On Saturday, July 15th, 2017, at Crit Hit 2017 in Phoenix, Arizona (held at the Hilton Phoenix Airport), I ran a homebrewed "Viking Crawl Classics" adventure for a Road Crew event for the Goodman Games World Tour 2017! Here's the report:
As many of my readers will already know, I've had a Viking-themed fantasy campaign setting called Midhgardhur that I've been toying with since about 2004 or so, and in which I started running a regular Pathfinder campaign in 2011 (and managed on Obsidian Portal as "Heroes of Midhgardhur"). This post in in an author's blog I maintain because I also write fantasy novels and short stories set in that world (shameless plug!). As soon as DCC came out, I wanted to adapt my setting to those rules, but I have not have not really had the time or opportunity to work much on it. So I decided to try it as a Road Crew event to playtest some ideas at the local Crit Hit convention.
I had six openings, and four players showed up. I had created pregenerated 3rd level characters using Purple Sorcerer's generators, then added some tweaks of my own for the setting. The players and their characters were:
* Keith: Gudhrun the Gydhja of Freyja (Cleric of the Vanic goddess Freyja), who had been raised an herbalist
* Robert: Eitri the Alfur (Elf), who had started his career as an elven forester
* Fabien: Eldgrimur the Runecaster (Wizard), an armorer before he was initiated into the mysteries of the runes
* Ryan: Ragnhildur the Red Shieldmaiden (Warrior with berserker Mighty Deeds), a hunter before she became a warrior.
The party started out in the small settlement of Luleastadhir, near the northernmost point in the bay called the Helsingjabotn, which was frozen over for the winter, preventing travel by longship. Due to a nearby outbreak of a plague called the Red Fever which resisted magical curing, Jarl Grundi asked for volunteers willing to cross the dangerous wilderness to the south and east on foot to reach the settlement of Vyborg, where the healers had a treatment for the Red Fever. The PCs agreed to go on the quest, of course.
The players were very smart throughout most of the session. Only Keith had played DCC before, so it was a great opportunity to showcase some of the things that make DCC special. The players got some advice from the Jarl's advisor, a runecaster named Orm-Barri who had a tiny shoulder dragon familiar, but they decided to buy a local shepherd named Sorli some mead and ask about the wilderness they were to cross. They got some good intelligence on the road ahead this way. They stocked up on mead and provisions before they left, and Gudhrun spent the night in prayer before their departure.
The morning of their departure, they sought an oracle from a local spaekona (seeress) named Sigga. I ran this like an extra Birth Augur for the duration of the adventure. The spaekona sat on a wooden platform and entered a trance to tell the group's fortune. I rolled 3d6 as if for an attribute, and came up with a number that would have given a +1 bonus. So she predicted good fortune for the party. I rolled on the Birth Augur table and came up with Charmed House, for Armor Class, so all the PCs got a +1 to AC for the duration of the adventure. I think it was clear to the players that it could as easily have been a prophecy of doom, a penalty to something rather than a bonus.
Feeling emboldened by Sigga's prophecy of good fortune, the party set out across the wilderness. On the first day, they sighted campfires in the woods to the east of the shoreline they were following, and they decided to investigate. It turned out to be an encampment of Kvenir, a reindeer-herding nomadic people of the area. The party decided to try to deal with them peacefully, and so traded mead for hospitality and warnings about the road ahead. The Kvenir welcomed them to their camp, especially in exchange for mead!
As the party continued along the coast, they began to see signs that there was something big and nasty nearby - animals with impossibly large bites taken out of them, but the bite marks looked human (there was a hunter and a forester among the professions of the PCs). They determined that a frost giant was hunting in this region. They tried to avoid the frost giant's territory, but it found them, emerging from the woods hurling boulders at them. It seemed to be insane, perhaps sick or an outcast from its tribe.
The battle with the frost giant went surprisingly well. Eldgrimur got off a Reduce spell early on, shrinking the giant to half its size (still bigger than even the Vikings in this party, but much more manageable!). The frost giant did get off a critical hit on Eitri the Alfur, breaking his arm, but the heroes defeated the giant. Gydhja was able to heal the broken arm by invoking Freyja (the new players seemed pretty impressed by DCC's "lay on hands" mechanics, which account for things like healing broken limbs - also, Keith role-played his prayers to Freyja really well!).
Here, though, the party diverged from their mission a little bit. It occurred to them that the giant might have a lair and treasure nearby, so they tracked his trail into the forest for a while. This led them to some strange hills that they soon realized were haugar (ancient burial mounds)! At this point, the PCs decided that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to divert so far from their mission, and prepared to head back to the coast. Unfortunately, they were set upon by draugar (undead wights from the burial mounds).
The battle against the draugar was fierce, especially since Gudhrun's attempt to "turn unholy" did not have much effect. Some of the undead seemed to have a paralytic touch, like ghouls, and fortunately Gudhrun was able to heal Eldgrimur the Runecaster when he became paralyzed (this took a couple of tries - there was some Disapproval, and Gydhja rolled a result that required her to remove her armor and clothing to become closer to the goddess. Some hilarity ensued as the cleric stripped out of her armor and clothing in the icy cold wilderness to heal the wizard!). The draugar seemed to be a pretty serious threat, so Eitri cast a patron spell, Warhorn of Elfland, to call upon the aid of his Patron, the Vanic god Freyur. Freyur sent a small army of minor landvaettir ("land-wights," nature spirits) to help the Pcs defeat the unnatural draugar, but it was clear that Eitri now owed service to Freyur in the future.
Continuing on their journey towards Vyborg, the party entered a mountain pass that was said to occasionally be the lair of an isormur, an "icewyrm" (frost dragon). Unfortunately, they saw signs that there were more frost giants about as well (perhaps the tribe from which the mad giant they had faced earlier had been cast out). They climbed some cliffs to avoid the frost giants, narrowly escaped a seductive fey water spirit in a frozen lake, and got most of the way through the mountain pass before some failed Luck checks meant that they had attracted the attention of the ice wyrm, a linnorm-like creature. It came barreling out of a burrow in the ice to attack them, and it had a Frightful Presence that sent them running back into the mountain pass . . . towards the frost giants!
Eitri the Alfur was able to call upon his Patron, Freyur, again (we were all joking afterwards that this party owes a year and a day's service to the Vanir for all this help) and used Spellburn to achieve the highest result on Invoke Patron! The PCs all became champions of Vanaheimur, like avatars of the Vanir, for their battle with the dragon! Ragnhildur the Red Shieldmaiden went berserk (prompting me to quote the movie Erik the Viking - "It's no use going berserk against a dragon!") The fight was pretty epic, and Ragnhildur was pretty badly wounded, but a combination of sorceries brought down the beast - a Paralysis prayer from Gudhrun immobilized the monster (Keith rolled really well and I rolled a 1 for the save!), another blast on the Warhorn of Elfland brought more landvaettir warriors to attack the beast, and Spellburn on a Flaming Hands from Eldgrimur the Runecaster finished it off! The party was overjoyed at having defeated a dragon . . . and then they heard the approach of several frost giants, who heard the commotion of the battle and wanted to investigate!
The party stood triumphant over the corpse of the dragon as the giants came into view, trying to look intimidating ("We just killed a frickin' dragon!") They said they wanted to intimidate the giants by calling out to them, so I called for a Personality roll, and it came up a natural 20! So I ruled that the attempted intimidation with the corpse of the dragon as a prop was enough to send the frost giants running for reinforcements. The party decided to claim trophies from the dragon to prove their claims (like, "I'm going to carve a new drinking horn from a horn or tooth of the dragon!") and they hurried down out of the mountains to get to Vyborg, where the king welcomed the dragonslayers to his hall and agreed to send healers back to Luleastadhir.
The party decided that they would later go loot the dragon's lair, and take care of that tribe of frost giants, but it might have to wait until they had paid their debts to Freyur and the Vanir . . . so that would be another saga . . .
We ended the game at that point, but I always feel I've done my job well if they players start asking, "So wait, where can I get this core rulebook? How much does it cost? Are there any other books you'd recommend? What about that Steel and Fury supplement you had at the table?" I feel like I made some converts to DCC, which is always great. Keith was a big help with explaining the rules and talking up the game, too!
Sounds like it was a blast!
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