Vikings

A Saga of Adventure Gaming!

Anyone familiar with RuneQuest in any of its editions will recall that it is a d100 roll under skill based fantasy role-playing game system - one of the "second wave" in the once-new role-playing designs of the late 1970s. RuneQuest, being among those games that explore the use of mechanics different from a straight house ruling of The World's First Role-Playing Game's system, it represnts a departure from the class-based roll a d20 to succeed games. As an early percentile based RPG and one that combines a default setting markedly different from the Tolkien/classic fantasy worlds, RQ sets an example that influences many later RPG designs.

As gamer legend has it, RuneQuest (1978) came about as the result of The Chaosium (Greg Stafford) wanting a role-playing game to compliment the Glorantha setting used in previous boardgames and having tried a house rules version of the popular game published by TSR, they instead developed their own ground breaking system (RuneQuest) that would eventually be the game engine for an entire line of games published by Chaosium, known collectively as Basic Role-Playing (BRP). 

Much of the success of the BRP family of games is largely due to the intuitive nature of the D100 roll under mechanic, skill based character profile (rather than class based) and its flexibility and modularity lending itself readily to customization such as can be seen when comparing Call of Cthulhu to RQ (take out RQ's hit location system, add in rules for Sanity, etc.). Adaptability has become almost synonymous with BRP - which is arguably one of the first "generic" systems for RPGs.

In 1984 Avalon Hill published RuneQuest 3rd Edition. Written by the same good folks at Chaosium that had developed previous versions, 3rd edition RuneQuest seems a logical "upgrade" to its predecessors. The Avalon Hill Game Co. added a fantasy Europe setting to the RQ box set - perhaps in a marketing  effort to appeal to the many historical wargamers who had traditionally formed a large part of Avalon Hill's customer base. The "fantasy Europe" idea certainly appealed to me at the time, and it still does. 

One of the early releases for the 3rd edition would be the boxed supplement RuneQuest Vikings (1985).

As anyone who has seen even a single episode of the recent Vikings dramatization on the History Channel knows, the "Viking" image is one that lends itself readily to larger-than-life stories. A blend of fact and fiction accompanies much of the popular images we associate with the Vikings. Explorers, warriors and sailor merchant/pirates, the Vikings are commonly seen as a romanticized mystic warrior culture, familiar yet also fantastic - and a nearly perfect setting for role-play and adventure.

My journey into FRP games, particularly those featuring a more history feel, took a sharp turn in 1986 with the then new Harnmaster rules. Drawn to Columbia Games Harnmaster's cover art which depicts a very Norman looking knight in the forground and a burning village in the background, I soon discovered in Harnmaster 1st edition a D100 skill system that felt familiar nestled within the pages and as a bonus, one that seemed to offer a couple of improvements over the RQ system it most closely resembled. For example, RQ uses what we now call a "degrees of success" distinction in the form of critical, fumble and special success rolls alongside simple success and failure results. The extreme low end and high end of the D100 range being used to calculate the numbers that produce these extraordinary or "special" outcomes. Keeping a running count of what the specific values are that count as a critical or special result could be a bit cumbersome as that target number range changes along with the effects of fatigue and according to various situational modifiers.

Harnmaster uses a D100 roll under mechanic similar to that of BRP/RQ, but substitutes the rolling of "doubles" on the percentile dice for high and low range in determining a critical or fumble result. Double digits (like "55" or "99") trigger the rules for a critical if the total value is less than the target and therefore a success and if a failure, rolling doubles becomes a fumble in Harnmaster.

The hit location and armor layering systems in Harnmaster seem more detailed and "realistic" when compared to those I had experienced in RQ and wounds in Harnmaster are not merely lost hit points, but rather involve a narrative description such as a "minor injury to the skull" or a "grievous elbow wound" (either of which is liable to become infected). In the late 1980s this sort of detail was exactly what I sought in my role-play gaming - a brutal degree of "realism".

Orbaal (a supplement for the Harn setting, published by Columbia Games) was transformative in migrating my Viking dark age low fantasy Europe campaign from RuneQuest 3rd edition to Harn. Orbaal, like other early Harn material, is written without a specific game system, no doubt in part due to Harnmaster being only an idea at the time. The island realm of Orbaal is a kingdom with close connections to mainland Ivinia - itself a fantasy version of the old Norse culture and it therefore shares some nice parallels with the Vikings of myth, legend and history while offering the creative freedom of a fantasy setting. By about 1986 I was referee for a band of Viking enthusiast gamers and using the Orbaal module and my own fictional Otar's Isle lore I had developed for RQ Vikings, drawing inspiration from various sources including several favorite horror and ghost stories. But, that is a saga for another day.