An RPG set in the Doom of Ragnarök, utilizing Robert J. Schwalb's Shadow of the Demon Lord rules and based in Ian Sharpe's Vikingverse.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Character Creation - a quick example
over 2 years ago
– Fri, Aug 05, 2022 at 11:06:33 PM
Hello,
Today, I am aiming to showcase how to build a character in When the Wolf Comes - and test out the freshly designed character sheet at the same time.
Introducing Grábakr
One of my favourite characters in Loki's Wager is Grábakr, so I have used him for inspiration. In myth, "Greyback" was one of the serpents that slither at the foot of the world-tree Yggdrasil (attested in the eddic poem Grímnismál). In the novel, I describe him as a bipedal, maned serpent with a razor-blade smile.
Step One
So, to make Grábakr, first of all, I pick an Origin. This character is a járnviðja (járnviðjur is the plural). Now, I get it. Not everyone is going to want to say "Yarn-vith-ja", so it is perfectly fine to use the English version "Child of the Ironwood", or even Ironwoodite.
In contrast to their vicious reputation, most Children are exceedingly well educated and mild mannered - hand-reared, they borrowed polite, unassuming tones from the Verðandi sisterhood. While they are capable of acts of carnage and chaos, they are living proof that nurture trumps nature, and love conquers all.
Step Two
Given this Origin, the book contains various tables to help inspire character creation, although you are of course, free to choose or make up your own.
Grábakr rolls on the Background chart, and rolls an 18. This gives him a rather rare brain-machine interface, granting the following ability: You can use a triggered action on your turn to communicate telepathically with any willing creature that knows at least one language and is within 20 yards of you. The effect lasts for 1 minute and has three uses daily.
I then roll on the Age, Build and Appearance charts. Some járnviðjur increase their stats here: Grábakr turns out to be old, grizzled but immensely broad. His Size increases. This suits me just fine: Grábakr is a gentle giant. Less helpfully, a roll on the Lifestyle table reveals he is a thrall (perhaps recently escaped from slavery?)with no equipment to speak of.
Step Three
Some gamers might play out a Level 0 character and their first fledgling adventures, but I am going to skip ahead and advance to Level 1.
Ironwoodites are quicker than most other Origins, but I plan to follow the path of the Wise. His brain was tampered with for a reason! I take some Scientific Professions, and boost his Will. Grábakr is expert at understanding the properties of matter, skillful with semiconductors and bio-mechanics as per his mech-heritage. He also has the gift of Soul Sight, and a keen grasp of the laws of fate. Combined with his engineered telepathy, we are creating a serpent-savant!
Grábakr learns the Gand craft, and selects a range of spells. Practitioners are able to control the elements, manipulating root-particles and sister-particles to hurl projectiles or seize the wind. The craft is a matter of atmospherics, sonic weaponry and gravity manipulation and requires that Grábakr be able to speak Double-Dverg. It also requires a Field Kit as an instrument - which as a runaway slave, we can't afford. Probably a priority to beg, borrow or steal one in the near future!
The Character Sheets
If you are familiar with Shadow of the Demon Lord, you'll note that some of the Attributes have changed -Agility replaced by Sleight, for instance. In the Vikingverse setting, names have power; Óðinn sacrificed himself to learn their secrets (not to mention the French language fell into decline after the capture of Parisborg in 885AD, and Latin was made illegal after the Fall of Rome less than two centuries later) So, in the setting Slœgð/Sleight is a much more suitable term than Agilité/Agilitatem/Agility. That said, the changes here are broadly cosmetic, so if you want to stick to what you know, be my guest. Just make sure you've squared it with the Norns.
Hopefully, that gives you a taste of Character Creation, and inspires some ideas while you wait for the full rulebook.
Best,
ISS
Virtual Valhǫll - Your guide to getting Roll20 Goodness
over 2 years ago
– Wed, Aug 03, 2022 at 10:05:58 PM
Hello!
Thanks for bearing with us as we got into figured out our Virtual Table Top planning.
If we hit that big stretch goal, we'll be creating a When the Wolf Comes Compendium for Roll20 - basically, making the rule book available for online play. Most Compendiums sell for $30-50 USD.
Our plan is this:
If you have backed at the Mánagarmr tier ($50CAD) or above, which is about 70% of backers, we'll be providing you with unlock keys free of charge. Once the Compendium is built and approved in the Roll20 system, I'll distribute those keys to you.
If you backed at a lower tier ($25CAD or less), we hope you consider upgrading and getting the most bang for your buck!
Considering the shared DNA between the two games, we hope that the Wolf Compendium will lay the foundation for a Shadow conversion in the future! It's like an investment in the End of the World, always a good bet ;).
This should be a win-win scenario. Víst munum vér sigr hafa.*
That said, there is about a week to go on the campaign and we have a way to go unlock the Roll20 stretch goal. But, you are Vikings. You aren't about to twiddle your thumbs and let someone else steal all the glory.
Here is a short guide of easy actions that might make a difference:
Follow or tag @Vikingverse on Twitter and tweet about the campaign. Tag in @roll20app and make some noise.
Facebook referrals represent 7% of all pledges. Follow the Vikingverse page and share some posts to your feed or gaming groups.
Ping your pals on Discord and share the link to the Kickstarter.
Mass a raiding party at the gates of Reddit.
Get your gaming group to pledge on an oath ring to try something that isn't 5th edition D&D.
Run round Gencon this week and find Jeremy from Outland Entertainment and his wonderful cover illustration. Make him TikTok famous.
* A friend of mine recommended actually spelling out the pronunciation for these Old Norse phrases, otherwise people glaze over and don't read. So to make it easy, I have cued up the exact spot on the audio guide (TC 4:05 of Chapter Six, click the image to go there).
** TC 2:06 Chapter Five
Our friends in Hel
over 2 years ago
– Tue, Aug 02, 2022 at 04:52:56 PM
There is a saying in Old Norse (well, in the TV Show Norsemen):
"Keep your friends close and your enemies a little bit further away". Geym vini þína nærri, ok óvini þína ǫrlítit lengra frá.
As I was preparing for our campaign launch, I kept seeing ads for Hellguard: Curse of Caina. Hellguard is a a tabletop roleplaying game of infernal fantasy, complete with five single-night adventures and tools to create others. The team at Granite Glyph Publishing Co always seemed to be one step ahead in press and promos, and got a Kickstarter Project We Love badge. Clearly, they had done a deal with the djöfull!
But we are all bound by the invisible threads of the Norns. It turns out, they also have a cool set of tokens being made by Campaign Coins. Soon enough, our good friend there, Mark Morrison, introduced us. We've been chatting ever since about the ups and downs of the Kickstarter life.
I've been so impressed with their game AND their sense of camaraderie that I upped my pledge today. They are approaching their last 24 hours and they really deserve a look.
Best,
ISS
Hell is empty
And all the devils are here.
Tómt mun í helvíti
Ok djǫflar allir eru hingat komnir.
Origins (Part Two)
over 2 years ago
– Tue, Aug 02, 2022 at 01:41:21 AM
Hello!
To celebrate passing another stretch goal - we'll get to work on those digital spell cards! - I wanted to share the remaining Origins for those who have been patiently waiting.
From left to right - and not to scale:
The Járnviðjur are the Children of the Iron Wood, animals given sentience and turned into beasts of war. Built for conflict, these child soldiers are orphans to a war they barely comprehend. They can take many forms, from great maned serpent-savants to armoured dogmen, each boasting a devious array of genetic circuits, computational organs and recombinant plasmids.
The Jötnar are a race of monstrous experiments, mutants engineered for strength, size and insurrection. Born of desperation and struggle and cast as avenging angels in a war for the heavens, they remain locked in a bitter fight for freedom – and survival. Most jötnar remain broadly bipedal but use animals to inspire and ornament their evolving forms, much as menn use tattoos.
Dökkálfar are a race of living statues, ancestral spirits caged inside ironwood shells by a twist of fate. Masters of earth and dust, they are both feared and renowned for their devastating artifice. Centuries of isolation have left many of their kind detached, capricious and vain, jealous of those who still rejoice in the music of Yggdrasil, and dismissive of new-fangled automatons.
The Álfar are the true scions of Yggdrasil, her bark and bough made flesh and marrow. But be warned, the “elves” of the Vikingverse are not Tolkien’s pointy-eared archers or Victorian faerie folk. They are spirits, pattern-welded into weapons - and for all their dazzling brilliance, they harbour hearts as cold as stone.
The Orcneas are creatures of vacuum and void, corpses reanimated by the spirits of the condemned. The last panicked broadcasts from Mímisbrunnr branded them the “Eaters of the Dead”. The Wise have identified three main genotypes: the so-called Sons of Muspell smoulder with an unquenchable fire; the Sons of Nifl have shimmering blue skin and crackle with cold; the Sons of Ginnungagap have an ink black skin that reflects the stars.
Now, there is even more revealed in a Discord Q&A I did last night at the Randomworlds RPG Server. The chat log is here for the dedicated!
Now, if you'll excuse me, I’ve got to see a man about a wolf*.
Haf þú mik afsakaðan, ek þarf at finna mann sakir úlfs.
Best,
ISS
*It just occurred to me, this phrase might be lost on, well, just about everyone. Here is it's origin and meaning. If you get this far in the update, please do post a comment to let me know if you'd ever heard it before!
Deep Delving with the Dvergar
over 2 years ago
– Sun, Jul 31, 2022 at 10:06:14 PM
Hello!
I had a great question today from a backer, which deserves a detailed answer. The question was: "Will dvergar always look as alien as on the illustration above?".
I'm going to answer that in a variety of ways, and I hope it helps.
Firstly, we are creating illustrations designed to capture the imagination. Ger (the artist) and I went back on forward on the concepts for the dvergar a lot. I wanted to keep the "beginner" dverg boxy and functional. But it is your game, you can design your character however you wish. The goal here is to take the essence of Norse myth and made it into a playable, and fun, origin. If you want to stick horns on your dverg, you go right ahead.
Secondly, the Origin description excerpted below will doubtless help inform how you design your dverg. And I choose my words carefully there, because designing your "machine-man" is very much like designing a car. In some senses, they are similar to Shadow's Clockwork ancestry. They also have a dash of Replicant and a touch of Marvin, but their inherent Norseness ensures dvergar are considerably more crafty.
Thirdly, as your thread your way through the Vikingverse, you will choose different paths. Origins are just that - a starting point. A dvergar who takes a martial path will adapt, evolve and augment his form until he looks something like this:
Dvergar Path Progression
Machine Men
Designed to provide their masters with slave labour, dvergar range in size and function from rigid-bodied industrial behemoths to minute drones that aid in medical procedures - and everything in between. The first dvergar were assembled centuries ago by the great Langbarð polymath, Lewenhart of Meilangsborg. He built them as war machines, bonding mineral and metal, oil and polymer to give the illusion of life to his mechanical brutes. The devices became especially sought-after during Time of Travels as unquestioning and reliable thralls, able to work in the harsh conditions of the hinterworlds without complaint or injury.
Branching Code
Níu Heimar pioneers experimented with new materials, infusing ironwood, fluid sacs and soft resins into the steel and stone frames. This made the machine men more adaptable, but it inadvertently gave them a degree of sapience. Now linked to the consciousness of Yggdrasil, these accidental engines came to be known as svartálfar or dökkálfar – corrupted, ungainly versions of true álfar, but carrying with them centuries of wisdom.
Artificial Intelligence
The emergence of the dökkálfar terrified the Wise and stifled dvergcraft for over a century. Only with the outrbreak of war did Midgard’s most industrious minds turn their attention back to mechanised labour. The Skuld began to mass produce new models under the direction of High Lector Niði Bohr. These new designs are colloquially known as Bots, a contraction of Bohr’s Thralls.
Dvergar are heavily reliant on memory, continuously reading instructions stored there and executing them as required. The near-omniscient supercomputer MIM provides access to vast amounts of data, allowing dvergr to perform complex computations with great speed, even translating intangible concepts like minni into observable reality.
Tall Stories
Dwarves, like elves, are commonplace in fantasy: despite their small stature, they are tough as nails, boasting big beards and bigger axes. Which makes it more startling that, in the early Norse sources, there is no mention of their being short! The literal smallness of the dwarves was a product of Christianization, earlier texts like the Völuspá mention only that they were the product of the primordial blood of Brimir and the bones of Bláinn; the Prose Edda describes them as maggots that festered in the flesh of Ymir before being gifted with reason by the gods. In When the Wolf Comes, dvergarcomes in all shapes and sizes.
Any Colour You Want
…so long as it is black.
One of the first great dvergar magnates, Heimríkr Fjǫrð, famously said that his customers could have their dvergar in any colour they wanted, as long as it was black - a comment that has defined all subsequent dvergar manufacturing. There is an expediency to this approach: most bots are made almost entirely from mímameiðr, which is notoriously difficult to paint. While there has been a degree of experimentation with other composites and colouration, most designers tend to favour sleek, black boxes that they never go out of fashion. For simplicity, most dvergar have four wheels or a number of continuous tracks.
Once activated, dvergar tend to be dour and dismal. Philosophers have speculated as to whether this is due to ironwood itself or their bleak colouration. Libertarians point out that being purpose built for domestic drudgery hardly inspires the best in the dvergar, but it remains true that they are by nature, treacherous, lustful and vengeful creatures and the device most often returned under warranty.
Dvergar are factories in and of themselves, able to replicate a wide variety of tools and technologies with a high degree of competence. Whether they will actually do so depends on their mood, which is often…dark.
Built-In Obsolescence
Just four decades ago, almost no one owned a personal dverg. Today, nearly everyone is bothered by a truculent black box. To ensure new models sell, dvergar are manufactured with an artificially stunted working life, designed to become obsolete inside five years. After this allotted span, their power supply fails, and their neural networks uploaded to the Evergreen. These short lifespans are often truncated further by violent conflict or extremely hazardous tasks. Given their origins, dvergar are sometimes called (ironically) Longbeards or (pejoratively) Wormfood.
Dvergar Names
Dvergar have runic bar codes stencilled onto their chassis during assembly, which encodes identifying data and allows them to access Evergreen networks. While the bar codes are machine readable, they are incomprehensible to humans without a suitable optical scanner, so most dvergar go by their brand name when in mixed company.
