2015-03-23 Sagas of the Icelanders
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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.
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.
