Black Gate

It’s Christmas. You’ve got everybody together. Perhaps you’ve all watched Stranger Things  and now you have the urge to dust down your dice, dig out the Dungeon Masters’ Guide and introduce whatever kids just happen to be lying around to the imaginative world of your youth.

Or perhaps in a fit of nostalgia, you made a Christmas present to yourself of a recently published role-playing game, but the only available players right now are under 12. Or perhaps you’re like me, a life long player, and this is just a good moment to share the joy.

So how do you go about introducing kids to tabletop role-playing?

Really very easily, as it happens. The youngest child I’ve GM’d for was my 5-year-old-daughter when she crashed a party of 9-year olds, found all the traps and made off with the loot. Having done this a few times and talked to other gamer-parents, I’ve noticed a few things…

(Geek and Sundry beat me to the punch on this one (link), but my take is slightly different.)

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Some time ago I celebrated the new Modular series of Black Gate posts by contributing my own enthusiastic review of the four English-language volumes in the current Yggdrasill roleplaying game line. I’m grateful for the many responses to that post and for the reader recommendations of other Norse-related rpg material. I would collect all roleplaying game materials, regardless of game ethos or genre, but my budget won’t allow it. So I’ve narrowed my collection to Norse and Viking-themed materials. Hey, I tell myself, I’m actually running a Viking-themed game right now, using Yggdrasill, and I can justify this expense by believing, truthfully or not, that I’ll find some practical gaming use for it.

As I collect these materials, I notice that they sort into three or four categories:

• Actual “full” roleplaying games; what I mean here is that the product comes complete with rules and setting designed to emulate, in particular, the kinds of experiences one expects from a Norse-themed roleplaying game
• Sourcebooks and campaign settings, using the real world “Viking Age” as inspiration but designed to be used with an existing “Core Rules Set” (like D20 or GURPS, Fate Core, etc.)
• Campaign settings, adventure paths, or standalone modules that detail a particular region of a fantasy world that is designed to emulate, within that secondary world, a “Viking Age” roleplaying experience

That’s right: I said three “or four” categories. The fourth category constitutes an “Appendix Y” — Appendix Yggdrasill — if you will, the reading I have been doing for most of my life that informs the kind of Viking Age adventure that I want to evoke in my roleplaying game. I might find occasion to comment on these works, as well, for they’re just as relevant as actual gaming material.

I intend to use these rough categories to frame the reviews of my developing collection. And I begin today with an item from the first category — well, I’m placing it in this category, even though Vidar Solaas’s Vikings RPG (2008) has been built using the D20 system. Attempting to use D20 to emulate a more or less “authentic” Viking Age experience has required Solaas to modify, rebuild, or “hack” the D20 rules set so drastically that Vikings RPG does indeed qualify as a game in its own right.

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