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By Mark Morrison
Age of Vikings by my dear friend Pedro Ziviani is my new favourite roleplaying game. It’s out now from Chaosium.
It’s also, in a way, my old favourite RPG. Back in the 1990s Penny ran a wonderful RuneQuest Vikings campaign, which I remember with such fondness that when it came time to downsize the RPG library (a constant rebalancing act, one in, one out) I parted with all of the RuneQuest 3rd edition Glorantha, but kept Vikings.
Pedro lives in Reykjavík, capital city of Iceland, and poured all that love for the people and history of his new homeland into Mythic Iceland, an award-winning Basic Roleplaying supplement that came out in 2012. I was in my first year teaching Writing for Interactive Narratives at Swinburne University, Australia, so as a writing exercise I set my students to writing a BRP adventure. I figured they needed an example to study, so I tapped into my love of Vikings and wrote “A Cold Death”, which Pedro later revised into a proper Icelandic adventure, as opposed to my “kinda Norse” version.
Age of Vikings is the new full colour revision of Mythic Iceland, now a complete game in its own right. It sits exactly between Pendragon and RuneQuest, and while I loves me some Glorantha (and always will), there’s so many exciting things about Age of Vikings that push it ahead in the play queue. The Icelanders are bonded to their farms and their families, so the game has a really strong backbone of the society of the Commonwealth period in Iceland, but feuds happen, the gods answer, and there are trolls in the knolls. (I shamelessly stole that line, it’s the title of a great book of Icelandic folk stories!) That said, the game is what you want it to be: movie vikings, historical vikings, all farms no raids, with giants or without. If you’ve got a Viking story in you, this is the game to tell it with.
Pedro and editor Jason Durall have put so much into this new edition. The Icelanders can always call on their ties to the gods or the passions that drive them to be the stars of their own saga. There are two totally different magic systems, and each feels unique to the setting: carving the runes to make your own spells with Rune Magic, or the shamanic practice of Seidur Magic, calling on gods, spirits and the land. When magic happens, it feels mythic. Combat is shield shattering and bone crunching. Once it starts, someone is going into the mud.
It’s a beautiful book. The gorgeous colour art by Ossi Hiekkala and Martyna Starczewska really evokes both the people and the setting, in a way I haven’t seen in an RPG book before: there is a peace and dignity to these Icelanders, until they go to war. It reminds me of cracking open an Osprey Book with art by Angus McBride. There’s also a wonderful map of Iceland by Colby Richards, which is reminiscent of maps of olde, inspiring all kinds of treks and adventures.
I ran this for the first time at Chaosium Con Australia last month and, shout out to my players, it’s one of the best con games I’ve ever run. We all learnt the game as we played, and seeing the players realise that their characters grew stronger by strengthening their bonds with the land, their gods and each other was truly awesome. A great saga was told. I can’t wait to tell more.
Adventure Awaits - Get your copy of Age of Vikings Today!
- Hardcover (price inc PDF): $59.99
- Special leatherette: $99.99
- PDF from Chaosium: $29.99
- PDF from DriveThruRPG: $29.99
- Quest Portal VTT: $29.99
