14 thoughts on “Here are my criticisms of the game after 5 sessions.”

  2. Thanks Jim!

    1) Regarding resources, if the Man is not present as a PC, in my experience they are always secondary or even irrelevant to the game. The Man reflects more an implied reality of settling Iceland than the fiction of the Sagas, for sure. This is more an issue with explaining what individual playbooks represent than the game as a whole.

    2) I’d say this is largely a legacy issue with AW that I wasn’t able to resolve completely in the timeframe of publishing the game.

    3) This goes along with point #1, the game is restricted in its culture and time period (as expressed through the playbooks and moves) to present a certain reality (and fiction) of the saga period. It is definitely much more focused than AW. But the limitations of the moves are meant to be a challenge to the players. There are plenty of ways to break those norms.

    4) A lack of examples is something I regret and definitely an oversight. It’s been on my mind a lot recently.

    5) I thought the Allthing was well represented in Jason’s chapter of the game. On the other hand this point ties back into (and goes against) #3 in as much I wanted the players to come up with their own laws and legal precedents. Which means the game starts out in a tightly defined time period but leaves things open for the future.

  4. The sagas are about larger than life characters.

    This statement left me scratching my head. Are we reading the same sagas? What I love about the Icelandic sagas is their immediacy, their realness, how they’re not larger than life, but very, sometimes painfully, life-sized, if you will. Which is one of the things I really appreciate in the game so far. As in the sagas, everything can unravel in one sudden moment of violence. There’s a bad roll, and a beloved character is gone forever, the same way characters in the sagas will suddenly die. It spends time on the minutiae of their lives, the mundane-ness of it all, as the sagas do.

    I agree with your third point, that it’s a fixed time and culture, though for me that’s a lot of the game’s allure. Digging into the history and culture has been where a lot of the fun in the game has come from. My wife’s character is all about the weird laws in the Icelandic commonwealth (and her desire to get women to be able to testify before the thing).

    Personally, I love the way fronts are presented.

    On your last point, you seem to be familiar with other “Powered by the Apocalypse” games. Have you read AW, particularly the chapter about creating custom moves? It might be because of my experience with AW, but I see creating custom moves for precisely the sort of thing you’re talking about here as where a lot of the fun in any ongoing AW game comes in.

  5. Gregor Vuga

    1) Since the Man and Woman are recommended for at least one player in the group, the resources seem to be stressed to some extent. These characters also reflect the main characters in the sagas to a large extent. It makes sense that someone should play at least one of them. The only other one close to a saga hero is Godi.

    2) The MC can handle this with minimal disruption to the game. It just becomes something that the RAW doesn’t support well.

    3) This is really a comment on the type of game that this supports. If you are a fan of Icelandic/Viking culture, this game is for you. If you want freedom to develop any culture or world you want, Dungeon World or Apocalypse World is a better fit.

    4) Our game progressed just fine with the loose fronts I was tracking. I just wasn’t able to lock them down in a format that matched you presentation.

    5) Yes, the laws were well presented, but there were no moves to support presenting or arguing a case at the Althing. The Godi has a move for making rulings, but that only works if you have one as a player. If I had more time, I would have developed custom moves. I just see these as being common themes in the sagas and should be more directly supported in the core material.  I think that part of it is that new players look at the moves to get some ideas of where they should try to move the story. Not representing these leaves sections of the sagas unexplored unless one of the players or MC has outside knowledge about them.

  6. Jason Godesky

    The characters I remember were wealthy, fierce fighters who could take on multiple opponents, and had great influence over their neighbors. They weren’t going out and killing armies or monsters, but they were visiting or feuding with King of Norway. Maybe larger than life is an overstatement, but they were definitely heroic. They don’t spend their time gathering food and tending the animals. At least the sagas aren’t focused on this aspect of their lives.

    Writing custom moves is fine, but themes that are repeated in several sagas should have some representation in the core game.

  7. The day after, Oddr takes a fishing-line off the wall, and all fishing tackle, and twelve ells of cloth. He now goes away and no one wishes him farewell. He goes out to Vatnsness, enters the company of some fishermen, and received at their hands, as a loan or on hire, things that he stood most in need of, and when they knew that his kin was good, and he himself much liked, they ran the risk to trust him.

    –The Bandamanna Saga

  8. Of course, Oddr gets wealthy but then the story focuses on who will manage his household while he’s away. And then setting up a priesthood.

  9. Yes, there are examples of daily lives and small activities, but the relative amount of time spent on them is small. Compare the sagas to the Little House on the Prairie books. Both tell stories about settlers in a new land. The sagas mention new farms being built, animals tended, and winters being hard. These things, however, are usually covered in a short space, a paragraph or two. If more detail is given, it is due to the importance of some other story element such as a border dispute or prophecy being fulfilled. Little House on the Prairie will devote a whole chapter to building the front door of their house. To me the Man and Woman playbooks have more of a Little House feel to them than a sagas feel.

    I’m not saying the game can’t be fun, compelling, or realistic playing with careful resource tracking and trying to desperately survive yet another long winter. It just doesn’t match my impression of the type of stories contained in the sagas that I read.

  10. Maybe Egil’s Saga. Most of them have a lot of mundane stuff like that. Little House is actually a pretty good comparison. I remember many chapters like that in Njal’s Saga, for instance.

  12. Njal’s saga is what originally got me so excited about SotI. My players can be badass unstoppable heroes in any other *World game (except tremulus), but I want to see how they struggle against bullying itinerant duellists, corrupt gothi and hard, long winters.

    The appeal is in the struggle, and the humanity of the characters. They can attempt adventures (called ‘perilous journeys’ in Njal’s saga) but these are extremely risky and provide small reward.

    Still, I haven’t played it yet. First game is tonight, after our regular Apocalypse World game finished its first season a couple of weeks ago. Five players plus a GM, can’t wait to try it.

  14. Jim Sensenbrenner  Our first session went brilliantly. The relationships and bonds created a thriving, dynamic web of PC NPC PC triangles, informing the story and driving the action forward. Haven’t had occasion to make any custom moves yet, but with a wedding coming up and a blood-feud begun, I can definitely see that I’ll need to.

    Even our most gung-ho player, acting as champion (huscarl) for the Man in a holmganga paused before he rolled the dice, knowing that the entire outcome of the duel, maybe even his life, hung in the balance.

    SotI is a much starker, grimmer world. The scarcity feels more pronounced even than Apocalypse World, with everyone in the little extended family almost without trying slipped into a pioneering ‘do anything to survive the winter’ mentality.

    The game was a huge success with my players, the gendered moves especially.

    We have in our family so far a Man (Olaf ‘Lead-tongue’ Harikson), a Woman (his sister, Grimhilde the Deep-minded Getrudesdottir, and her 12 year old daughter Freydis), a huscarl (Steinar the sly), a shield maiden (Sigrid Gydasdottir, Grimhilde’s bastard half-sister), with our late fifth player coming in as one of the NPCs, Odd, Sigrid’s half-brother who accepted the gospel of the white christ and came to Iceland as a missionary before the rest of the family, bringing shame and ignominy on everyone associated with him (He’ll probably be a Wanderer, for want of a better playbook)

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