Season 3 of the Black City Vikings Campaign

 

The Saga of Thule, Book III — The Exiles of the Sea-Wolf

“In the north beyond the whales’ road, where the sea smokes and the sun forgets to set, there lies the island of the Black City. There the stones remember what men were not meant to know.”

The Age of Discovery

A score of winters past, Harald Olvirson was blown off his course while steering for Hibernia. His ships struck the fog-bound isle that men would name Thule, and in its ruins he found gold shaped like triangles, gems that shone with cold fire, and crystals that sang when struck.
He returned rich and envied, built a harbor camp, and claimed lordship of Thule. Many followed him. Most never returned.

The Rise of the Sea-Wolf

Among the later voyagers came Sigurd the Daring, captain of the Sea-Wolf out of the Isle of Mann. His crew of freemen and oath-brothers delved the Black City’s frost-sealed streets and the Grey catacombs below. They returned with relics and silver enough to feast a kingdom.
In the summer of A.D. 833 they held the Feast of the Four-Hundred and Forty Pounds, when the air itself shimmered with heat from their fires. There Sigurd met Helga the Seid-Wife, companion once to Red-Hrolf the Axe-Lord of Jutland. Before all gathered she turned from Hrolf and chose Sigurd, saying:

“Wyrd bends for the daring; a lord you shall be, though your throne stand upon ice.”

That night Sigurd’s men swore him Jarl beneath the aurora. The sea froze in the bay and shattered like glass, and the Blue Obelisk flared upon the horizon.

The Fall into Exile

Red-Hrolf’s wrath made the Isle of Mann a knife’s edge. Helga’s choice and Sigurd’s new title turned kin against kin. By the next thaw the Sea-Wolf sailed north again—exiles by choice and by wyrd, bound for the ruins where their fortunes were first won.

The Camp of Trade Town

On the shore where Harald’s old harbor rotted, Sigurd raised a hall of driftwood and black stone. There, amid ice and whale-bone palisades, stands Trade Town—half fortress, half market, ruled by the exiled Jarl and his witch-queen. With them dwells Shafat al-Mustafa, the Arab wizard, whose Tower of Glass rises from the ice like a spear of light.
Shafat serves as Sigurd’s counselor and keeper of forbidden lore, trading the secrets of Grey relics for iron, amber, and blood. Under his guidance the camp endures: fires burn by his art, and the harbor stays free of pack-ice when he wills it.

The Present Year — A.D. 839

Now each year, when the sea loosens its grip for six to eight short weeks, the exiles’ harbor fills with ships: treasure-hunters, raiders, thralls, and dreamers all seeking the luck of Sigurd the Daring. Each thaw brings new oaths, new quarrels, and new graves when the frost returns.

Thus begins the third season of the saga — when the ice cracks, the sea-king’s banner rises again, and the exiles of the Sea-Wolf return to the Black City beneath the burning lights of the north.

Black City Session 3

 

After a couple of weeks off due to unavoidable issues, we played again last night. One of the regulars was missing, and none of the irregulars made it either, so we had just two players, so they each took two back up characters with them as henchmen.

We started late, mainly because we were chatty after a couple of weeks off, but also because we were all trying to remember exactly what had happened three weeks ago when we'd last played, parsing it all together from our collective notes and memories.

Joe's character Sigurd the daring has taken over the leadership role, since Jason's character, whose name I can't recall now, who had been their chief, died in session one. They decided trying to enter the towers was too deadly, and going underground seemed like a death sentence, so they were just going to explore the ruins and scavenge, while avoiding any other Northmen. A decent plan, but they ran afoul of some moaning shamblers (kind of Zombies, almost like on “The Walking Dead”, except not as a virus), they mistook at a distance for other Vikings.

The combat went well for most of the party, although Joe's Berserker Angmar got pretty mangled. He survived, but only because we used the Death & Dismemberment chart for fighting at 0 HP. He ended up with a couple of broken bones and was stunned and prone at one point, saved by the rest of the party. A couple of party members had nasty bites, and were pretty grossed out that the undead were actually eating their flesh.

The party trekked back to their ship and dropped off Angmar, grabbed Knud Frisk the beefy (Joe's Magic-User) as a replacement and heaaded back to the city, with the same game plan. They searched their way through a couple of hexes before finding an intact building that turned out to be a home base for some bandits. They went in assuming it to be abandoned and searchable, tripped a trap near the entryway (gas, poisonous, but merely incapacitating and vision obscuring), Sigurd failed his save. Everyone else made theirs, and most of them surged into the main room, and into a fight. A pair of archers shot at the party as they emerged from the cloud of gas.

The next round a spearman in a strange helmet moved to attack, more arrows came at them from the archers. The party's counterstrike killed the spearman.

I won initiative the next round again, and another group moved into range, a guy carrying a “strange trumpet looking thing” (Atlantean Lightning Gun), and two men with swords & shields moving clearly in front of him as a shield wall to protect him. The lightning gun fired, killing Knud and wounding Sigurd, whom Knud had dragged from the gas cloud. I did make the ruling then and there that magic/tech that drops you to 0HP or lower is a kill. The D&D table makes no sense against those types of attacks.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, the Atlantean Lightning Gun exploded on use, killing the user, and his two guards instantly, and depriving the party of the coolest treasure there. The party took down one of the Archers, and the other surrendered, offering to show the party where the hidden loot was. Magnanimous in victory, the party offered to take the Archer on as a henchman, and the adventure would have continued, but it was late in the evening, so they returned to their ship and we called it quits for the night.

All in all, it was a good evening of gaming, despite the poor player turnout. I had fun, and I am pretty sure Joe and Jason did too.

I do need to go through and populate the hexes ahead of time, as it is cumbersome to do at the table during play, which was also noted in the original Black City campaign. I may also prep some wandering monster encounters ahead of time.

Black City Vikings & Customization

 

I don't recall where I found this image, but it seemed to fit the theme.

We've had to cancel two weeks in a row due to circumstances outside our control. I have however, had time to customize the setting some. In my version of the Black City, we're basically working under the assumption that everything is true. Conspiracy theories about ancient aliens, aliens (really core to the setting anyway), Atlantis, reptilians from the center of the earth, alternate dimensions and parallel worlds, Stargate type stuff, Lovecraft, mythology, everything.

The campaign takes place in a fairly realistic Viking age setting, until you get to the Thule islands and the black city. The players are, to the best of their abilities, playing their characters as Norsemen of the time period, with appropriate weapons and armor (I made a table to roll on for equipment at character generation, it saves a lot of time). I have made some concessions to magic, for what the Norsemen believed in, and added some flavor to the rules set we're using (LotFP, as suggested in the original Black City campaign). I added a couple of flavorful house rules too that seemed appropriate for the Viking Age, notable “Shields Shall Be Splintered” and “Death and Dismemberment” from the OSR blogosphere, and Berserker and Gothi classes, and some Skald skills.

In my head canon the Alien Greys that built the city died off, but their creations didn't. I have them as the creators of the Hyperboreans, who outlived their masters, and then tried to enslave the rest of the human race way back in prehistory. My Hyperboreans are essentially a human sub-species designed to act as overseers for the rest of the human and proto-human slaves the Greys kept. Tall, pale, cold resistant, magically adept, and psionic. Hyperboreans are familiar with the use of most Grey technology, but cannot make it, being (genetically manipulated) humans though, they are creative enough to effect some repairs, and jury rig some new devices, as well as use them in unintended ways.

Next come the Atlanteans. Also human, not genetically manipulated, descended from human slaves that escaped the Hyperboreans and settled Atlantis, they are tech users, which made them far more advanced than their Neolithic and Bronze age contemporaries. They have a whole gonzo Steam-Punk Tesla meets Magic with an ancient Greek aesthetic going on. Their tech is their own, as is their magic; different than that of the Hyperboreans, who are basically just scavenging from the Greys.

I mention both the Hyperboreans and the Atlanteans because, long after the Greys died out, they fought a long genocidal war against each other in my head canon, and one important front was the Black City. So their artifacts also litter the ruins, and they are responsible for some of the destruction of the environment there, and some of the deadly hazards of it too.

The Reptilians from the Earth's center, I am less sure about yet. I might want Silurians from Doctor Who, or maybe Sleestaks from Land of the Lost. Maybe both? Possibly neither.

I may or may not consider Robert E. Howard's Hyborean Age canon to the campaign, I haven't decided yet, but I'll have to slot in some other ancient stuff if I do. I am trying to slot in an old school Battlestar Galactica reference (The 13th Tribe of Man, “Life here began out there”), but need to reconcile it with the rest. My current thought is to use the Warden from Metamorphosis Alpha as the colony ship from Kobol, possibly some time travel shenanigans shoe-horned in to make it work logically in my mind. It would give us yet another ancient spaceship wreck somewhere on earth. Anyway, I want Colonial Warriors and Cylons to make an appearance, if only as an “ancient aliens” style background.

The dimensional gates make things like side trips to other campaign worlds a la Q1 a possibility, actually looking forward to throwing Carcosa in the mix. Thinking about adding some bits from ASE. I know I want dinosaurs at some point. Maybe some other time travel shenanigans so I can bring in Nazi occultists, possibly with a diesel-punk moon base.

The setting already has competing mad AIs and Alien ghosts and so much more.

Session Two - Black City

 This one was a marathon eight hour session with a lot of exploration and some combat. Not all of the players were present for the entire session, two of them weren't at the game at the same time even, missing each other completely. I continued a policy of having everyone have three characters to play, one primary, one alternate/henchman, and one "on deck". Since I started all the PCs at 1st level, and didn't bother adjusting any of the random encounter lists or scaling any of the placed encounters, it seemed like a reasonable precaution. There were a few fatalities, and a couple of long-term injuries (broken bones from the "Death & Dismemberment" table. Cagey players are starting to abuse the "Shields Shall Be Splintered" rule, but I'll let it slide for now, as it is keeping fatalities low. 

The players found some good loot this time, which was enough to push one of the Fighters up to level two. He had already become the de facto leader of the group, by virtue of having been a part of every expedition this crew has made into the city, and having lived to tell of it without suffering some debilitating injury.

They didn't run into any poison monsters this time, but they did run afoul of a pair of Watchers (limited Stone Golems), and one fatality occurred there. They managed to beat a Polar Bear, held a party on the beach for the other Norsemen, and recruited a witch/seeress away from another crew. 

The hardest encounter of the night was a Wind Demon, and they did win that fight through shear luck and misplaced confidence. The "Death and Dismemberment" table was on their side in that fight, and my dice apparently wanted them to win, as I rolled a record number of 3s and 5s.