So, What About Those Vikings!

Inspiration for Heroic Dark Age Fantasy Role-Play

The so-called "dark ages" are poorly documented - hence the name. It's not that the sun shone less brightly between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Renaissance in Europe, rather learning took a step backward. Literacy seems to have declined and the established social order that had once been a rule of law deteriorated to a point of decentralized petty warlords who imposed their personal will through might of arms. There is a lack of specific facts in many cases, lending speculation a free hand. It's "dark time" in human history - at least that is the popularized version of sixth through fourteenth century history that I recall, and I find all this very liberating and inspiring from a story-teller's perspective.

Role-Playing games are a form of cooperative story generation. The referee usually sets the stage for the players who direct the actions of their characters within the limits imposed by what-ever rule system and dice rolls are used. We call this a game because the object is for everyone to have some good, social, fun.

What it isn't is a history lesson. When we play, we are creating fiction. Indeed, this may take on the form of "historical fiction" if we borrow certain aspects from history (as we understand it) and the result is something akin to historical novelization as practiced by writers of historical fiction. The popular "Viking" image has roots in history, but it is also so much more, often combining legend, myth and imagination to create something which never truly existed, but maybe should have!

My own FRP games which have been nominally set in a Viking Age have been influenced by years of my exposure to various influences, literary and otherwise, some of them riffs on their author's exposure to diverse sources of inspiration. It's how stories develop.

In this post I shall give credit to some of the more salient sources of inspiration that have greatly influenced my thinking on role-play in a Viking Age.

The Broken Sword, written by Poul Anderson, is not the first book I recall having read about Vikings (that distinction belongs to a children's book by Ingri d'Aulaire titled Leif the Lucky), but it is the first that comes to mind when I contemplate major influences. In The Broken Sword, Mr. Anderson relates a fantastic tale of not only Northmen, but elves, trolls and magic. The cover illustration image above hardly does the novel justice in my eyes, but it's probably a marketing decision. The elves and trolls in The Broken Sword bear little resemblance to those found in Professor Tolkien's fiction or those depicted in Dungeons & Dragons, but they are memorable and have a nice "Viking Age" feel to them.

Eric Brighteyes by H.R. Haggard and Styrbiorn the Strong by E.R. Eddison are two additional novels that have greatly influenced my thinking. Both written more than a century ago, they present a more romanticized version of Norse culture than either The Broken Sword or history books do. Likely inspired by the Old Norse Eddas, both novels tell a tale of a bigger-than-life hero doomed to live out a fate that unravels like the thread of a tapestry.

A more recent discovery, Guy Gavriel Kay's The Last Light of the Sun has also become a favorite source for gaming inspiration. Set in a version of the period of Alfred the Great, the novel draws upon myth and legend, folk tales and history and weaves an epic tale I have found myself returning to many times to drink of its magical waters (yes, there is an enchanted pond in the novel where a creature of fairyland is first glimpsed).

Blending fact and fiction, gritty realities with mystical fancies, and the traditions found in epic saga, the fictional world of Vikings can offer the FRP gamer a dragon's horde of treasures from which to weave our own heroic tabletop tales.