How would you run a Viking campaign?

[Corsair14]

@KineticDiplomat- Very well worded. Your low fantasy vs high fantasy really describes my 2nd edition experiences and how I run my 5e games currently. Everything should be a challenge, every magic item, no matter how minor is important. I think its why my expectations of a game get me into so many arguments on the 5e forum and on DnD facebook sites.

[hamishspence]

I'm using it as it was coined by Llyod Alexander. Which isn't even mentioned on the TVTropes page. So shame on them.

His books were given as an example - under the Literature section of the High Fantasy page.

Them not mentioning that he invented the term, may have to do with the writer of that particular page not being interested in who invents what term.

[farothel]

In Pathfinder there is the The Northlands Saga Complete.
I'm currently in a PbP here on the forums where we use some of these classes (I'm a Huscarl, a fighter archetype):
https://forums.giantitp.com/showthre...in-the-Ice-OOC

[Ignimortis]

I dunno why everyone's saying "no" to most magic classes on a thematic basis. Odin himself is a sorcerer/wizard/whatever mage, he literally died to gain wisdom of the runes (you might flavour a wizard preparing spells as scribing runes on pebbles, actually), and there are examples of magic-users in Norse culture. Of course, the Norse looked upon women who used magic with much more respect than upon men, magic being considered an unmanly occupation (enough for men accused of doing sorcery to become societal pariahs at least partially), but there is no direct reason to ban wizardry or magic of any sort in such a campaign. Clerics might very well work just fine, if they're of the brawnier sort.

[Delta]

I don't get all that either, honestly, there really isn't a lot in the D&D core that I'd consider flat out wrong in a "viking-inspired" campaign. Some of the races, maybe, Monk might be a bit of a stretch but with a moderate amount of reskinning I don't really have a problem imagining a spiritual norse fighter using some kind of supernatural energy to fight better, and I have absolutely no idea why clerics would be out when the norse pantheon is basically brimming with gods of life and fertility and so on. Hel, you just need to click that link on the left tab to see a webcomic with one protagonist being a cleric of Thor...

As to alignment, "noble and just at home (or at least perceived to be) and brutal pillagers abroad" covers a big chunk of just about any professional "warrior caste" in history, from ancient Romans, Greeks and before through medieval knights to the modern day, so I'm not sure why vikings would be in any way more or less problematic within that framework (personally, I just scrap alignment since I just think it's a terrible idea, but that's neither here nor there)

Why Druids would be out is outright baffling to me, "mystical wild shapechangers" is like a total staple of norse mythology.

[Iku Rex]

The Svilland setting (5e) could be useful: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product...Setting-for-5e

"Svilland is a Norse Mythology inspired D&D 5E campaign setting; it is designed to bring the valour, brutality and drama from Norse tales to your roleplaying games. The game is compatible with 5E, but its theme and dynamics are very different than your usual high fantasy game. Sure, there is magic in this realm, plenty of it even. Yet, it is given in a way that reflects omens, spirits, runes and Norse deities with their true forms in the mythology. In Svilland you will learn the true meaning of blood, magic, raids, and wrath of the gods."


(I haven't tried it myself.)

[NigelWalmsley]

I dunno why everyone's saying "no" to most magic classes on a thematic basis.

Vikings honestly fit really well into a standard D&D setup. You get to have adventures that are as loosely or as tightly coupled as you want, because the characters are vikings and they spend their time sailing from fight to fight. Historically, the vikings visited North America, Europe, and even parts of Africa and bits of Russia that are technically in Asia. Obviously those were different groups of individual vikings, but if you were doing a viking campaign you would be well-justified in having the PCs hit all of them. You can have one adventure been fighting Seelie and Unseelie Fey while raiding fantasy!Ireland, and then have the next one be fighting fantasty!Russian vampire nobles. And the PCs can return to or not return to any of those at their whim.

As far as magic goes, you certainly could have a gritty, low-magic setting (that being how vikings historically operated, on account of magic not being real). But I don't see any particular reason to do that. Personally, I think a Norse setting should support at the very least Fire and Frost Giants as enemies, and character concepts like "warrior who turns into a bear to fight" and "magician who uses runes to do magic". Look at what MCU Thor gets up to. Obviously some of that is Cosmic Marvel stuff, but even within the milieu of his own basically-Norse material, he has Frost Giants, Fire Giants, various giant monsters, trolls, and Dark Elves.

Frankly, the big issue D&D has for viking campaigns isn't anything about classes or magic, but the fact that it doesn't have a particularly good vehicle system. That's the problem you're going to need to solve if your campaign is going to be centered on a group who's defining aspect is their seamanship.

[JusticeZero]

Most of the classes don't seem to fit with the aesthetic, including all of the arcane ones. Viking paganism wasn't about nature worship, so no druids, stealthy rogues are a poor fit for a culture with very little urbanisation, monks are right out and I'm not even sure about clerics.

I'll tell you what I did. I used the Pathfinder 1 SRD, because I know it better, and initially started by going through all the classes. I made a list of what classes and races were available in the setting in the area in which they started based on theme, banned a bunch of equipment, and rolled with that in an Epic-6 environment. A lot of the base classes went out the door as a result, and they were left with a crazy quilt of uncommon classes; things like Slayers, Shifters, Alchemists, Spiritualists, Dreads populate various thematic lists. They can't be an Elf or a Dwarf, but they can be a Changeling, Skinwalker, or a homebrew merfolk.
Then I used the local deity to supply them with a few items like Cure Light Wounds and Detect Magic wands.

It's working fine. They appreciate the attention to setting and adjust their tactics around the party composition.
D&D 3.5, PF were bloated with lots of material that could fill in for other roles near the end. Use that to your advantage by ruthlessly chiseling away everything that doesn't look like your setting.

[Delta]

I'm not even sure you need massively detailed vehicle rule because, while ships obviously were a huge, essential parts of viking culture, they were mainly used as a way of getting from A to B, "naval warfare" in any kind of modern sense, using the ship as more than a vehicle carrying the people doing the actual fighting close to the enemy, was still centuries away at that point, the fighting itself is still man to man and can easily be simulated by bog standard D&D, maybe giving a situational modifier or so if your captain got the ship into an especially great position for you to board the enemy or something like that.

[Corsair14]

I think Saltmarsh has at least the 5e rules for longships and naval combat. I don't know of any naval combat between Vikings and others(or each other) so I don't think it will be an issue unless they head into an area like the Mediterranean where there are established naval powers.

[Delta]

And even in the mediterranean, outside of very specific stuff like Byzantine flamethrower-ships, ship to ship combat was mostly "getting close enough so our soldiers can attack their soldiers", either with ranged weapons or boarding.

[Morty]

I guess I'm joining the people who ask "why are you using D&D for this?". There's plenty of other systems better suited for a Viking-themed game, with varying degree of historicity.

[KineticDiplomat]

@Corsair. Glad to hear it. To my mind one of the reasons D&D fails so badly as a story system in so many cases Is because it relies on extremes to avoid being boring.

A sword fight is just d20, dmg dice, d20, dmg dice until one side runs out of (insert your HP belief here). You could have Achilles fighting Hector and it would be a dull and dreary affair. Aragorn, why, he has a few vague DC checks and can roll his d20s in melee or ranged. Locke Lamora is a high cha stat with a couple social proficiencies and not much else.

Pretty soon you realize that D&D relies on you shadow stepping from the back of a dragon while firing machine lighting to fight the lord of the nine hells on the astral plane...because if it doesn’t blast you with so much spectacle that even the Silmarillion pales before you, its just a handful of poorly designed dice mechanics that have trouble handling 99.9% of what you would find in a good book or movie as anything more than a hyper simplistic roll that has little to do with your character.

Which is why it would be god awful for a game about being Vikings.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by NigelWalmsley
Historically, the vikings visited North America, Europe, and even parts of Africa and bits of Russia that are technically in Asia.

As well as Anatolia, where one group became the elite Varangian Guard.

Originally Posted by Delta
…”naval warfare" in any kind of modern sense, using the ship as more than a vehicle carrying the people doing the actual fighting close to the enemy, was still centuries away at that point….

Not sure why you say this—the Athenians developed and employed sophisticated squadron tactics a thousand years before the Vikings.

Originally Posted by KineticDiplomat
Pretty soon you realize that D&D relies on you shadow stepping from the back of a dragon…its just a handful of poorly designed dice mechanics….

You don’t seem to like the game, but there are a lot of people who have had a lot of fun with it, without requiring a “spectacle” anywhere near the degree you describe. Most games don’t reach higher levels, so by default people are having fun in lower levels.

And whether a swordfight is “dull and dreary” depends entirely on players, DM and context.

[Delta]

Not sure why you say this—the Athenians developed and employed sophisticated squadron tactics a thousand years before the Vikings.

Um... how does that contradict anything what I said? Yes, there was limited ancient naval warfare in the mediterranean, but even that was, from a gaming perspective, easily simulated by normal D&D mechanics plus some situational modifiers since in the end, it still came down to "some guy shoots/stabs other guy" with a rather limited number of direct combatants since ships generally weren't that huge, so in the end, you could easily use a regular combat encounter to model this. And even that was pretty much dead after the Punic wars, since the Romans simply never cared a lot for military use of ships unless they absolutely had to.

But we are not talking about either the mediterranean nor ancient times, we're talking high seas, long distance sea travel (which is what made the vikings so impactful because those guys simply got everywhere) during the viking age, during which there really wasn't a lot of naval warfare. Finding and engaging ships in these territories was simply impractical under most circumstances at the time, stuff like fortifying ships to be actually used as weapon platforms in direct ship to ship combat and so on is something that didn't happen until long after the viking age had ended. If two ships ever got close enough and fought, it was by trying to tie the ships together somehow, board and get into close combat, which again, sounds like something you can easily simulate via a standard D&D encounter.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Delta
Yes, there was limited ancient naval warfare in the mediterranean….

I encourage you to read Lords of the Sea, which will give you a much broader perspective on naval operations in the ancient world.

[Jeivar]

The Svilland setting (5e) could be useful: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product...Setting-for-5e

"Svilland is a Norse Mythology inspired D&D 5E campaign setting; it is designed to bring the valour, brutality and drama from Norse tales to your roleplaying games. The game is compatible with 5E, but its theme and dynamics are very different than your usual high fantasy game. Sure, there is magic in this realm, plenty of it even. Yet, it is given in a way that reflects omens, spirits, runes and Norse deities with their true forms in the mythology. In Svilland you will learn the true meaning of blood, magic, raids, and wrath of the gods."


(I haven't tried it myself.)

Holy crap. Thanks for pointing this out to me.

[False God]

Skipping by everything so far, the real question is:

Do you want to run a game about vikings?

Or

Do you want to run a game with viking themes?

Honestly, D&D may not be the best game for the former. You might be better served by a more "epic" style of TTRPG than D&D's more gritty by-the-numbers gameplay. Getting a party together of mighty warriors to go forth and conquer and pillage might not be so fun when one of them takes a lucky crit to the face and has to roll up a new character. I'd advice a more storytelling game to get that more beowulf-"Vikings the TV show" epic sort of feel. (I'm sure there's some sort of "L5R but with vikings" game out there.)

For the latter, all you really need is to surround the characters with a sense of "viking culture". What classes you do or do not include really doesn't matter at that point, as long as the players feel like vikings. The 5E setting already recomended is a good example of how to do that without trying to make the game about "real vikings".

On a final note, if what you're going for is historical accuracy, I'd just say don't do that.

[Delta]

I encourage you to read Lords of the Sea, which will give you a much broader perspective on naval operations in the ancient world.

Thanks, I will have a look at that. But I think concerning the topic, my point very much stands, ship to ship naval combat wasn't really a thing during the era and area we're talking about, that only came much later with more technological advances in shipbuilding, navigation and arms. The fact that makes viking such feared seamen wasn't that they directly attacked other ships, it was the simple fact that they managed to travel over vast distances and difficult seas more reliably, quickly and in numbers no one living on those coasts had really thought possible up until that point.