#part of the spellslinger series :D

[siennamakeschaos]

IT'S SO SMOOTH AHHH 😭

[derkastellan]

Vikings: Deviating from a “non-setting” approach

The AngryGM has defined a so-called non-setting here:

“The point is, when you choose to run in the non-setting, what you’re really doing is choosing a blank slate. You can conjure up cities, towns, kingdoms, NPCs, backstories, story hooks, and anything else you need as you need them. The non-setting is a sort of template. It spells out a hazy world that you can detail as you need. And there’s enough spelled out that you really don’t have to do any work beforehand. The races, the classes, their roles in the world, the gods, all that crap that players need to know is already spelled out.“

D&D has always had a rock-solid non-setting backed in. Just enough to start your dungeon romp. You can derive it from the class flavor, you can add bits from the Monster Manual, it’s up to you. And players are rather familiar with it, its assumptions have made it into many videogames, and if not literally so, they have often been in terms of subverted tropes. People know what to expect, and the D&D tropes are more known by now in many ways than fantasy originals like Lord of the Rings, even. You expect a wizard to be a spellslinger all the time, not the more subdued occasional magic of Gandalf the Grey. D&D has taken its source inspirations and supplanted them successfully in the minds of those interested in the fantasy genre, especially role-players. In fact, it is hard to find people without such preconceived notions these days...

The “starting problem” I found myself with was of course of my own making:

Shadow of the Demon Lord is not D&D.

The setting of SotDL is absolute “grim-dark” and was unsuitable for my campaign in most parts. (It seriously suggested a “suitcase full of body parts” as starting equipment to one of my players.)

People show up with expectations from the non-setting material they find in whatever rule-set you give them.

For the most part, the idea of playing vikings came to the rescue. This provided a mythology and general feel to the whole thing. But there were problems. This campaign preceded the now popular-viking-themed TV series that paint a picture of how vikings lived. I had a good general idea about that, but I found that I had to communicate this idea to my players as well.

Deviating from “high fantasy” in terms of tech level

This started with backgrounds as professions. If your character is a chandler, you expect there be some way to do your trade, right? What I didn’t expect was players that assumed a kind of high medieval “shop & craft” culture with cities where they would find shops to buy things like in a fantasy corner store based on various themes. This idea is more from D&D than anything with its ubiquitous “weapons shops” and “general stores” where people can buy equipment. I had to let down players easy from their ideas and tell them how the setting worked (crafts practiced at home and trade-bartered to neighbors) without trying to disappoint too much.

One player was a particular hard nut in this regard, unsurprisingly the guy who was the only who had his heart set on science fantasy campaign. (And no other takers, pretty much.) I wanted to give him a chance to be the guy who eventually takes the to-be-discovered science stuff in the setting and cook up his own inventions, but he did not agree with my pacing. 

Eventually he left the campaign, having also been the one with the most deeply ingrained notions of how things “should be.” He played a dwarf, and a dwarf should have a crossbow. It was a real thing explaining to him that the setting didn’t start out like that and a true point of contention. On the one hand, it was my fault for not assuring buy-in better. But on the other hand, can you actually devise your own setting if somebody doesn’t want to let go of basic premises of what are other settings? 

That was a trap to fall into with advertsing for the least common denominator - you say “fantasy” and people might show up for an exact thing, hell, even a straightforward game of D&D with no frills, and you somehow have to manage these expectations. Even simply giving in to them would have been an option, but I prefer how it worked out in the end. I got my players’ buy-in one by one during the campaign, so all is well that ends well, I guess...

In establishing a sort of frontier setting, I had a lot of freedom beyond the basics of technology and staples like the Norse gods. I could establish my setting and do the exposition as my players encountered it gradually which is a big relief.

Odds & ends

So what remains are the bits of the non-setting I had to marry with my setting - the fantasy races. My fantasy vikings were a mixed lot, but the PCs surely were more outliers in the community. I established a rough idea of the role of dwarves and elves in my setting, and I did to halflings what most fantasy authors did to them: nothing. I established precious little for them, and people tend to ask least about them. Still, the “age of sail” setting serving as an initial foil had had a “fantasy Portugal” of halfling sailors in it that had something to tie halflings into the world as well, a sort of homeland. I just didn’t tell my players about at this point.

The good thing about making a viking setting with fantasy races was that my players could stand apart a bit from the rest of the village, being slight outsiders but also instantly recognizable. None having chosen a human in this regard was a blessing. The origin story of the orc I left as a complete mystery as I did not want a pre-established enmity between orcs and men. He was an orphan of a strange race raised by a human, which also meant I was (temporarily) depriving him of one of his starting gifts - the ability to speak “Orcish.”

And that was enough to start. Enough mythology to have a cleric of Thor, a little bit of “fae” which fits well with a Celtic-Germanic mishmash background for the northern parts of the world, and dwarves fit anywhere where it’s cold without too many questions. It did not require a fully fleshed setting, but it certainly required fleshing it out enough to answer player questions and paint a picture for them, bringing the world alive.