This is an approved re-cut and paste review by the Raj from RPGGeek:
This is a review for the 2006 PDF edition of Fate of the Norns: Ragnarok. I'll start by saying that my group and I have been playing this game for the last 6 years on and off, and we love it. Along with Burning Wheel, these are the two staples at our gaming table.
The book is laid out in the reverse order of the previous editions. Instead of opening up with dweller (character) creation the book dumps you head first into the lore. At the end of the book is where you will find the dweller goodies.
Now the lore is very important, since it's high fantasy now, with a lot of goings on in the heavens. There is a large chunk devoted to the various worlds, the denizens of those worlds and their politics. What my group and I seriously enjoyed was the perspective from the giant side. It’s presented as a list of grievances against the gods, and it sets the stage as to why the final show-down must happen. This also sets the tone as high fantasy which is a big contrast to the second edition which we found to be low fantasy (more historical). There are two new archetypes presented here (which make an appearance later in the book for dweller creation) that weren't in the previous editions. You can now *play* as an Einherjar or Son of Muspel. For those who don't know, Einherjar and Sonce of Muspel are mortals who have been chosen at the time of their deaths, to join the big leagues as immortals. Heavy stuff! It even gets heavier, since it goes into the troubled psyche of these beings. They are not your epic level dwellers with nothing but good stuff poured on (like in other RPGs), instead they are troubled by the trauma of their deaths and have troubles adapting to bodies. The new bodies not only have heightened perceptions into spectrum not seen by humans, but also might that is tenfold that of the strongest humans. Anyhow this adds a really nice RP twist to an otherwise over the top champion!
Once the lore is done, you are then brought to the mechanics, and this is where most people will stop in their tracks and do a double take: this RPG uses no dice or cards! It uses Viking RUNE STONES instead!! Talk about a mechanic that fits the genre like an old shoe- we fell in love with this. We took a while to adapt to these rules and thanks to some friendly e-mail replies from Pendelhaven staff, we found out what we were playing incorrectly during our first few sessions. The fact that your character sheet is a bag of runes can be daunting for some players.
So the dweller breaks down like this: there are two stats, Essence & Destiny. Essence is the stat that tells you how many rune you know fromt he 24 futhark runes. And Destiny tells you how many runes you Wyrd (draw) when you need to resolve a challenge. The runes are also your Traits (stats/attributes). There are 8 physical, 8 mental and 8 spiritual (hahaha PMS acronym) and depending on how many of each you have, those are your Traits (stats/attributes). When you create your dweller, you can choose how many levels you spend on buying Essence and how many on Destiny. Each player is encouraged to experiment with what they would find as their favorite ratio. Our group was debating the pros and cons for a year and still couldn’t agree on what would be best. It truly is up to your play style and is well balanced.
OK so next you bind the runes your own (Essence) to powers and skills. Each rune can be mapped to one active power, one passive power and one skill. So if you own 5 runes, your know 5 active powers, 5 passive powers and 5 skills. OK, so now what do you do with these runes? So in this RPG there is a pay mat, and depending on where those runes end up, different things occur. At the time of this writing FOTN:R has released a much nicer playmat than what we have been using for year, so and download that one!! The mechanics and the players direct the runes accross "piles" on the playmat and that causes powers and skills to happen, attacks and dodges to occur, damage to be taken, etc...
So now onto combat. Hey what’s a blood thirsty Viking game without combat? First things first, the damage you take immediately moves runes you can use out of reach… damn realistic, each hit hurts and you feel it as you lose the ability to manifest some of your powers. Secondly, it’s visceral and tactical. The way you mix and match your runes defines the end effect. The closest thing I can compare it to is the computer game Magicka. Every hand you draw is like a poker hand, you study it, study your current predicament, study everyone's play mats and play the best actions you can. You can play lone runes, or combo them for various meta effects. There are also conditions which use tokens (poison, immobilized, immolated, etc), and that may be the only clunky part of the design. Everything else gets 5-stars for coolness, 5-stars for originality and 5-stars for working damn great (3-stars for the damn clunky condition tokens... sorry they are my pet-peeve... guys fix it in a way so you can use the runes instead of introducing tokens...).
The classes/archetypes/occupations to choose from are a subset of the the standard ones from previous FOTN editions and they add the Einherjar and Sons of Muspel. I sometimes miss some of the ones they didn't port forward to this edition (Stalo anyone?). There are no boring warrior/thief/mage/cleric stereotypes. Same can be said for the monsters and items. The nice thing about progression is that is continues the tradition started in FOTN 2e of using chess boards. No skill trees, you progress along a chess board and you can move like a king (one step in any direction). You can also have multiple power/skill chess boards, or spec to just a few. After many years, the FOTN universe has matured and taken on a very distinct flavor. We don’t need Githyanki, give us Skwee!
Now the adventuring world is new. Virtually nothing from the old FOTN worlds are used. The times are dark, gritty, ugly and dangerous. So a whole new locale has been designed to capture the mood. The NPC’s are all dark shades of grey, there is no black and white, and very few light shades of grey exist. It’s not for young kids, and I’d say it’s borderline 18+ for rating. The NPC’s aren’t you typical fare, and when we’re so desensitized to violence and cannibal NPC’s don’t phase us, the designers throw allusions of deviant sex offenders (nothing graphic but enough to shock). This keeps things far from typical unicorns and leprechauns. The closest parallel I can draw is to is Warhammer Fantasy from the 80’s.
So in conclusion, this is a system that is incredibly crunchy and full of Viking high fantasy flavor. It allows for uber character customization. Yet you can make a character in less than 2 minutes if you’re not into min-maxing. An area that all the FOTN games need improvement on is new art... I know that's subjective, but I'm not into the classical myth art from the turn of the century. But probably more importantly is a much needed source book or new edition that incorporates the missing old dearly loved archetypes ("occupations" using the old 1e lingo, yeah I'm an old timer hahaha); So Pendelhaven, if you're reading this, I want to see the two above things fixed! You got several of my e-mail too I'm sure Hahaha
ps. Best skill ever: "Drinking & Wenching"
Peace!
This is a review for the 2006 PDF edition of Fate of the Norns: Ragnarok. I'll start by saying that my group and I have been playing this game for the last 6 years on and off, and we love it. Along with Burning Wheel, these are the two staples at our gaming table.
The book is laid out in the reverse order of the previous editions. Instead of opening up with dweller (character) creation the book dumps you head first into the lore. At the end of the book is where you will find the dweller goodies.
Now the lore is very important, since it's high fantasy now, with a lot of goings on in the heavens. There is a large chunk devoted to the various worlds, the denizens of those worlds and their politics. What my group and I seriously enjoyed was the perspective from the giant side. It’s presented as a list of grievances against the gods, and it sets the stage as to why the final show-down must happen. This also sets the tone as high fantasy which is a big contrast to the second edition which we found to be low fantasy (more historical). There are two new archetypes presented here (which make an appearance later in the book for dweller creation) that weren't in the previous editions. You can now *play* as an Einherjar or Son of Muspel. For those who don't know, Einherjar and Sonce of Muspel are mortals who have been chosen at the time of their deaths, to join the big leagues as immortals. Heavy stuff! It even gets heavier, since it goes into the troubled psyche of these beings. They are not your epic level dwellers with nothing but good stuff poured on (like in other RPGs), instead they are troubled by the trauma of their deaths and have troubles adapting to bodies. The new bodies not only have heightened perceptions into spectrum not seen by humans, but also might that is tenfold that of the strongest humans. Anyhow this adds a really nice RP twist to an otherwise over the top champion!
Once the lore is done, you are then brought to the mechanics, and this is where most people will stop in their tracks and do a double take: this RPG uses no dice or cards! It uses Viking RUNE STONES instead!! Talk about a mechanic that fits the genre like an old shoe- we fell in love with this. We took a while to adapt to these rules and thanks to some friendly e-mail replies from Pendelhaven staff, we found out what we were playing incorrectly during our first few sessions. The fact that your character sheet is a bag of runes can be daunting for some players.
So the dweller breaks down like this: there are two stats, Essence & Destiny. Essence is the stat that tells you how many rune you know fromt he 24 futhark runes. And Destiny tells you how many runes you Wyrd (draw) when you need to resolve a challenge. The runes are also your Traits (stats/attributes). There are 8 physical, 8 mental and 8 spiritual (hahaha PMS acronym) and depending on how many of each you have, those are your Traits (stats/attributes). When you create your dweller, you can choose how many levels you spend on buying Essence and how many on Destiny. Each player is encouraged to experiment with what they would find as their favorite ratio. Our group was debating the pros and cons for a year and still couldn’t agree on what would be best. It truly is up to your play style and is well balanced.
OK so next you bind the runes your own (Essence) to powers and skills. Each rune can be mapped to one active power, one passive power and one skill. So if you own 5 runes, your know 5 active powers, 5 passive powers and 5 skills. OK, so now what do you do with these runes? So in this RPG there is a pay mat, and depending on where those runes end up, different things occur. At the time of this writing FOTN:R has released a much nicer playmat than what we have been using for year, so and download that one!! The mechanics and the players direct the runes accross "piles" on the playmat and that causes powers and skills to happen, attacks and dodges to occur, damage to be taken, etc...
So now onto combat. Hey what’s a blood thirsty Viking game without combat? First things first, the damage you take immediately moves runes you can use out of reach… damn realistic, each hit hurts and you feel it as you lose the ability to manifest some of your powers. Secondly, it’s visceral and tactical. The way you mix and match your runes defines the end effect. The closest thing I can compare it to is the computer game Magicka. Every hand you draw is like a poker hand, you study it, study your current predicament, study everyone's play mats and play the best actions you can. You can play lone runes, or combo them for various meta effects. There are also conditions which use tokens (poison, immobilized, immolated, etc), and that may be the only clunky part of the design. Everything else gets 5-stars for coolness, 5-stars for originality and 5-stars for working damn great (3-stars for the damn clunky condition tokens... sorry they are my pet-peeve... guys fix it in a way so you can use the runes instead of introducing tokens...).
The classes/archetypes/occupations to choose from are a subset of the the standard ones from previous FOTN editions and they add the Einherjar and Sons of Muspel. I sometimes miss some of the ones they didn't port forward to this edition (Stalo anyone?). There are no boring warrior/thief/mage/cleric stereotypes. Same can be said for the monsters and items. The nice thing about progression is that is continues the tradition started in FOTN 2e of using chess boards. No skill trees, you progress along a chess board and you can move like a king (one step in any direction). You can also have multiple power/skill chess boards, or spec to just a few. After many years, the FOTN universe has matured and taken on a very distinct flavor. We don’t need Githyanki, give us Skwee!
Now the adventuring world is new. Virtually nothing from the old FOTN worlds are used. The times are dark, gritty, ugly and dangerous. So a whole new locale has been designed to capture the mood. The NPC’s are all dark shades of grey, there is no black and white, and very few light shades of grey exist. It’s not for young kids, and I’d say it’s borderline 18+ for rating. The NPC’s aren’t you typical fare, and when we’re so desensitized to violence and cannibal NPC’s don’t phase us, the designers throw allusions of deviant sex offenders (nothing graphic but enough to shock). This keeps things far from typical unicorns and leprechauns. The closest parallel I can draw is to is Warhammer Fantasy from the 80’s.
So in conclusion, this is a system that is incredibly crunchy and full of Viking high fantasy flavor. It allows for uber character customization. Yet you can make a character in less than 2 minutes if you’re not into min-maxing. An area that all the FOTN games need improvement on is new art... I know that's subjective, but I'm not into the classical myth art from the turn of the century. But probably more importantly is a much needed source book or new edition that incorporates the missing old dearly loved archetypes ("occupations" using the old 1e lingo, yeah I'm an old timer hahaha); So Pendelhaven, if you're reading this, I want to see the two above things fixed! You got several of my e-mail too I'm sure Hahaha
ps. Best skill ever: "Drinking & Wenching"
Peace!
