits that can be pulled out for other games. It could mash up very simply with Cthulhu Dark Ages, for instance, or with Mythic Iceland. The village writeup format is good, and I'll probably swipe that for other games. Maybe also the medicinal herbs, although they're not weird enough for a fantasy game. Maybe for another Taming of Dragon Pass type game. And it's a pretty good resource for any type of game set in 11th-c. England, fantasy or otherwise, although I already have a fair few reference works on the subject. 

So yeah. I am going to try to run this at some point! I have a pretty clear idea of the campaign already. 

RPG a Day, Day 7: How much falutin'? High.

I found the Day 7 question -- "intellectual" RPG -- a little curious. Obviously, RPGs are a bit of an intellectual pastime anyway (as opposed to, say, a physical one), but I don't think that's what it meant. I think it meant something like "the most highfalutin' RPG you own."

This is a subject that seems pretty contentious among gamers. Even talking about the subject of "intellectual" or "artistic" RPGs introduces the risk of pompous auto-back-patting on one hand or derpy Philistinism on the other. I hope I steer between the two extremes; a lot of the games I love are based on doing straightforward adventure fiction (although they aren't as derpy as people tend to assume, for more of which see below), but I put in my time in the indie-gaming trenches. I wrote a 24-hour RPG, and I won twenty-five bucks for so doing, and then I kind of forgot all about it. Sorry, Ron. (It's totally incomplete, and even if it were complete I doubt it would be any good. Me writing narrative games is real square-peg-in-round-hole stuff.) 

Anyhow. 

In the video, I kind of make it sound like the indie RPG thing ended in like 2008, which is totally untrue; that's just when I started to get out of it. Lots of cool stuff is still coming out of that movement, and in fact I've talked about some of those games previously on this blog. I'm perfectly happy to be a consumer of those games, but keeping up with the upcoming stuff and the new releases and so on proved too difficult for me. And my strengths never lay in game design. I'm not a rulesy thinker. Perhaps that's why old school gaming and Gloranthaphile setting-nerdery both appeal to me so much. 

Speaking of setting-nerdery, there's some of that coming up in today's video.

As a further point, I am not at all sure that our perception of games as "intellectual" or not is accurate. I mean, I think most people think of D&D and its heirs as the action-movie bros of the gaming world, focused on thrills and spills and less concerned about, I dunno, feelings or whatever. But I think that's probably a mistake. Go back and look at the old school blogs I linked to yesterday. Sure, Jeff likes broad comedy in his blog, but read it for a bit and you will see that he's a very smart, educated guy. And does Middenmurk look like the blog of someone who's just in it for uncomplicated action? 

Perhaps what I'm saying is that we may be confusing games that tolerate a broad range of play styles and therefore can be played in a lighthearted, undemanding way with games that have to be played that way (like World of Synnibarr or whatever). 

Lastly, one subject I don't touch on is that games have always been educational for me. The first time I ever heard about the Shahnameh was from Gary Gygax. The first time I ever encountered the myths of the Popol Vuh was in a TMNT supplement. How many of us gleaned the basics of Sumerian religion from Deities and Demigods? My examples are mostly legend and myth, but there's a lot more. Oh, games don't teach good history or good science or whatever, but hopefully what they do is sort of ... limn the edges of larger subjects and entice people who are motivated by that sense of incompleteness to check them out. Or that might just be me. 

Notes:

I have previously reviewed Mythic Iceland. You can buy it at, you guessed it, DTRPG. 

The updated version of De Profundis is just over £5, so that's going on my to-buy pile. What the hell. 

There is also a new edition of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen. It is also very inexpensive. 

Dogs in the Vineyard is great. There's also a bundle of a bunch of lumpley games on there; check 'em out. My old PbP is still online all these years later, although you may need to be an RPGnet member to read it. 

And you can get My Life With Master pretty easily too. 

I know a bunch of you guys are Monsterhearts fans. Same guy did Ribbon Drive. You can get it in PDF, although it isn't as cool without the DVD-case thing, at least to me. 

Review: Sagas of the Icelanders

Right, so apparently it's Iceland week here at the blog. Who knew? Anyway, yesterday I reviewed Mythic Iceland by Pedro Ziviani, and today my attention turns to Sagas of the Icelanders by Gregor Vuga, a game modelled on the, er, sagas of the Icelanders.

Although a friend had been trying to get me to look at this game for ages, I kept forgetting to, but I picked it up a while back with a bunch of other indie games, including its ancestor Apocalypse World. They get me with these Bundles of Holding, man, no joke. 

I have the PDF, which you can get from the publisher for 6 Euros(!). Looks like the print version is sold out. 

So, despite sharing the same foundation, this game and Mythic Iceland are very, very different.

I have never played an Apocalypse World-inspired game, but basically most of the things your character can do mechanically are codified as "moves," some of which anyone can do and some of which are unique to your particular playsheet (which is basically a sort of character class in brief). Each different *World game has different sheets: those for Sagas of the Icelanders are:

• The Child
• The Woman
• The Man
• The Matriarch 
• The Goði
• The Seiðkona
• The Wanderer
• The Shieldmaiden
• The Huscarl
• The Thrall
• The Monster

Each of these has their own particular moves, plus the basic moves anyone can do and some moves that are specific to their gender. You get one free one and then choose another from a list. So for instance, the child might choose to be be able to get adults to sympathise with him or her, or the woman might choose an ability that lets her scrounge up supplies in an emergency. As you go on, you can develop new ones, I believe, although it's late and I'm not going to look that bit up again.

The basic system is very simple: you roll 2d6, usually adding one of the four stats (Young, Versed, Gendered, and Wyrd). Get a 7 or better, you succeed. On a 7-9, you succeed but with some kind of flaw or cost. On a 10+ everything goes swimmingly. Each move specifies what the flawed condition is. Stats start out anywhere from -1 to 1, with some going as high as 2. Again, I imagine they improve over time. 

The four stats might seem a little weird, but they're basically measures of how well you do at physical challenges, knowledge challenges, things relating to your social gender role (this is quite a big deal in the sagas) and luck or magical challenges. 

You also have relationships to other people, created at character generation, which have a certain number of bonds on them. You can increase bonds by doing favours, giving gifts and so on, and use them to do various things. I like the mechanical reinforcement of social norms; you can also see this in the gendered moves. For instance, the female moves include seduction, hard-headed pragmatism and what saga scholars call "whetting," that thing where women goad men to go kill some fools. Meanwhile, male ones are all about the prickly maintenance of honour and face, which is yet another reason for fool-killing. 

The GM (called the MC in this game) has a suite of moves as well, but honestly they seem like kind of formalisations of the things all GMs do. I found them super confusing to read about, but I probably would not find them super confusing to do. 

I'm at a stage in my gaming life where I'm drifting back toward the traditional, relatively secure in my GM skills and unconcerned with questions of game design per se, so this elegant but unfamiliar design doesn't have the appeal for me that, say, Dogs in the Vineyard did when it came out. Still, a lot of people rave about it and I will try to play it at least once. 

Sagas of the Icelanders is a much "thinner" game than Mythic Iceland, both literally and in the sense I have discussed previously. It's much more focused on a relatively small region and set of characters (or at least that seems to be the assumption). While character creation in Mythic Iceland tends to produce a sort of supergroup ("Gunnar, Egil and Grettir team up to solve mysteries"), Sagas is largely about creating a connected group around a single farmstead and leading them through the long-term story of feuds and rivalries and loves and what have you. 

Which isn't to say that Sagas doesn't have good historical detail; it's mostly pretty thin, but there is a pretty solid appendix on legal proceedings, some recipes, and other flavour-type text. 

I had a couple of gripes: for instance, the book refers to an MC sheet, which is nowhere in the book nor in the downloads that came with the Bundle of Holding. I had to go look for it on Google and find a version of it from 2012. That seems like an oversight. There's also a little mismatch between parts of the book: for instance, the currency system is super abstract -- you have a bit of silver, a handful, a pouch, a chest. Which makes sense, I guess, even though the pedant in me preferred Mythic Iceland's elaboration of the wadmal exchange system. But then in the legal appendix, all the fines are given in marks. Now maybe I just missed where it tells me how a mark fits into that system, but ... is it a little? A lot? I can go look it up (I have a pretty good shelf on the subject of early medieval Iceland), but still. 

I'm going to play it at some point, and I'll report back, but for now I'm still happy with enough of the ideas in it that I consider it a good buy, and at £5 I imagine you will feel the same. 

Review: Mythic Iceland

When I was a youngster, my parents had the old Penguin paperback edition of Njal's Saga, the one translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson (there is a new translation in Penguin these days, I believe). I didn't read it until high school, after I had already read the Poetic Edda and the more sort of mythological works in general. And then of course I got into the sagas much more seriously at university, when I was studying the Viking age. I think you are generally an Egil's Saga guy or a Njal's Saga guy, and on balance I think I am a Njal's Saga. I like tragic heroes more than antiheroes, maybe? I think my favourite part of Njal's Saga is (spoilers for a story from the middle ages) the death of Gunnar:

Gunnar defended himself with great courage, and wounded eight more so severely that many of them barely lived. He kept on fighting until exhaustion brought him down. His enemies then dealt him many terrible wounds, but even then he got away from them and held them at bay for a long time.

But in the end they killed him.

Now obviously I know that the sagas don't have paragraph breaks, and this one is the work of some modern translator, but damn.

But it's not all the cosmic futility of heroism; there's lots of hacking and slashing and jumping over things and sliding on ice and catching spears in the air and flinging them back with deadly accuracy. But I get my cosmic bleakness fix.

During an age of great brokeness, I was in Forbidden Planet in London and I did a comical spit-take when I saw that there was a game on the shelf called Mythic Iceland. I put it on my Amazon wishlist, which is what I did in those days with things that cost money, and then I kind of forgot about it, so I was really pleasantly surprised when a generous friend got it for me for my birthday. I have the paperback, which retails for about £20, but you can also get the game in digital format for $19, which is around £11.20. Heck, at the time of this writing, it's on sale, but only for a few hours, so if you're reading this later you're out of luck. I should have done this last week, really, shouldn't I?

The only real weakness of the digital version is that you don't get a copy of this bitchin' map of Iceland:

That is nice. I would put that on my wall. Of course, my wall already has a copy of Olaus Magnus's Carta Marina Scandinavia, so it might be a bit repetitive, but I guess what I am trying to say is that I like maps and I like this map. So that's a good point right out of the gate. 

Now, when I tell you that this is a BRP game about playing saga heroes in 10th-century Iceland, I expect you're going to have some assumptions (if you're like me). You'll imagine that this book is going to be: 

• very well-researched
• a little stodgy in its presentation
• nominally generic but with a slight tilt toward mystery and horror. 

And you would be dead right. But let's look into the book and break down the contents a little further. 

We start off with an introduction to Icelandic history and literature, as well as an intro to the world. This is going to be a fantasy setting based on the sagas, with some medieval Icelandic folklore thrown into the mix in the form of the Hidden Folk. 

Character creation follows the outline of BRP character creation, but removes some things and adds others. There are no specialised professions (which is in keeping with the economy of saga-era Iceland), and you have a fylgja (animal spirit, fetch) that represents you. Your wealth takes the form of a farm and certain types of trading rights, although all characters start as householders and have roughly equal wealth. I would have liked to see a little more variation here, although it is true that being a free landholder is pretty commonplace for saga heroes -- and is the only way you can participate in the oh-so-important lawsuits. 

There isn't a lot of advice, speaking of saga accuracy, on making female heroes. You can create them, and there's a female name table and all, but then the rest of the game doesn't pay much attention to what women might be doing other than things stereotypically associated with men (although the female character on the cover is preparing to do some magic, which I think is the right answer to that question). 

The character sheet, I am sorry to say, is ugly as sin: 

Oof.

You have a god you're devoted to, and doing things to increase that devotion can give you bonus on relevant actions. Like Egil being devoted to Odin, I guess. 

There's a lot of really good material on the climate, landscape, society and culture of saga age Iceland, and a great visual explanation of the calendar. Mind you, I'm not sure who this is for. I already know a lot about the Viking period and the Icelandic sagas, but I still think it's great to have this all in one place. But this doesn't solve the problem of how you get players to enjoy the unique saga-ness of the sagas without just making them do a shitload of homework. Shitload of homework seems to be what this game is opting for. We're well over 50 pages into this thing before there's any hint of what the players might actually, er, do.

Oh good! Lawsuit rules. You can't do Icelandic sagas without those. And if you think I'm joking you've never read one. 

There's a good section on religion, emphasising its murky and variable nature but giving pretty simple and memorable rules for how to earn your god's favour. Do something your god likes, get a point in the allegiance-to-whoever score. Get your score over a certain level, get some bennies. But there's also a section on Christianity, including a legend about the Holy Grail being in Iceland. Get in! Viking things in games don't often pay enough attention to Christianity. Erik Bloodaxe was a Christian, y'know. 

OK, magic in this game is based on being a runemaster. Each rune has a meaning, which can have a narrative effect (for instance, Fe, which means wealth or cattle, has a narrative effect of bringing fertility or creating wealth) and a mechanical effect (in this case, adds 10% to Farming or Brawl skills). 

Runemasters start with knowledge of only one aett (set of 8 runes), based on the god they worship, and have to learn more in play, either by studying with runemasters, "sitting out," "going under the cloak," etc. Rune lore and seidr seem to be being collapsed into one here (not that I think we can systematise early medieval magical beliefs that easily, but for gaming purposes, why not, right?). Procedurally, it's pretty straightforward. You choose the runes you want to use, carve them into whatever, "dye" them with blood, speak a targeting phrase (better if it's a poem) and roll the dice. More complex rune "phrases" have more potent effects but take longer. Talismans are much the same but you burn permanent points of POW into them, so you can't make too many. All makes sense. 

This is a nicely detailed little system, and frankly you could drop it into most other games that have a skill system or equivalent thereof with next to no effort. There are good little summaries of the runes for players that you could copy or print out for the runemaster to have. I think this system would work best when encouraging runemaster-like play, by which I mean that it should require the player to do a bit of reading and think about the rune lore (stipulating the usual, that most rune lore is ahistorical nonsense, blah blah). 

Then you gotcher guide to the setting, with every location having some little adventure seeds in it. Of course, saga hero PCs aren't just troubleshooters for hire or murder-hobos, so a lot of these fall into the old CoC structure of the PCs having some kind of uncle on the spot. Mind you, this is essentially the plot of Beowulf, so whatever. 

Next up are elves and the Hidden People. These are very fairy-tale like. For instance, children can see them, but adults can do so only rarely. They do give that Scandinavian folklore sense of this kind of parallel society of weird people who are still essentially farmers and hunters and so on. The backstory explanation is that these guys are elves who basically self-exiled from Alfheim to live out their lives in peace. Proper elves from Alfheim sometimes turn up, and they are arrogant, belligerent sonsabitches while the Hidden Folk are mostly pretty chill, just a little shy. 

The next section is about the rest of the world, with the usual Northern Europe stuff, plus good sections on Greenland and North America. The Wineland stuff has some Native American monsters (Uktena, Thunderbird, Wendigo, that kind of thing), plus the monopods from Eiriks Saga. There's a section on going Viking, with ship stats, weapons, rules on random generation of raid targets, and a useful monastery map. 

One thing I thought was missing from this section was something on plunder. If you've ever read the sagas, you know there's a lot of coveting of items, a lot of gift-giving, and a lot of objects (particularly weapons) with histories. So it would have been cool to see the loot described in terms of the kinds of things you might find rather than just X amount of wealth, particularly when the game's already done such a good job of explaining the importance of gift-giving in the cashless Icelandic economy. 

But I am not one to complain! Instead, watch this space for some cool examples of Viking plunder and perhaps a random loot generation table. 

Lots of good stuff on running a game, with some discussion of Luck in its confusing Norse sense. 

Then you get some critters, ranging from the usual suspects like trolls and frost giants to selkies, krakens, draugar, and even more mundane opponents like polar bears. 

Then there's a scenario, which as far as I can tell is the devil's own railroad. This kind of thing is very common for intro adventures in games where the adventuring premise needs to spring from who the PCs are. The other alternative would be the old Vampire: the Masquerade intro scenario, in which approximately nothing at all happens. They're just there to give you the feel of it, even if in this case the feel is attached to "go here, fight this guy."

There's an appendix which is basically a little Iceland supplement for Cthulhu Dark Ages: some history, monsters, spells, and a scenario. Nice! I was not a big fan of the game, mainly because it didn't feel well-adapted for what I wanted to do with it (it was very focused on running scenarios set on Continental Europe, which, I mean, I get that it's a German game, but you'd think that the English-language version would talk about England a bit more). But here in combination with the Icelandic setting material it's pretty good. Plus, volcano cults!

The wrapup

I think Mythic Iceland is pretty good, even though I absolutely cannot see myself running it as written. It's dense with stuff, which is good, and it shows knowledge of medieval Iceland, which is also good. It's kind of weird, in that it's neither a balls-to-the-wall Norse-themed fantasy setting nor a game in which you play out some variant of the Iceland sagas. It's kind of somewhere in between. Still, I think it has a lot of use for people who a) want a bunch of info about the sagas in an easy-to-use gaming form or b) are already running a historical-fantasy campaign they could slot this into. There is already an Iceland sourcebook for Ars Magica, but I assume it's high-medieval. 

In terms of stuff to idea-mine for another fantasy game, I would say that the magic system is usable, the gods system is a pretty neat idea for putting religion into the lives of non-cleric characters, and the map and location guides are good too. 

I think I would definitely run it as some kind of Cthulhu Dark Ages thing, but that might be because I have all the necessary resources easily to hand. Kind of a cold, bleak, damp and relentless Norse horror thing. I could get behind that. 

I kind of already did. (Plug!)

Next in this impromptu series of things about Viking age Iceland, I'll do that treasure table thing and I'll also take a look at the Sagas of the Icelanders RPG, which I picked up ages ago but still haven't even read.