Getting Everything Out of “The AlÞing”

Welcome to the Age of Vikings! 

In this blog we’ll discuss various ways to expand and improve your gaming experience with the new Age of Vikings roleplaying game.

In this first installment, we’ll discuss the introductory adventure in the Age of Vikings core rulebook, “The AlÞing” (pronounced “all-thing”). This adventure is an open-ended sort of affair, focusing around the National Assembly, a yearly occurrence that combines People’s Court, county fair, networking event, and family reunion. 

It’s meant to be re-usable, but for some gamemasters and player groups, it may be a bit too loose in format, with an emphasis on social maneuvering and problem-solving versus… well, fighting monsters or going toe-to-toe against fierce Viking warriors. 

Here are some suggestions on how to take that adventure and open it up, unpacking some of the events, and/or expanding on the many opportunities it presents. 

Looking at the adventure itself, there are several ways to insert content in or around the events of the AlÞing, or in the surrounding territory. Whenever something refers to the core book, a page number is provided. 

[SPOILER ALERT: Following are many spoilers for “The AlÞing” adventure. Proceed at your own risk.] 

Before the AlÞing

Getting to the AlÞing in southwest Iceland can be an adventure in itself. It’s a journey of many days across rocky and desolate terrain, though fortunately it’s in the spring, which is better than in the winter. Heroes can run into outlaws or run afoul of landowners whose properties they’re crossing. Hospitality is a big deal to the Norse, but many are the problems faced by the folk of saga-age Iceland. The heroes might become embroiled in some local feud, or run into difficulties with a rival from their personal histories. Perhaps trouble follows them from home!

Trouble can be supernatural in nature. The heroes might cross paths with supernatural creatures (maybe a troll stealing one or more of their cattle), a nykur (p272) shows up and tries to lure one of the heroes to their doom, or their cattle accidentally absorbed part of a herd of sea cattle (p268) and local merfolk are desperate to get them back.

Around the AlÞing 

Once the heroes get close to Assembly Plain, where the AlÞing is held, there’s no shortage of nearby adventure and/or places of interest. 

Taking a look at the map of Iceland (pages 222-223 and inside front and back covers) there’s Cold Valley (page 236), within 5 miles of the site of the National Assembly. Within 25 miles or so are Children’s Falls (page 219) and Tongue Rock (page 220). A quick scan of those entries reveals that within 20-25 miles of the site of the AlÞing, one can find:

• Caves often used by outlaws 
• A canyon haunted by ghost children 
• A cave leading down to Surtur’s realm of Múspellsheimur 
• Other caves supposedly leading to Niffleheimr, ruled by Hel
• A door to a realm of the hidden people
• A fjord that’s home to a wicked whale that terrorizes ships and fishermen
• A community of almost 180 outlaws, led by a man named Hörður 

Holy Hill (Helgafell, page 220), about 28 miles away, is the holiest spot in the land and supposedly those who climb its peak respectfully get three wishes from Þór (Thor). The area also contains portals to Ásgarður (land of the gods), Álfheimur (land of the elves), Niflheimur (land of the dead), all of which are guarded by the Great Eagle Vindsvall, one of the four mightiest animals in all of Iceland.

Go another 15 miles to the southwest and you’ve got a monster-haunted glacier (Under the Glacier, page 221), a troll-plagued ruined temple to Þór (Þór’s Headland, pages 223-224), a pass guarded by a fierce and cursed giantess (Blue Mountain, page 233), an active volcano that leads to the realm of the dead (Hooded Cloak Mountain, page 235), and more. This is some amazing tourism! 

Most of those locales have at least one myth or associated story seed that can be easily adapted into an adventure. 

At the AlÞing 

Once the heroes are there, the heroes can become immersed in the events depicted in the adventure, or even be called away for side adventures to any of the above-described areas. The AlÞing itself is a two-week long event in which people often arrive several days early, so there can always be prelude adventures that take heroes away from the site to solve a problem in the vicinity, and they can easily return before the AlÞing is over. 

Looking at the events described within the adventure itself, here are a couple of potential opportunities to do more with the existing story seeds:

• Brother Colum, the Irish priest (page 294) approaches the heroes and asks for their help in a difficult matter. One of the other attendees at the AlÞing has in their possession a cross that is wanted by the gođi he’s there under the protection of. The gođi is thinking of becoming a Christian and wants that very cross. However, the people of his community—some of which are present at the AlÞing—don’t want to become Christian. If the heroes help the priest find and get the cross—in the possession of a Viking who took it in a raid—they gain the favor of the gođi. However, this might enrage the Viking who owns the cross, who offers it as a reward for a fight. Or the people of the gođi’s district ask the heroes to mind their own business.
• The final story seed in the adventure (page 297) mentions a few visiting gods, disguised as mortals. During the very first playtest of this adventure, the gamemaster improvised having a certain shapeshifting trickster hide his half-brother’s hammer and cast an illusion over a treasured but non-magical hammer owned by the blacksmith Gautráður (page 292). In a drunken haze, the red-bearded storm god stumbled into the blacksmith’s tent while it was deserted, and claimed the hammer as his own, causing much dismay and a widespread search for the apparent thief. To stave off trouble, a one-eyed old man leaning on a staff enlisted the heroes to find the hammer before things got out of hand. [Spoiler: Things quickly got out of hand.]

After the AlÞing 

And even after the AlÞing has drawn to a close, there is no shortage of story threads to expand on, and to these the gamemaster might want to add a complication stemming from one of the legal cases the heroes settled, perhaps immediately, or even months after the AlÞing.

• The murder of Hrafn Hrollason can have more victims. Depending on how the case was settled, the family and kin of those who were ruled against seek the heroes out and begin to harass them, cause problems for their families, besmirch their reputations, etc. The heroes must then find out who and why, and challenge the offenders, either legally or with threat of violence.
• The unhappy couple Steingestur and Álfdís are perhaps still in their love/hate relationship (or have returned to it), and blame the heroes for the decision that either got them divorced or put them back together. They have enlisted the help of a seiđkona (or runemaster) to cause the heroes some problems. Perhaps this takes on the form of a plague of bad luck (the heroes’ Luck scores become reversed, so they are constantly having terrible things happen to them). Maybe finding the solution is discovering a scorn pole or a magic curse item, then confronting the one who made it and tracing it back to the unhappy couple.
• Killer-Gest is unhappy with the judgment and seeks out those who decided against his brother, Ari the Black. Killer-Gest and some of his allies come for the heroes and ambush them on the way back home from the AlÞing. They try to provoke the heroes into conflict while guesting at another landowner’s house, which creates a problem as rules of hospitality and honor come into play.

There’s also the simple matter of settlements. If the heroes were tasked with resolving one or more of these cases, they may also be asked to help collect and deliver the settlements awarded as a result of their decisions. Getting a lot of money out of people who don’t want to pay can easily become the stuff of sagas… the bloody kind that involves going toe-to-toe with fierce Viking warriors!