Civilization -Norsemen

Civilization

Mannheim as it was named by the Norsemen was home to many cultures, but the Norsemen now control most of the land and thus this book focuses mainly on their point of view and beliefs.

Norse upbringing

You grew up in a village on the banks of a fjord somewhere in Midgard. (You and your group can agree to get more specific about your homeland if you want, using the information given later in this chapter on regional differences between Norse cultures.) Since childhood you have thrilled to the tales told by the men of your village when they return from their raiding expeditions. The raiders, led by a chieftain, would be your village's most admired men even if they didn't go off to engage in wild and bloodthirsty adventures.

They're the brave and able bodied men from the village 's richest families, who can afford the silver needed to equip them with weapons, armor, ships, and horses. Luckily, your own ancestors assured your family a small bit of wealth, by risking their lives in foreign lands and in the Underground. Now that you are old enough to swing a sword and to attract the attention of watchful Odin and battle-eager Thor, you intend to join their ranks.

Your village houses a few hundred people. They live together as extended families in large wooden buildings called steads or longhouses. These houses have few interior walls; everybody lives, eats, drinks, and farts together, in a spirit of true Viking togetherness. You grew up in these crowded, raucous circumstances, with a roof of turf above your head. You would feel strange if forced to sleep in a room all your own. Only the wealthiest villagers sleep in beds; the floor and a blanket is enough for any sturdy young warrior.

The village women take wool sheared from the sheep baa-ing on the pastureland outside your village and weave it into clothing. Men wear cloth trousers and leather jerkins over long woolen shirts. Women wear dresses of pleated linen. When it is cold, you don fur hats and heavy cloaks for warmth. When a man dons a blue cloak, it means that he intends to murder an enemy.

Jarls, Carls, and Thralls

There are three types of people in your village: jarls, carls, and thralls. You are lucky enough to be the son of a jarl, the wealthy class that equips its young men and sends them out raiding. One day you might be the leader of your village, or a gray-bearded priest of Odin and the other Aesir gods. If you live that long. Because only one son from any family can fully inherit its lands and silver, it is perhaps convenient that many young men of this favored class meet premature ends at the hands of wild beasts or their own kin.

Killing a member of the jarl class is a major crime — one likely to start a feud between villages. Only by paying a hefty fee of compensation, called wergild, numbering many coins, horses or thralls, can tempers be cooled and years of bloodshed averted.

Another layer of authority knits together your village with those around it. You are ruled by a king, elected by the jarls of each village, who in turn must listen to the voice of the village assembly, or thing.

Both jarls and kings must take care to rule wisely, and with the consent of the freemen under them, or they'll be deposed. Although it is good to be wealthy and to descend from a line of valorous leaders, authority means nothing unless it is properly used.

Carls are the peasants who work the land. Like the jarls, they are landowners, but their holdings are small. They take up sword and shield to defend the village from enemies, but rarely go out raiding. Though they are laborers, they are also free men, and can vote when the village meets in its things. At the thing, the villagers decide matters of law, choose targets for the jarls' sons to raid, and, on rare occasions, depose foolish leaders.

The murder of a carl is a serious matter, but the compensation due for it is rarely more than a few coins, one horse or thrall. Feuds that erupt over slain carls tend to remain in families, and won't necessarily embroil entire villages, but they could.

Thralls are indentured laborers who enjoy few rights. They may be captured hostages from foreign lands or rival villages, outlaws stripped of their free status, or unfortunates born to this wretched status. A thing may grant an especially admired or worthy thrall the status of a carl, but it will mean little change in his circumstances unless he can also somehow acquire a small landholding. Thralls are not trusted with weapons and don't participate in village defense. The murder of a thrall is treated as a property crime against the jarl or carl holding his indenture; it is more serious to kill a man's horse than to slay one of his thralls.

In their skalding (satiric verse) contests, jarls mock carls as cowardly, bumpkinish peasants. Carls in turn make fun of the jarls' arrogant airs and adventure-shortened lifespans. However, the power of each group is well-balanced, and the people you grew up with accept their respective lots in life.

Thralls, naturally, are excluded from such considerations; if one of them engaged in satiric verse against his better, he'd be slain out of hand.

HOLMGANGS AND BLOOD EAGLES

As you grew up, you learned that the best way to settle disputes between equals was through a duel, which is called a holmgang. This roughly translates as "going off to an island to beat the crap out of each other and settle it like men." Your people have developed many variant rules for holmganging; sometimes they tie t h e opponents to stakes so that no cowardly running can interfere with the proper laying on of the harm. In other instances, they make a sort of primitive boxing ring out of cowhide strips.

Sometimes the combatants trade blows one at a time, to see who can take the most punishment. In other duels, they slash away at each other in freeform style, just as they would in a fight to the death. The blood eagle is an especially gruesome form of execution favored by some Viking cultures. It involves the opening of the screaming victim's chest cavity so that the two sides of his rib cage can be pulled out and exposed.

Your Religion

Worship of the Aesir has been a big part of your life ever since you can remember. You learned the grim tale of how Odin cast out his eye for wisdom. You've thrilled to various tales of Thor's exploits, which may cast him either as staunch hero or muscle-bound buffoon. Mention of the gods and their myths appear throughout this book, so we won't repeat them in detail here.

PRIESTS AND PRIESTESSES

Priests and priestesses are usually of the jarl class. No one chooses to be a priest. A high Divine Awareness ability is something that settles on a person, whether he likes it or not. Although priests are respected for the important tasks they fulfill in performing necessary rituals, the position is sometimes a terrifying one. Even the good gods, like Odin, can be terrifying to confront. Priests sometimes meet the gods face to face, in dreams and visions. Priests are often retired heroes, because the Aesir invest those who destroy their foes with great powers. Priests never specialize in the veneration of a single deity. A priest represents all of the male gods; a priestess calls upon all of the female gods.

Their most important duty is the performance of fertility rituals to bless crops and domestic animals. When the gods are strong, and Loki's minions are weak, food will be plentiful. When Loki is on the rise, the forces of death and madness strengthen, withering grain plants and drying up the wombs of cows and mares. Often the best way to strengthen village magic is to send mighty young warriors off to slay Loki's minions. Priests and priestesses are also called upon to remember the stories of the gods, and to supply counsel to the troubled and weary. Their voices carry great weight at the village assembly. If they say Odin wishes something to be done, the people tend to believe this. However, villagers carefully watch a priest's behavior to make sure he hasn't been corrupted by Loki. Those who succumb to trickster are subject to blood eagle.

Among jarls and carls, women are accorded great respect. At the thing, their voices are at least as important as the men's. In the world of Nordica, a jarl's daughter is as likely to don armor and clank off into the trap-laden byways of the Underground as his son.

No one has trouble believing the stories of the fierce, winged Valkyries, because everyone knows a warrior woman he wouldn't dare face on the field of battle.

THE VILLAGE RUNE

In a central courtyard stands your village Rune, an artifact gifted to your ancestors in the ancient past by Odin himself. It is a large slab of rock with one of the letters of Odin's runic alphabet carved into it. When the gods are near, or when Loki's machinations bring Ragnarok another step closer, the rune pulses and glows. By giving his people proof of his existence and concern for them, Odin strengthened his position against Loki. Perhaps it is true that the gods depend as much on their worshipers as the other way around, and that, without belief and prayer, they would wither and die.

This could be why Loki recently sent his Dark Vikings to attack nearby villages and destroy their Runes. Stone carvers throughout Mannheim now work to recreate the Runes, in the hopes that rituals by village priests can reach Odin's ears and cause their power to be rekindled. The few villages still guarding intact Runes now protect them with added ferocity, for fear that Loki might finish the job before the new Runes can be finished and properly dedicated, especially after the Great Flood in which countless Rune stone location’s were lost.

CHILDHOOD

When you listened to the Viking raiders of your father's generation, you learned of the other places in the world. Your sense of geography is determined by which places are good to raid, and which are not. When you play a Nordica hero, you must forget your modern conception of geography. You know that the world is flat, and that Mannheim is the center of the world. Ringing the Viking lands are a number of foreign places, which are good to raid. They are ringed in turn by the realms of myth, from dwarfish Nidavellir to dread Nifleheim. The exact relationships between these places is unknown, though, and complicated by the fact that they are best reached through shortcuts that run through the Underground. By tramping through subterranean passageways, you can reach the land of the giants faster and more safely than you'd get to Kanum-Kotan or to Angul-law, which require journeys across treacherous, storm-tossed seas. This chapter presents the most interesting lands of Mannheim from the perspective of adventurers, focusing on the areas from which such characters are likely to hail. Each section contains the following information ✦ Common Knowledge: General facts about the place that every resident of the region knows, including an overview of the region’s notable features, both civilized and natural.

✦ People of the Region: A look at the region’s populace.

Viking Raids

Just because a neighboring land is Viking is no reason not to raid it. Maybe it's bad to raid other Aesir-worshippers when Loki is strong. But when Odin has the upper hand, your neighbors are as good a target as any. If you can successfully raid them, that means they're weak. Once you're long gone, and their women are done lamenting the destruction you've left in your wake, they'll strengthen their defenses and better train their young men. You're doing them a favor, really.