A toy game from the 2016 game design advent calendar.

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This game is about Vikings, at home and abroad. The goal is to have character activity at home affect activity abroad, and vice versa. If you're slacking on your fatherly duties at home, maybe that comes out mechanically in a raid on a Saxon village.

This is an unabashed hack of
Lasers & Feelings by John Harper, just with two dimensions. Seeing the picture above, I couldn't help but feel drawn to the sea. I mean, look at it, it's so...expansive. Then I saw the little buildings, and the little village and community I'm sure is vibrant there, and I got it.

I've been working separately on a game about dichotomies of self, so I'm cribbing some of its ideas here.

Requires:

Standard stuff here.

• A GM
• Some players
• Bunches o' six-sided dice

Rules:

Refer to Lasers & Feelings for gaps in the rules; it's an excellent little game, and if you ever wanted to try this one out I'm sure you could slap the rules together and get something groovy.

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You are either at at home, or adventuring abroad, and have a number for each. When you're at home, you always roll with your number for Home; when you're abroad, always roll with Abroad. Before deciding on your numbers, answer the following:

1. Who do you struggle to be at home?
2. By what title are you called at home?
3. When you are abroad, what distinguishes you from the other Vikings?
4. When you sail abroad, what are you responsible for on the ship?

The answers to these questions should be different. 1 and 2 will inform your Home number, and 3 and 4 your Abroad number. For instance, consider Zog the Viking. He struggles to be a good father, but is known to be a good Jarl for his village. He's also renowned for his ability with an axe (many a Saxon have been cleaved in twain by his hand) and is responsible primarily for navigation while sailing.

Write those answers out short-hand on a grid, from 1-6 on both axes (ha, punny), like so:

So you've got this glorious Spectrum of Self setup. Great! Now pick a number for each axis. Say 5 for Home and 3 for Abroad. Mark it on the grid with a couple lines:

When you do something risky or uncertain, roll 1d6 to see how it goes. The GM will tell you which quadrant your action lies in; perhaps Zog wades into battle (Axes/Jarl), or takes time to teach his son the ways of combat (Axes/Father), or tries to navigate the quickest way across the sea, bearing his wounded and dying son home for healing (Navigation/Father).

When you're abroad, you roll Abroad and want to roll within the appropriate row (so here, if rolling for Axes, roll < 3, if rolling for Navigation roll > 3). When you're at home, you roll Home and want to roll within the appropriate column (so roll a 6 for Father, or < 5 if rolling for Jarl). If you roll your number, ask a good question and roll again (see Lasers & Feelings for more on that).

You can roll more dice if you have them; read on for that. Follow Lasers & Feelings for seeing how the roll goes:

• No dice succeed, it goes wrong
• One dice succeeds, you barely manage it. GM makes it costly for you.
• Two dice succeed, you did it!
• Three dice succeed, critical success.

Here's the new and interesting bit: if you flubbed it up and no dice succeeded, leave them in the quadrant the GM told you the action lied within. Those dice are available to you anytime you roll for that quadrant's Home or Abroad.

For example: Zog does take some time to show his son the ropes, teaching him a cool axe trick his own dad showed him. The GM says that lies within Axes/Father, so Zog's player rolls 1d6 for Home and gets a 4; that's a miss. Maybe the son hurts himself doing the trick, and Zog's wife is furious with him. Zog leaves that failed dice in the Father/Axes Quadrant.

The next week, he's on a raid and charges a rather robust fellow. He attempts to cleave him in twain; the GM says that's Axes/Jarl, and Zog rolls for Abroad. This time, however, he has that dice left in Axes/Father, available to him because he's rolling to get in the Axes row. He rolls 2d6, gets a 4 and a 5, and succeeds with two successful dice. He did it well, but he also lost that saved die.

Notes:

Remember that the point here is to have home activity and abroad activity be mechanically entwined. In the example, Zog effectively used his failure as a father to boost his ability as an axe-wielding terror. Likewise, perhaps his failure as a navigator on the way home changes how his life with his family goes in the future.

This could be added to in a couple ways; maybe all failed dice always get saved, whether or not the action itself was successful. It would also be interesting to let players adjust their scores by buying small bumps; they pay 2 or 3 saved dice in a quadrant to increase the quadrant's size (Jarl/Axes dice can increase Home or decrease Abroad). That would model increasing experience, learned through failure. It would also tend to pull the system to a stable point of 3's in both Home and Abroad, since smaller quadrants will accrue more dice. Maybe not so desirable, but interesting.

--Karaktakus the Envier of Viking Beards

Prompt/cover photo: Wikimedia Commons