Thank you.

I suppose magic would fit well into this story provided it can be modified somehow to fit the cultures present. Like magic wielded by priests of the Norseman mythology, skräling (Indian) shamans or Christian priests. However the default D&D "cast ten spells a day" style would not be for my liking. Magic would still have to retain its mystery. Maybe this could be achieved by somehow completely excluding low level spells from the game, making magic rare and powerful and only for those who've spent a great deal of time studying its mysteries. Or you could simply make all magic GM controlled.

Same goes for magical beasts - if you manage to find ones that fit one of the mythologies, then yes, it'd have a place in the setting.

EDIT: Concerning this, I just came up with a funny idea: tie different spells into corpses of animals so you can "sacrifice them to the gods" to gain some magical benefit. Everyday animal entails could perhaps do stuff like bring back 1 HP while sacrificing a magical beast would give some great advantages. Of course, only a well learned Norseman priest, Indian shaman could do this, so the things should have level requirements for use. This could be the only way to cast spells - just forbid the normal magic usage.

Now, how would miracles work with Christian missionaries? Any ideas?

Last edited by Kryigerof (2006-11-14 20:31:35)

So what do you do in this setting? To answer the question I asked in the Golden City thread, here's the things you should be able to do without GM interference. I might be going a little deep into details here, but the point is to clarify what style of gameplay I was thinking about.

All of these things are meant to be done in a slow pace while roleplaying. Many of them would probably have longish waiting periods like repairing in Seed, to give the player a chance to chat in peace. However, they should also be made complex enough to make play interesting.

1) Get food to yourself and your family. It should be made important that you get enough food, because getting your basic living is one important challenge in a settlers life. Food could be gained at least in the following ways:

1a) Hunting. Not your generic wilderness grind but one where stealth and preciceness are key. It should be relatively easy to make most animals run instead of fighting when attacked, making it important to sneak or plan your hunt (such as chasing the animal toward another group of hunters). Of course, some animals, like bears would have to be fought, but these would be special, great hunts.

1b) Fishing. What a better way to learn to know your clanmate than to spend a day in a boat together, waiting for fish to catch? (Must check out how the Vikings actually fished.)

1c) Foraging. The woods are full of food for those who know what to look for. Leaves, roots, sweet berries just wait to be picked and eaten. The availability of berries could depend on the season, to make it necessary to plan for the winter.

1d) Farming. At some point of the game you might start growing crops in fields. Any ideas how this would work?

2) Crafting. We'll definately need to get our hands on some sort of a crafting system. The PCs will have to build everything from scratch (apart from what they brought with them).  This is so that there is no  You'd craft at least the following:

2a) Buildings. Not quite sure how to implement this, though it would start by cutting trees. Then maybe carry them all to the site and do some "house building work" or something. The creation of the actual house would probably have to be done by a GM.

2b) Food. You'd have to prepare the food before eating it.

2c) Clothes. Mostly out of furs.

2d) Weapons. Mostly spears etc, unless an iron supply is found.

2e) Tools to create all of the above.

3) Explore the surroundings. The woodlands should be made interesting in some ways, so it's not only "another tract of forest". Maybe by adding better hunting/fishing/foraging spots, holy locations (like erratic boulders etc). And of course as many special locations as the creators can come up with, such as native camps.

EDIT:
4) Maybe warfare against natives or other Norse groups if it comes to that. But fights should not be daily grind affairs.

This would only be the everyday life, of course. GM controlled stories could include pretty high-flying mythological stuff too.

Last edited by Kryigerof (2006-11-15 20:09:50)

For the moment this setting appeals to me the most as well.... that extra bit of information on what you could do in this setting helped quite a bit!

I like the idea of hunting and in general making sure you survive. The downside is that there will most likely be less politics and stuff like that... but that could come with the addition of more tribes i guess

True. This kind of projects are usually way more difficult than they seem at start, at least for the inexperienced (which I suppose most of us are). That's why it's best, in my opinion, to start without too great ambition (not to say Vinland would be the easiest to implement either, with the crafting and all).

In NWN there were several custom crafting systems. The one used in Narfell had a dialogue-based system that kept track of individual players' crafting skills.

Why should the skrälings be anything but Native Americans just like in the real world? I'd like to take the "alternateness" from the idea that superstitions are real (and that the Vikings might actually thrive in the new world), not swap real world things into fantasy conventions.

If we, for more combat opportunities, really need a "monster race", I'm sure we could find some mythological gnome people or simply an aggressive Native American tribe. (According to the LARP I was in, the dominant tribe in the area were the Mik-Maks, a rather peaceful people. But the more aggressive Iroquees (or one of the other aggressive tribes, I'm not sure which) were not too far to the south (well, thousands of miles probably, but little things like this could well be wrong in the history books:)).

I totally agree. The difficulties of such peace would be one of the great story opportunities. After all, the Native Americans don't have any actual need to keep them there.

Actually, they will have quite a lot to offer any native tribes which bother to befriend them. In the real world, the two biggest trade items that the Native Americans wanted from white settlers were metal tools/weapons and alchohol, neither of which was made by the tribes. The Vikings could produce both of these. And unlike the white settlers of the real world who came centuries later, Viking technology isn't so far ahead of the natives that they couldn't learn to manufacture it themselves.

Friendly relations with the Vinlanders has the potential to jump the Mik-Maks (or whoever) from the stone age to the iron age in two or three generations.

Interesting. Though it probably wasn't the same everywhere, at every time - a lot can happen in 600 years. The way it was introduced to us, there was no voting involved, simply a big public discussion led by the chief. Of course, they likely made some assumptions as well (though Harmaasudet (Greywolves in English) usually know their stuff when it comes to historical accuracy).

Just a little thought concerning hunting: We could play down the grind aspect more by making finding the animals more challenging than killing them. We could do this by having the animals leave markers on the ground that could be seen with the spot/tracking skill. Also, we could designate certain places as animal drinking spots and have the animals go to those locations on a regular basis (using some sort of a thirst counter perhaps). This would emphasize the need to know the wild - you catch a lot more game if you know a few of these drinking spots.