The Age of Vikings Companion is the first expansion for Age of Vikings. It is useful for both players and gamemasters and includes foreign and mythic hero options, expanded rules for faith and divine abilities, a new bestiary, community creation, and five adventures. A gamemaster can add any of this material to an existing campaign or use it when starting a new one.
In this article, I’d like to highlight two sections from the Companion:
- The Communities chapter, which surrounds the heroes with neighbors who have their own ambitions, loyalties, and grudges.
- and the adventure “A Ravenous Heart” that looks at Iceland from an entirely different perspective.
Building a Community
Farms in Age of Vikings produce their own food, clothing, and other necessities. Despite this independence, people place great value on their community. Life is harsh at the northern edge of the known world, and good neighbors can mean the difference between life and death when food is scarce or rivalries become bloody feuds. The people living nearby are part of a hero’s daily life, and their problems have a way of becoming the hero’s problems as well.
The rules for building a community help the gamemaster create this social world before play by quickly generating important NPCs, along with their statistics and goals. More importantly, the rules tie these people together and to the heroes. For example, someone seeks status, someone fears a neighbor, someone swears an oath, someone loves a hero, and someone else may hate that same hero, and so on. The gamemaster ends up with not only a list of NPCs, but also a network of relationships that are already causing trouble.
I also wanted the community creation process to be fun. Instead of rolling one person at a time, the gamemaster throws handfuls of dice onto the Community Sheet and assigns results according to where they land. This was inspired by how a seiðkona or another magic practitioner would cast bones and read their position for prophecies or divining someone’s intentions. The sheet represents the land surrounding the heroes, and the dice reveal its people. Through them, the gamemaster discovers who these neighbors are, what they want, and where the next conflict might begin.
All of this makes life easier for the gamemaster. If the heroes need a craftsperson, legal advice, or healing, someone may provide it, usually at a price. While the heroes are away, community members continue pursuing their motivations. When the heroes return, a marriage may have been arranged, an oath broken, or a feud started. These people can give support during an adventure, provide events between adventures, or keep an entire sandbox campaign moving.
Raven Heroes and “A Ravenous Heart”
Ravens are everywhere in Iceland, and there is a wealth of folklore about their intelligence and adventures away from humans. Gatherings of ravens are a common sight throughout the country. Icelanders call them raven assemblies. When watching one, it is easy to imagine that the birds are holding a serious discussion about matters known only to them. That was the starting point for one of the adventures in the AoV Companion, “A Ravenous Heart”.
The adventure is written for raven heroes, and it gradually builds up to a truly mythic scale, giving the heroes the chance to meet many legendary spirits, including the four great guardian spirits of Iceland.
If the gamemaster’s current campaign does not include ravens, human heroes can be temporarily transformed, and pre-generated ravens are provided. Ravens can travel across Iceland in hours, see spirits hidden from humans, receive prophetic visions, and have friends among many different species. They are also fragile, and a raven hero should think carefully before fighting anything larger than another bird. That change of scale makes even familiar situations feel different.
The Communities chapter and the adventure “A Ravenous Heart” are just two examples of the wealth of new material that the Age of Vikings Companion adds to the game, and that gamemasters can use right away.
