2015-03-23 Sagas of the Icelanders

/pics/16908864152_b402959066.jpg

Today we played Sagas of the Icelanders. I spent about half an hour skimming the book, having read various playbooks and some stuff online, some months ago.

Sagas of the Icelanders

I had three players playing the Skaldmey, the Seiðkona and the Huscarl. I noticed that the fighters picked moves such as Belligerent, No Mercy and Freya’s Light. That seemed to indicate armed conflict. The witch picked Bonecaster. That seemed to indicate some searching. I decided to make this about a whale. If somebody managed to harpoon a whale, there was a 50% chance that it would wash ashore in the following days, dead. In this case, half the whale belonged to the owner of the land and the other half belonged to the owner of the harpoon.

We quickly introduced relatives. Picking a last name automatically determined the names of parents. The relationships at the beginning determined additional background: The Huscarl belonged to the family because his father had been killed in Norway and the father’s friend had taken the boy back to Iceland. The Seiðkona had maybe killed and buried her husband and made sure to set the Skaldmey on her path of rebellion.

The player characters venture out to find the whale. Some bone casting follows. They arrange to bring along an ally from a neighboring homestead, a young man thirteen years of age, defend their honor against malicious comments from the elder brother, find other neighbors having also heard about the whale, pick a fight, kill one of them, both parties call for reinforcements, a standoff ensues and finally the whale is divide 50:50, partly to avoid a feud about land ownership because this is a bay where oath breakers are drowned and therefore it belongs to neither family, and partly to avoid a feud because the Skaldmey had killed one of the neighbors in a wrestling match, tempting fate.

Some of the interesting things I saw at the table:

• The Huscarl trying to influence his foster sister the Skaldmey and realizing that he had only violence at his disposal. The men cannot reason with others. He didn’t want to risk killing her and so she got her way.
• The Huscarl being goaded by the Skaldmey to jump from the cliff into the cold water below and risking grave harm. That’s when we realized that a failure meant death.
• Whenever the women talked reason, the men were still free to ignore the warnings and suggestions, but it meant incurring a significant disadvantage.

At the end of two and a half hours, all three players said they liked it. One of them had run a few sessions of *Apocalypse World* for us, ages ago. He liked it. The other had played in those *Apocalypse World* sessions and he had also played in my One Shot of *Colonial Marines*. He said that he liked *Sagas of the Icelanders* best.

​#RPG ​#Indie ​#Sagas of the Icelanders ​#Powered by the Apocalypse