The SAGA continues

I have got my Viking / Anglo-Danish morph SAGA army more or less sorted out, so it's on to the next project, my Normans, who are of course going to serve as the basis for a first Crusade morph (since the two armies should be 95% indistinguishable anyway).

Here's where we are so far:

The first unit of Hearthguard: Conquest Games Norman knights led by a Perry Miniatures Bohemond of Antioch.
God, I hate painting horses. Bohemond is a little shorter, but I think he looks OK (his base is built up). 

A unit of Warriors: Black Tree Design Norman crossbowmen.
The weird-looking guy in the back rank is, I think, Foundry, ex-Citadel.

An unusual choice, probably mainly for the building defense missions in Cross and Crescent: a unit of dismounted knights.
Perry Miniatures First Crusade, painted over a decade ago. 

The start of another unit: Levy archers. Black Tree design, except for the guy on the right, who is Foundry.
They're a surly-looking crew.

The army so far. 

 You'll notice that I am not super-consistent about basing; some of the models are on very flat Renedra 20mm bases and the other ones are on taller GW bases. Also, SAGA armies are usually based on round bases (although these bases are totally legal under the rules). This is because aeons ago I based the older models on the taller bases for WHAB, which uses square bases, and damned if I'm going to go back and undo work when I've got so much to do.

Anyway, I think they look quite nice.

Yet More Vikings

As you may recall from my posts about Saga, Mythic Iceland and Sagas of the Icelanders, I tend to acquire games that deal with the early medieval period. Greenland Saga is sort of an outlier, since it's not actually set in the Viking age, but rather in the 1450s. This is quite an early third-party third-ed scenario, if I remember correctly, released in 2001. It was written by Michael Bennighof and published by Avalanche Press. AP are still around, but they're not making RPG products any more. 

That damn cover

Controversy over the covers of Avalanche Press's RPG supplements was one of the ongoing arguments of the early d20 era, and I don't want to rehash it here. In principle I agree that there's nothing wrong with any given sexualised image of a female character -- the problem is simply that there are too few non-sexualised images of female characters, a lack of equivalent images of male characters, etc. However, despite the cheesecakey model and pose, my problem with this cover is not that. It is this: this cover illustration sucks. For two reasons!

First, quite apart from the outfit, what the hell is she doing? Her pose looks awkward and unnatural; look at how loose her hand is on the hilt of the sword. She's standing slightly on tippy-toe (or something; the line between whatever's behind her and the floor is really mushy) while either drawing a sword backward from her belt or stabbing herself in the hand. If she's drawing the sword, why is it covered in blood (and where's its scabbard?); if she's sheathing it, why is she doing that considering she seems to be surrounded by enemies? What is the blurry sort of dragony thing in the right of the image? What is the thing in the foreground, partly obscured by the AP logo? In short, what in the hell is going on in this illustration? 

But the fact that the image isn't good is only the lesser part of the problem. The more important point is that the cover gives you a very misleading idea of what kind of scenario this is. Greenland Saga is. In a sort of what-the-hell, high-fantasy romp, this chainmail-singleted Valkyrie would be a fine (if clumsily executed) cover image. But that's not what this is; Greenland Saga is a heavily historically-inspired scenario with lots of references to the sagas, particularly Grœnlendinga saga and Eiríks saga rauða. The Valkyrie appears as a suggested character on one page of this scenario; this is the only image of any character in the entire thing (there's almost no interior art).

So what we actually have is a D&D adventure for history nerds, while what the cover depicts is an 80s trash-fantasy throwdown.

Which is a shame, because it's an OK scenario

The gist of the scenario is that a Papal agent in Norway recruits the PCs (who may have worked for the church in a previous adventure) to go and find out what's going on in Greenland, which has been out of official contact for some time. When the PCs get there, they find that Greenland's Norse population is dwindling and that the locals are reacting to this fact in different ways.

The interesting thing that Greeland Saga does is that it doesn't provide a single explanation for the disappearances. It gives some mundane explanations (the colonists are getting ready to abandon Greenland for a more welcoming North America, the colonists have been enslaved by unscrupulous Portuguese cod fishermen) and a supernatural one (the colonists are under attack from unipeds, legendary creatures mentioned in the saga).

Most of the scenario is actually focused on travelling around the different parts of the Norse colony on Greenland, talking to different people and figuring out what's going on. It's possible that there will be a lot of combat, but there are few scenes where it's absolutely called for -- it's more a byproduct of travel in a harsh environment than anything else.

There are two main problems with the scenario: the first and most significant is the rules system. Historical scenarios test the limits of the D20 system's adaptability. Here, for instance, we're told that the party should include a cleric, but that clerics shouldn't be able to a) cast spells, or b) be proficient with weapons or armour. While this is a pretty accurate description of actual 15th-century priests, it does make playing the party cleric a suicide mission, considering that clerics also don't get a lot of skill points. Similarly, every who-gives-a-crap sailor, beggar and merchant in this scenario gets a full D20 write-up, complete with Forgery skill or whatever, just in case ... something. There is nearly nothing that couldn't be achieved just by saying "Level 1 Commoner." You see the same problem with something like Skull & Bones -- the writer is fighting with the rules a bit to fit them to the history. The difference is that S&B made up for it by providing a ton of new historically-inspired rules.

The second problem is with the historical content itself. There are a few editing glitches -- for instance, some of the Old Norse words have rendered incorrectly, presumably because the special characters needed went missing at some point in the production process. There are also a few simple goofs -- for instance, that valkyrie on the cover? Her name is Sigurd. Not Sigrid; Sigurd. Which is a man's name. I mean, I guess people can be called anything, but it's as weird as if she were called William.

But the thing that keeps jarring me is the inconsistency in terms of how historical we're meant to be. So there are, no fooling, rules for getting dysentery from drinking the water, which you're supposed to roll every time you drink. There are stat penalties for female characters, because "life is not fair. Deal with it." But then one of the first people the characters meet is this like beautiful but deadly Italian merchant princess assassin -- in fucking Bergen -- with like a fancy gown filled with throwing daggers. So which is it? Is it James Bond in the 15th century, or is it a game where you have to constantly roll to see whether you get the death shits from drinking water?

There's a sentence I did not anticipate writing before I bought this thing.

Anyway, it's got a few useful bits (unipeds, I guess, although again Skull & Bones has better monsters-from-medieval maps) but overall it's more interesting as an example of the kinds of things people were experimenting with in the early days of the D20 boom than as a scenario. It does have a few useful maps, and the idea of the different explanations (and a section discussing how to combine them) was a good one.

So: concept OK, execution flawed, I am a weird completist who has bookstore credit he seldom gets to use.

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. 

Maelstrom: Domesday character creation

So, I promised I would work my way through the character creation process for Maelstrom Domesday, the game I picked up at Dragonmeet.

This is a game of supernatural investigation in the early middle ages. That makes it the game for me, as you can maybe tell from this image of a small part of my bookshelves:

So, the way character creation in this game works is via a lifepath system. You can either determine your character's background randomly or pick the individual steps, but the system encourages you to do it randomly. I approve, because I'm a big fan of random character generation. I know some people don't like it, but I find it inspiring.

I went through the process twice, just for laughs, but this is my first one.

First off, you generate your starting attributes. There are ten of these -- nothing too exotic. They all start at 40, with most humans having scores in the 30-80 range. You choose four to add d6 to, then select another two to subtract d6 from. I chose to buff up my Attack, Persuasion, Perception and Knowledge and then reduce my Missile and Speed skills. It seemed fair enough for a supernatural investigator type, but the whole point of character creation is that until you get pulled into the world of the supernatural you're just an ordinary person.

Next you roll for your character's "racial" origin -- for the first guy, I rolled Saxon, which is the most likely result, as you might expect from a game set in 11th-century Yorkshire. I then rolled for his social background, and it came up with statistically the likeliest result: a peasant.

Next you roll for three "characteristics," which are various special traits and abilities. I rolled one that made me better at archery, one that improved my mathematics, making me better at bartering and so on, and one that gave me the ability to do hedge magic -- this lets me learn the Magic skill, but only to level 1.

Once you've found your social class, you roll for your starting career -- each background has a different distribution of possible careers. So for instance, if you're a noble, you're going to wind up being a squire or something, while if you're a peasant, not so much. I rolled for my first career and wound up as a wiseman, a sort of kooky village advice-giver / herbalist guy. And I could even learn magic, so that worked out nicely.

Each time you progress through a career, you add a certain amount to your age (it varies depending on the career), then add some points to a set of attributes specified by the career plus a discretionary one. In the case of a Wiseman, these are will, endurance and perception. You also get to spend two points from the various skills available to you. Wisemen have a lot of skills, so I chose different ones each time. You also roll on a random table, with the table being determined by what kind of occupation you have -- sedentary, in the case of a wiseman. Lastly, you can also get some equipment (a random chance) and an amount of money (there's also starting money based on your social class). You then roll to see whether it's your last career, and what career you move on to. I was a Wiseman several times in a row -- it's a pretty restrictive career. As a result, my skills are varied and my Wiseman-relevant stats are great.

The random events were my favourite thing about character creation; at one point, I learned philosophy, which apparently helps me resist something called Imbalance (I haven't read the actual rules). At another, I accidentally set myself on fire, giving me some hideous facial scars.

At the end of my career (you keep rolling to see if your career ends; if you roll over your age it does) I then rolled to see what my encounter with the supernatural had been -- apparently a tapestry shifted walls overnight!

Unfortunately, my contact with the supernatural drove me out of society -- I guess they didn't notice that I could do magic in the first place -- but one magnate decided to retain my services as a supernatural investigator. I rolled to see who it was -- Richard fitz Gilbert, of all people. Great.

So I'm a horribly-scarred, half-educated hedge wizard that no one will have anything to do with because of my role in the weird tapestry incident. Fortunately, I've picked up a smattering of philosophy, so I don't let it bother me too much. My character is a prize weirdo, and I get the feeling this is pretty common among characters in this game.

I made a little picture of him:

His name is Ealdred.

I'm going to enjoy running this game.