If you’ve read any of my blogs about game lines before, you’ll know I have a lot of affection (nostalgia, even) for a good old fashioned supplement. By this I mean a mixture of additional material for a game – player options, subsystems, source material. You won’t like, or use, everything – but usually there’s something in it that’ll grab you.
And so, Chaosium’s first proper supplement for Age of Vikings is here. And this is as random an assortment of stuff as you could imagine. Like other first looks, this isn’t a review – I haven’t used this book at the table yet – it’s based on a read-through and hopefully gives you enough to decide if it’s for you. I’ve plans afoot to get Age of Vikings to the table with some of these options, and I’ll come back with a proper review when that’s done.
While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, and the chance to request articles or content, for a very reasonable backer level of £2 per month. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks!
Age of Vikings is Chaosium’s remaster of the much-beloved Mythic Iceland, brought up to date with the latest version of their BRP system. And it’s a fantastic setting – blending historical Icelandic life with myth, to create something both distinct and manageable. Iceland isn’t a huge population in the 10th Century, and this means your heroes can have a real impact on their communities. And, because this is Chaosium, the layout, art, and descriptive text are really high quality, and nicely consistent.
Now, I should state straight up that the Age of Vikings core book isn’t without its flaws – while the book was thoroughly proofed, there are numerous errors in stat blocks and game mechanics – none of which are game-breaking, but it’s annoying to have 4 pages of errata. These are, mercifully, folded into the .pdf now – but here’s hoping the companion doesn’t suffer from the same issues. (So far, there’s a couple page references awry in the contents page – which doesn’t fill me with confidence – but we’ll see). It would be a real shame if these put you off the product, though – because the vibes are immaculate, and most of these errors can be glossed over without affecting play.
For Players
So what’s in it? Well, more character options for one. I’m not hugely taken with the non-human player options – dwarfs, hidden ones (elves), jötunn (giants), ravens, and sealskins – these are hard to fit into a group of regular Icelandic characters, and so much is made of the communities you live in – but the options for Foreign cultures really interest me. You can now play Byzantine Greek, English, Finns and Sámi, Irish, Scandinavian, Scots, and Slavic player characters – obviously you don’t really want more than one or two in your party, but it adds a lot to the game to have these options for variety, especially since your players might well be encountering these nationalities.
There’s some new options for religion, including Christianity (converting to Christianity is a pretty poor choice in terms of losing magical powers, but I guess we’d expect that), and a few additional weapons scattered in the rules. The non-human (“Mythic”) races are, this being BRP, hideously unbalanced compared to human PCs – but I’m sure you can make it work if you really want to have a SIZ 35 Jötunn in your party.
For GMs
For starters, there’s a whole subsystem here for generating a random community – including names, motivations, and skills for key NPCSs – and this is an adventure generation machine really, when you find out what the local Icelanders want and are willing to do. In the core book a lot is made of community and the Icelandic culture – this transfers this to gameable content, and is fantastic. There’s a well stocked Bestiary of NPCs, Animals, and Monsters, which gives you loads of options in addition to the core Age of Vikings ones. And then there’s adventures – five of them.
For such a distinctive setting, you really need these – a few classic examples of what you can do as Age of Vikings heroes. There’s a Cattle Raid (which is more or less one enormous combat), The Hunt (a template really for a short monster-hunting story – probably needs a subplot to flesh it out, and some assembly is required, and Trade (probably the worst-named adventure ever written, this gives a couple of fleshed out encounters for when they, well, trade). Two more fully-realised adventures are Gone Viking (which puts the PCs as the crew of a raiding ship – this is good stuff, and reminiscent of older adventures) and A Ravenous Heart – which is designed to be played by a group of heroes who are all Ravens, and includes pregenerated birds for your players.
It’s a great adventure, but we need to talk about these playable Ravens. BRP is a system that doesn’t scale at all well to characters that are a couple of feet long. You’ll have one or maybe two hit points – and a hit location table of 8 locations with, probably one hit point each. If something hits you, you’ll be dead; that hit location table is entirely unnecessary, as is the note that you can attack twice per combat round. There are more elegant ways to play birds in a world of humans (and Jötunn), but sticking to BRP so rigidly just makes it weird.
Overall
Look – as I said before, not everything in this book is for everyone. Where I’m less keen on the ravens, the non-humans, and some of the bestiary (let’s go fight a Frost Giant, with his 1D8+11D6 damage from his fist – maybe send the raven in, it’s all the same to them), the community subsystem and the other adventures more than make up for this. I’m going to chill out about whatever emergent errata appears and try to just run (or play) this fantastically realised game of mythic Iceland, and so should you.
