I ran Sagas of the Icelanders twice at Big Bad Con this past weekend. It is a lovely convention game for me – it breaks down to an hour for orientation and making characters, an hour to build a fraught situation, and two hours to resolve it somehow. here are a couple of nice moments from my games at BBC.
Game one: There’s a beautiful moment between the Seiðkona and the Matriarch as they realize the Norwegian woman is moments away from giving birth to a child that will strengthen her husband’s legal claim to their land.
That moment has a name, and the name is “infanticide”.
This game ended with all the men in the family killed and the strong women left struggling to pick up the pieces, the future uncertain.
Game two: In the aftermath of a bloody battle, the wounded Huscarl comforts his older sister over the death of their father. “I must go tell Gisli,” she says, and her brother’s gaze shifts, and suddenly she knows.
This game featured the arranged marriage of the Huscarl and a Shield Maiden who were good friends but completely uninterested in each other as mates. In the end, after the Huscarl became Goði upon the murder of his father, they married anyway for the sake of political unity.
#soti