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LatwPIAT posted:We don't really know how things worked before ca. 900. It's known that there was an increase in manorialism and centralization of land ownership from that time onward, but the details are scarce. That said, it might also be a conflation of sources or terms. While some articles on viking society (broadly applicable to the vendel period) describe bondi as free men who typically own or rent land, other describe bondi as people who pay off debts to the jarls by working the land, with karls being the people who are not bound to the land. The structure is then: Ahh, I wasn't aware of that distinction between bondi and karl, and assumed that the authors chose to use "bondi" as a synonym to prevent confusion of names with "jarl, karl, and thrall." All right, I'll give Yggdrasil credit, they've apparently done better research than me. LatwPIAT posted:The origin myth of the social classes, Rígsþula, from somewhere between 900 and 1250 CE, describes Thrall as "svartan" which, well... I'll have to see if I can dig up the source I found discussing the use of that word and the context around it. I recall it making a fairly convincing case that it meant dark-skinned from working outside all day rather than due to melanin content, but the details are escaping me.
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Jun 1, 2020 18:26
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That Old Tree posted:There were a handful of regular posters on the old forum that would advance this idea, yes. The Yozis/Primordials in general were "right" and the aggrieved party in all things, because after all they created everything* and were so complex. Often simultaneously they were so complex they were more like "the weather" than a character or whatever, and so beyond moral judgement, but you still shouldn't try to control or defeat them outright because actually yes they are like characters since they have distinct personalities and desires of their own and it's bad to take away their agency. This is a few pages late, but I want to note that a lot of this came from a dude whose main forums persona was ‘i want to gently caress She Who Lives In Her Name’ A being whose primary incarnation is a collection of tens of thousands of floating glass spheres full of fire.
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Jun 1, 2020 19:11
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Mors Rattus posted:This is a few pages late, but I want to note that a lot of this came from a dude whose main forums persona was ‘i want to gently caress She Who Lives In Her Name’ Well that's creepy. I don't have anything more to add, that is just creepy.
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Jun 1, 2020 19:22
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On hey a new page I wonde
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Jun 1, 2020 19:27
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 Mutant 2089 We can rebuild them, we have the technology. Unlike the horrible monstrosity that was the Neotech 2 character creation system this is far simpler in comparison. Instead of a bloated multi-step process we have 7 simple steps to follow in order to make a character: 1.Pick Class (even if Race would be a more apt description in this case) 2. Roll attributes. 3. Calculate Derived attributes. 4. Pick Previous profession 5. Pick Mutations or Cybernetic/Robotics 6. Pick Skill 7. Come up with a name, background and so on. After that we have a character read to play with. Nice and easy. Mutant has four different classes to pick from and these are: NOM or Normal Human PSI or Psi-mutant ROB or Robot MUT or Mutant. We’ll go more into detail about those later on. After you’ve picked your class you then need to roll your attributes. And here I came across something that stopped me dead in my tracks for a while. Step 2 is that you need to roll your attributes. But at that point it doesn’t mention what you need to roll, so for a while I was scrambling to find what specific dice it was and began extrapolating from mentioned ranges and looking at the main BRP rules and previous editions of the game. But as it turns out that table was listed after the attribute descriptions. I can see what they’re intending, with that you read through what the different attributes do and then roll. Even then that’s bad page structure and flow. Either way each of the four classes have different dice rolls to make for their attributes. A NOM for instance follows the basic BRP structure of 3D6 for all attributes whilst a ROB rolls 1d6 with various numerical bonuses.  Then it talks about alternative rolling methods and we get this adorable gem of a paragraph: quote:“The player characters are hardy adventurers and are expected to be better than your average Svensson (TL note: The Swedish equivalent of a Johnson). Average suckers have no chance in making through the adventures that we are going through, so that's why it’s probably a good thing that we're a little better than average, right?” After that they offer three different ways you can ‘tamper’ with your attribute rolls. Either you can roll twice for each attribute and pick the best one. Or you can roll three complete arrays and then pick which one you want. And lastly as some careers have attribute requirements and you don’t meet them you can swap those out for the minimum requirement. I do kinda like the last method of altering rolls as it ensures players with a clear concept in mind to play what they want without suddenly finding that their idea is ruined by poor rolls. The other methods are pretty decent as well to ensure that you get a hero character if you so like. Either way, the seven attributes are: Strength (STY), Intelligence (INT), Personality (PER), Dexterity (SMI), Size (STO), Physique (FYS), Mental Strength (MST). Swedish abbreviations in parenthesis as I’ll be using those from here on. STY is a measure of your raw strength and relevant for close combat mainly. It also comes into play if you choose to play with the optional encumbrance rule. INT is your brain meat, but it also governs how many Background Points (BP) that you will get. These will be used for skills later on. The game is nice enough to not penalize you if you roll low int as the least amount of BP you can get at INT 1 is 20. The maximum is 100 if you somehow get 19+, You also get one BP per year of character age. So if your character is 22 years old you get 22 BP in turn. Which is a nice way to allow characters to have at least some skills. If you somehow managed to roll 19+ on your INT you start with a whopping 100 BP as a base. PER is a measure of how cool you are in the eyes of others. A high PER means that people will listen to you and you have easier time to convince people of things. Then the game falls into the usual trap where the social stat is linked with appearance and says that good looking people have a relatively high PER. Even if it’s stated it’s only tangentially linked it’s still rather lame design choice. A high PER also decides how many cyberware a NOM can use from the start. Even if you still need to have chosen a career that gives you access to it. Which is a nice way to shut down minmaxing to some extent. The maximum starting cyberware someone can have is 5 at a PER for 19+. DEX is more or less what you know it as. It’s a measure of how nimble you are. And the usual cornucopia of things fall under its umbrella such as reaction speed, speed, agility and precision work. You roll this for movement related things that aren't covered by other skills. STO decides on if you’re big chungus or not. The higher your STO value is the more you’ll weigh. After that you can decide how tall you are based on the table given. Interestingly enough your STY value can also influence your height in that a higher STY value makes you shorter while a lower one makes you taller. Robots are counted as twice as heavy at all times. FYS is the measure of how resistant you are. The higher the better. MST is how well you can handle pressure and your ability to resist mental attacks. A high MST lets you keep it cool under fire whilst a low one is obviously the opposite. Once we have rolled out all of that we now move over to Derives Attributes, of which there are six in total. Damage Bonus (SB) is bonus damage during melee and calculated by combining STY and STO. Bodypoints, or hit points (KP) is just your STO and FYS values combined. When you reach 0 KP you become unconscious and when you have lost enough KP equal to your FYS you die. So if you have STO 9 and FYS 11 you have 20 KP. When you become unconscious after losing all your KP you die if you accrue 11 more points of damage. Speed is FYS + SMI combined and gives you how many meters you can move during a combat round. Which the book assumes is running by default, otherwise it’s half that value. To determine if your character is left or right handed you need to roll a 2D10. Here the game makes a weird distinction between things. If you roll 19 it means that the character is double handed, which the book describes like ambidextrous but you can't use both hands at the same time. And then if you manage to roll 20 you’re properly ambidextrous. Age is completely up to the player to decide. Even if going past a certain age will start affecting your attributes. Even if the attribute changes don't occur until after the ripe age of 46, an age I’m not sure many players start at. The only difference is that if you start under the age of 20 you gain one extra SMI. As previously mentioned you also get extra BP for every year you reach. The bonus of playing someone old is that you do get more starting money. As previously mentioned it is counted in EuroDollar or ED. Former currencies are all but gone in the 2080’s, even if some countries still keep them around as remembrance of an age long gone. At the start of the game the character will have just enough money to gear you need to get going as an adventurer. You can generate starting funds in three different ways: chaotic, normal or stable. Even if you first need to roll 1D100 to see where your general level is, after that you can either roll another d100 to see which level you get or discuss with your GM about where you should be. After that you multiply it with your bonus from your age category. At this point we get our first sidebar of the game and it’s for an optional rule involving encumbrance. It’s an encumbrance system, moving on. After this it’s time to pick the characters previous profession, these decide what skills and equipment you start with at the beginning of the campaign. There are 8 different professions you can pick from: Street kid, Criminal, Merc, Metropolis, Nomad, Reporter, SWOT, Technician. We’ll be going into detail about these later on. Depending on what race (I’m just not going to call them classes unless necessary from here on, it’s dumb) you have picked you can now start to accessorise so to speak. For mutants it’s a case of picking their mutations or defects, For robots it’s parts for their cold metal skeleton whilst for a normal human they can slap on some cyberware to get their cyberpunk groove on. All of these can either be randomly rolled or freely picked amongst what is available. That should be decided jointly by both players and the game master. Then it’s off to picking skills, which are split into two sorta different categories: starting skills and career skills. But then only tells us to go and check chapter 8 for more details so that will have to wait. And finally it’s just a case of making up your character name and appearance as well as any background details and motivations. After that you’re set. We end with a sidebar that mentions that these things should be fun and that many players think it’s boring to play bad characters. It’s true, it’s not fun at all. The sidebar encourages players not to bind yourself to the dice and rules when creating your character. The rules should act as a framework and not a limitation and the dice should be a guidance and not an obstacle. If you think it’s boring that you’re limited to only three cyberware items at the start you’re encouraged to boot that thing out of a window. The same goes with if you don’t reach the requirements for the SWOT career you can just remove them or simply raise your attributes. The latter I assume is done with some moderation, especially when they previously talked about raising the attributes to the minimum. It’s nice to see stuff like this pushing forward the notion you’re doing this to have fun. Although I’d imagine you’d also want to talk to your GM about it because playing near perfect characters who easily accomplish everything could be really boring too. I could see someone using that sidebar to try to minmax their character just because the book says it’s okay. But that could obviously be solved by talking to your players. Outside of the weird layout issue where the required dice table is listed after the attribute (and their respective tables) the character creation system in Mutant is really painless and easy to do. No need to consult a myriad of tables and derived attributes like in N2 and you can without much issue make a character right before a session if needed. I’ll obviously do an example character after going through the classes and careers. Next Time: Who are you? Who, who, who, who? Cooked Auto fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Jun 2, 2020 |
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Jun 1, 2020 20:33
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Mors Rattus posted:This is a few pages late, but I want to note that a lot of this came from a dude whose main forums persona was ‘i want to gently caress She Who Lives In Her Name’ 
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Jun 1, 2020 22:01
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Mors Rattus posted:This is a few pages late, but I want to note that a lot of this came from a dude whose main forums persona was ‘i want to gently caress She Who Lives In Her Name’ It's quite the thing when somebody's sexual awakening comes from watching the Phantasm movies.
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Jun 1, 2020 22:47
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Nessus posted:Wait a minute... horny... lethal spheres and plenty of them... that wasn't Yoko Taro, was it? 
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Jun 1, 2020 22:50
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I should correct myself. A collection of tens of thousands of floating glass spheres full of fire that hates the basic concept of free will.
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Jun 1, 2020 23:06
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Mors Rattus posted:I should correct myself. That wasn’t even the worst of the horny Yozi apologists, which would be the poster who constantly explained elaborate quasi-to-explicitly sexual fantasies involving using Yozi charms on cultural conservatives, when they weren’t telling extremely hard to believe stories about their own sexual exploits while calling others prudes. That poster didn’t really make the journey from the old forums to the OP forums, iirc.
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Jun 1, 2020 23:21
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Mors Rattus posted:I should correct myself.
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Jun 1, 2020 23:21
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Mors Rattus posted:I should correct myself. "Hate" may be the wrong word.
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Jun 1, 2020 23:21
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Stephenls posted:"Hate" may be the wrong word. "doesn't vibe with"
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Jun 2, 2020 00:29
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Mors Rattus posted:I should correct myself. If you were tens of thousands of floating glass spheres full of fire, you'd hate the concept of free will too. They keep wandering off and you have to find them.... Yozi fetishism aside, I do kind of like the Yozi as a concept, and the way that their loss and the damage they took left them as shattered twisted versions of what they used to be (except for the Ebon Dragon, who was always a dick).
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Jun 2, 2020 00:44
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GimpInBlack posted:Likewise, I get real nervous when YouTube algorithms recommend videos about Viking stuff, especially when the thumbnail is a white dude with an undercut. Skallagrim is alright AFAIK. (please tell me if he isn't)
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Jun 2, 2020 00:48
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I wanted to post my thoughts about the Warhammer Fantasy 4e system and the game design decisions they made, but it doesn't really fit the format of this thread, so I started posting them in the WFRP thread instead. Feel free to come by and tell me why I'm wrong.
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Jun 2, 2020 01:45
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The Lone Badger posted:Skallagrim is alright AFAIK. (please tell me if he isn't) From what I can tell: ThegnThrand and Skallagrim are good. Shadiversity, however, is very ungood.
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Jun 2, 2020 01:59
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The Lone Badger posted:Skallagrim is alright AFAIK. (please tell me if he isn't) No source so take it with a heap of salt but the scuttlebutt around the HEMA community is his school is at least Nazi-adjacent. But this is from just talking to people and I don't have receipts and it's only a connection, do with this what you will.
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Jun 2, 2020 02:20
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 Chapter 3 (We Have Always Been at War): Estasia I just checked my power usage stats and it turns out I spend like six hours on an update. Granted, I have nothing better to, but that’s a lot of time and energy! I’ll be cutting down these updates in size while keeping up the frequency. The intro comic features somebody catching a few kids stealing fruit and threatens to tell their parents; suddenly, some airships appear and he orders them to go find an Alchemical that might be able to save their families. It’s pretty unclear what’s going on here. Estasia moves in a circle around the Elemental Pole of Metal, its open chamber neighboring every nation at some point in the circuit. Environment-wise it’s practically England; it’s cool temperature and high water content means it’s always foggy, rainy, and generally miserable without tripping into uninhabitable. The local architecture emphasizes redirecting water from rain to the various trenches/rivers carved into the floor. Estasia being Estasia, the area’s also full of training camps where sergeants make recruits do push-ups in the rain. Back when Autochthon ordered the construction of the first Alchemicals, the reincarnation of the leader called Estasia (who went by Luminous Exarch) realized one of his past incarnations was a Solar who died fighting the Primordials. He decided that, since his soul had been Exalted twice, this made him the natural leader of Autochthonia, and also that the best way to express that rule was by conquering everyone else. The country’s history since can be divided into six eras.
 By the standards of the other seven nations, Estasia is weird. Practically everything in the country rotates around its military and warlike past, including things that have nothing to do with the military. Citizens come across as loud and brash, trying to emulate the forcefulness of soldiers; they’re type of people who issue medals for exceptional service in factories, dress in military uniform when they go to work, and form fight clubs after hours. They are one of the only nations to have an established institution of marriage, though members of the Militat can’t marry each other (love can’t bloom on the battlefield, it might compromise your focus if they die) and parents play only a limited role in raising children, but they can marry members of the other castes or even foreigners. With their constant need for manpower and cultural obsession with physical health (their Surgeons are the best in the Octet), Lumpen really a thing; Estasia can’t afford to permanently shove anyone into the role of unhealthy, oppressed, demotivated grunt worker. Neither is exile, since they may need those warm bodies one day. Instead, Lumpen-level offenses usually get the offender lightly mutilated and put to work in dangerous conditions; if they succeed, they get their original status back (though serious offenders either either get turned into slaves or flee the nation first). Though the castes are as static as everywhere else, social divisions between different parts of society are a bit looser; they can and to associate with each other (and the Militat can marry members of other castes), while foreigners can immigrate and join the military, provided they pass muster. They can’t follow non-Estasian cultural norms, though. Speaking of which, the gulf that divides Estasian culture from the rest of the Octet boils down to three elements; their legacy of conquest, their reverence of the four Virtues, and the influence of the Militat. Huge chunks of their culture derives from elements they stole from nations they raided or fought against and adapted to their worldview, ranging from the art they make to the food and drink they consume (  ). Estasia is also haunted by the remnants of the now-heretical ideology that drove the Unity War, leading to a sense of cultural superiority that runs underneath Estasian society. On the other hand, their reverence of the Virtues comes from within. When he started drawing up plans for Estasia’s new social order, Exarch rifled through the memories of both his Solar incarnation and Estasia (who in Creation was a Solar Queen’s general) looking for models; he stumbled across the four Virtues and re-created them as best he could. Today the divisions and interplay between the four are so ingrained in Estasian society that they form the heart of most of its more complex art. For instance, while a statue of a soldier striking a valiant pose is considered gauche, a statue of a soldier kneeling and staring at his bloodstained hands is considered a golden example of the tension between Conviction and Compassion worthy of great respect (Estasia considers the Grieving Militat statue one of its national treasures). Their highly-developed theater tradition () uses the interplay between the four to fuel its narratives. Valor and Conviction are generally valued above Compassion and Temperance, but the second two are considered vital to counterbalance the first; the country’s most famous poem uses the destruction of a famous unit during the Fifth Campaign to lament how its commanders put Valor above Temperance. Estasians value public displays of the Virtues (that don’t interfere with work) from everyone, even Alchemicals; many Alchemicals find they help stave off Clarity.The third is the Militat (singular and collective), the only standing army in Autochthonia (it and its branches all use -e as the plural suffix). Militate souls are chosen for past diligence and dedication (they usually belonged to the Populat) and implanted with magical earpieces during soulgem installation; though they spend their early childhoods with children of every caste like in most of Autochthonia, they get special attention and meals laced with growth hormones before the caste whisks them away at 13 to begin training. Over the next six years they get a mixture of combat training, implants, and live fire exercises against less threatening foes before joining the caste proper and getting sent to battalions; at that point they get hired out to neighboring governments or any Tripartite branch that can pay for them specifically, hunt down major threats, or just do anything violent that needs doing. After a while the most accomplished can join the Evocat, the elites they keep in reserve during combat, and once they reach the point they can no longer keep up they either go into the supply corps or “retire” to tell children back home how back in their day, etc.  While the Populat don’t participate in combat (they used to be trained as militia until the Rebellion) and the Theomachracy only gives up the occasional Lector chaplain when they have to, the other three parts of Autochthonian society send members into battle alongside the Militate. The Sodalities send specialists known as Vicars to act as mechanics, medics, engineers, and supply officers; the fact that Militate pick up sacred secrets all the time when Vicars recruit them as assistants drives Sodality leaders absolutely bonkers. The Oglotary provides the Venatore, essentially the officer corps; while in theory they are selected from the most promising, strategically-minded children of the caste, in practice the selection process is corrupt as hell and often results in generals who essentially purchased their rank instead of earning it (yes, still ). After retirement former Venatore often climb up the ranks of the civilian government, and most Autocrats come from among their ranks. Even Alchemicals join the military; in fact, so many join the military that they play a key role in most Estasian units – they counter other Alchemicals. On the other hand, a surprisingly large number of Militate refuse to fight. Most aspiring pacifists get it beaten out of them during training or, like other Militate cadets with discipline issues, get diverted into some specialist role suited to their mindset; depending on how little they want to do with violence, many end up caravan guards hired to protect travelers, scouts and messengers, or just doing the paperwork. However, a few have the Conviction to refuse to have anything to do with combat in spite of all the pressure on them. Given how in line with Estasian values standing up to pressure that intense is, usually they don’t force them into combat or kill them for insubordination. Instead they are ostracized and eventually head either to Clasmat or Gulak (where enough pacifists have fled over the years that they’ve established immigrant communities) or towards tunnel folk communes (where The Estasian military values discipline above all else. They value their equipment: they equip their soldiers with the highest quality weapons and armor in the Octet as well as equipment seen nowhere else; Estasia fields the only cavalry force in Autochthonia, hoverbike-mounted scouts and lancers. They value their flexibility: every Militat can function as a line soldier, skirmisher, scout, and medic on top of any specialties. But first and foremost they value discipline. Estasian soldiers are trained to always listen to orders, not take initiative, and never falter; it’s part of why the Venatore come from a different caste, since they exist to handle making tactical decisions. It means they can outfight the conscript forces they face, breaking their will and chasing them down; since they can outfight the basic parts of every major army they face, they have little trouble maintaining their dominance. They’ve never fully overcome the legacy of Exarch’s dubious strategic instincts, though; their emphasis on discipline means taking out their Venatore cripples them, they have no idea how to hold territory or fortifications, and they can’t defend anything unless it’s as mobile as they are. They also rely too heavily on their Alchemicals to counteract their equivalents on the other side and get slaughtered when they can’t, and their reliance on time-honor tactics makes them vulnerable to surprises. If they enter Creation, they’ll find massive initial success as they turn everything near the gate into a smoking wasteland before their opponents realize their weaknesses and obliterate them. But while still in Autochthonia, Estasian mercenaries remain the most impressive and reliable troops available. Also there’s a brief section on the capital Lux (it’s a massive museum city dedicated towards serving as a national icon and it has some evocative locations for players to visit that I can’t make myself care about) and three notable characters; the Grand Autocrat (he has very little power in the face of generals interested in keeping the status quote in place as Autochthon dies, and as his brief dream of cultural imperialism collapses he’s started looking towards more extreme sources of change), an Adamant plant in the Militat who’s started to go native, and an Orichalcum who runs the best Militat school in the country. Next time, we will cover Nurad, the nation that’s about to get hosed. Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Jun 2, 2020 |
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Jun 2, 2020 04:03
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Fivemarks posted:Shadiversity, however, is very ungood. How ungood are we talking? Vaguely socially conservative, complainy about SJWs, or full Nazi?
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Jun 2, 2020 04:31
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When Compass Autochthonia was first released, it was as four separate parts released one after the other; it was released as one complete book once all four parts were out. Each part got one comic (that art budget again), which explains why some chapters have comics and some don’t. The need to keep all four parts of roughly equal length explains the weird-rear end chapter breakdown it has and why not every nation of the Octet got its own chapter. I do think we made something of a virtue out of necessity, though—breaking the Eight Nations up into themed groups helped pinpoint ways that authors could differentiate them both within and between those groups, and probably, in the end, made for more interesting nation write ups than if they’d just been broken up into eight different chapters.
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Jun 2, 2020 07:05
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Yggdrasil Part Eight: All Swedes Have a Thing. It is Known.  CONTENT WARNING This section includes references to slavery (including sexual slavery), infanticide, homophobia and misogyny, and assorted patriarchal bullshit. It's not explicit or glorified--it's about what you'd find in a history textbook about the Viking Age, but it's there. We've mentioned the thing a few times in this review--now it's time to talk in more detail about it. A thing (which yes, does come from the same root as the modern English word for "generic object") is a meeting of all free men in a social group (there are things at many levels of society, from "everyone who lives in the same region" all the way up to national assemblies like the Thing of All Swedes), at which disputes are settled, judgments levied, and new laws and communal ventures are debated, voted upon, and enacted. They usually happen once a year or so, often in association with major religious rites and usually also involving a big market fair as well. Monarchs can also call things specifically for their jarls to decide on matters of state, but these are rather rare. In theory, all free men have a voice and a vote at the thing (sorry ladies, hope you've got a husband, father, or other male relative to plead your case for you), but in practice, of course, the discourse tends to be dominated by the wealthy and influential--nobles don't really have any more executive power than other free men, but since you don't really get to call yourself a jarl without being rich and popular, the effect is much the same. One of the most influential roles is that of the lawspeaker--Norse people don't write their laws down, so a lawspeaker is nominated from among the community to memorize all the laws and decisions of the thing and cite them as needed. One of the most important concepts in Norse law is the wergeld (literally "man-price"). This is the assessed value of a person based on their wealth, social class, gender, and other considerations. It's what you're expected to pay to the family of someone you kill, or conversely what you can expect in ransom for a prisoner. Lesser crimes are often settled by the payment of some portion of a person's wergeld, and this is one of the matters the thing might have to pronounce. People do often "settle out of court," as it were, but when the two sides in a dispute can't agree on fair recompense, they might take it to the thing for arbitration. Or they might reject the payment and go straight to vendetta--which we've talked about before, and while avenging wrongs done to your family is generally seen as noble and virtuous, there's often a sense of underlying tragedy in the sagas that concern these blood feuds. Sometimes, if a payment isn't enough to satisfy the aggrieved party, there might be a formal challenge to holmgang, a formal, ritualized duel. The parties involved agree on a time and a place, weapons, and the like, then meet and beat the holy tar out of each other. Killing someone in a duel is not considered murder (and thus is not eligible for weregeld, and any retaliatory killings will be seen as illegitimate). Some insults are so severe that they require you to immediately challenge the insulter: the most common of these is being called argr, which could be "politely" translated as "an unmanly person;" it carries connotations of cowardice, effeminacy, and  being the receptive partner in homosexual acts. Thanks, rear end in a top hat Vikings. Curiously, there doesn't appear to be the same stigma associated with being the penetrative partner--the sagas include several insults along the lines of "all the einherjar can't get enough of your sweet rear end" or even "I hosed you and you gave birth to a litter of wolves," which a) wow and b) probably weren't meant to slander the glorious dead or as an epic self-own. Practicing seidr, or ecstatic magic, is also seen as a woman's art and therefore men who practice it (including Odin) are often labeled as such.If the guilty party refuses to pay, or in the event of crimes deemed unforgivable, harsher punishments might be levied. Capital punishment is fairly rare; more common (and arguably more terrible) is outlawry. An outlaw is exactly what it sounds like: someone who is completely outside the law. Legally they are a non-person, and can be killed with no penalty. Moreover, helping an outlaw is itself a crime punishable by outlawry, so outlaws find themselves truly cast out of society. Outlawry is generally either permanent or for a term of three years. Some later Icelandic law codes further give outlaws a few "safe zones," places where they can't be killed with impunity. Still, outlawry is a terrible fate, especially in a society as family oriented as the Norse. Speaking of family, inheritance is a pretty big deal. The Norse practice partible inheritance--that is, all the children inherit equal shares of their parents' property. This obviously creates some issues when you're dealing with powerful titles like jarl or king, so it's customary for nobles to name one child as the principal heir who will inherit the title. And as we discussed back in the setting chapter, all children are seen as having an equally-valid claim by bloodline, so it's unfortunately common for civil wars to break out between the children of a powerful lord, whether there was a named successor or not. If there are no heirs at all, a special session of the thing usually elects the new jarl or king. These elections are, of course, massive balls of politicking, backstabbing, and other plot-hooky goodness. The next section is sort of a grab-bag of tidbits about daily life, so I'm going to zip through them fairly quickly: Most Norse people die pretty young, whether in fighting, from disease, or in childbirth. Infant mortality is likewise appallingly high by modern standards--some estimates are as high as 60%. Accordingly, people who reach old age are accorded a great deal of respect and are cared for by their children. Relations outside your own clan are predominantly based on force or threat of force--people are always on guard against their neighbors trying to take their stuff by force, and conversely looking out for opportunities to do the same to neighbors they don't like. Norse people are superstitious and proud, and there are no formal schools for children: kids learn from the adults in their family. Hospitality is also vitally important--if you're travelling, you should expect that any home will give you a meal, a change of clothes, and a place to sleep for the night. The quality of that accommodation depends on the host's standing, but being generous to travelers is a good way to gain reputation for yourself and show off your wealth. Marriage is a matter of pragmatism, not love. We've already talked about how women have no say in their own marriages, and we don't actually know much of anything about Norse wedding ceremonies: what we do know is that there was typically an exchange of money or property--both a bride price paid to the family of the bride and a dowry from the bride's family to the bride herself*--and a big feast. When a child is born, it is formally recognized as a member of the family in two stages: first, the mother nursing it, and second, the father acknowledging it and naming it. Unwanted children, whether because of physical disability or just children the family can't support, were frequently exposed--left in the wilderness to die. It's a loving awful practice, and while I've seen some theories that try to soften it by saying it was possibly a form of unofficial adoption (the theory being that there were known, accepted places to leave unwanted infants, ergo people who wanted children but couldn't have them biologically could lurk around those areas when they knew a neighbor had recently given birth and adopt the abandoned kid), that strikes me as wishful thinking to soften the blow of a truly tragic part of pre-modern life. There's also a theory that selective exposure of infant girls (because those dowries are expensive) might have been a contributing factor in Viking expansion--with a massive surplus of young men in need of wives, going abroad might have been the only option to find one. * I hosed up here earlier and wrote "groom" for God-knows-what reason. The dowry was provided to the wife for her security in the event that she was widowed or divorced. Contracts and oaths are usually sealed with a handshake, or in more formal occasions (especially among the nobility) on a gold arm-ring that's been annointed with sacrificial blood. Several accounts of Norse temples describe a ring permanently on display there for the swearing of oaths, and a symbolic oath-ring shape on the hilts of swords is a common feature of swords in this time period. Norsemen were fancy motherfuckers. Contrary to the popular image of hairy, filthy barbarians in unwashed leather (looking at you, Vikings), the Norse were fastidious in their hygiene and personal appearance. Beards and hair are washed and perfumed regularly--the word for "Saturday" in the modern Scandinavian languages still derives from the Old Norse "bathing day." They were also styled and trimmed--beards are often described as "sharp" in the sagas. We know that women wore their hair long, with unmarried women wearing it loose and married women wearing it in complex buns or knots--but we don't know much about men's hairstyles. There are a couple of references to what sounds like a reverse mullet--shaves close at the back, with long bangs, and long hair on men seems to be unusual enough that it's used as a nickname, but that's about it. All Norse people wore make-up, probably dark eyeliner at the least and possibly other cosmetics. They likewise took great pride in their clothes--wool is the most common material, with linen being more of a luxury item and exotic materials like silk featuring as decorative flourishes. In fact, the Norse were apparently so hunky that there are entries in... I think the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles that basically amount to "goddammit, our women won't stop loving these gorgeous Vikings! They're clearly seducing them with the black magic of regular bathing and good oral hygiene." (Roughly 500 years later, their descendants at Jamestown would write almost the exact same thing about the local Powhatan men. You'd think the Englishmen might have got the hint.) Next Time: Drunk was I then, I was over drunk in that crafty Jötun's court. But best is an ale feast when man is able to call back his wits at once. GimpInBlack fucked around with this message at 13:40 on Jun 2, 2020 |
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Jun 2, 2020 12:54
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Wait, why does Yggdrasil claim the dowry is paid to the groom? As I understand it, viking society provided 'morgengave'/dowry specifically to the wife. The point being to provide for her if she's widowed or divorced. ... does Yggdrasil even mention divorce?
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Jun 2, 2020 13:14
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Pretty sure it mentioned that both men and women could divorce their partners in the previous update. Apparently one of the reasons that a woman could call for divorce for was that if her husband hadn't slept with her for at least three years.
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Jun 2, 2020 13:24
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Caustic Soda posted:Wait, why does Yggdrasil claim the dowry is paid to the groom? As I understand it, viking society provided 'morgengave'/dowry specifically to the wife. The point being to provide for her if she's widowed or divorced. Yeah, we talked about divorce in the last update. And no, you're right, that was my bad on the dowry, I apparently had a massive brainfart while writing that bit. I'll go back and edit accordingly. Yggdrasil actually doesn't even mention a dowry at all, just the bride price, which is also pretty weird, but that error is mine, not Yggdrasil's. The dowry is given to the wife for exactly the reasons you said, and if she doesn't end up widowed or divorced, her children will inherit it. One of these days I'll get through an update on Norse society without loving something up....
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Jun 2, 2020 13:38
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GimpInBlack posted:In fact, the Norse were apparently so hunky that there are entries in... I think the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles that basically amount to "goddammit, our women won't stop loving these gorgeous Vikings! They're clearly seducing them with the black magic of regular bathing and good oral hygiene." Just to contextualize this a little, because this is one of those factoids that shows up a lot, this shows up in one 12th century monastic chronicle. To summarize the story, as the Chronicle puts it, "the Danes, thanks to their habit of combing their hair every day, of bathing every Saturday and regularly changing their clothes, were able to undermine the virtue of married women and even seduce the daughters of nobles to be their mistresses". These nobles therefore come to the king and complain and demand that something be done. The king therefore orders the death of all the Danes in England (the St. Brice Day massacre.) One of the people killed is the sister of the king of Denmark. In response, the King of Denmark invades and takes over the country. Two quick things of note here. First, that that probably wasn't the reason for the St. Brice Day massacre. Other chronicles say that there had been a bunch of Viking raids along the coast not too long before, and that the king thought there was a conspiracy between the raiders and the Danes living in England to overthrow him, so he ordered the massacre. Second, this story fits a really specific medieval monastic trope, which is basically somebody commits a sexual sin (seduction and adultery here), which leads to an even greater evil (the massacre of the Danes), which leads to divine punishment and catastrophe (foreign invasion). It's very very medieval monk sort of thing to get really rhetorically upset about people having sex they shouldn't and talk about how terrible the consequences are. Medieval monks tended to get really upset that other people didn't take that sort of thing as seriously as they did. Sorry, and i don't mean to single you out. It's just that line tends to be taken out of context a lot and quoted as a fact, rather than as what it probably is, which is a warning that if you have sex that God doesn't approve of, it'll set off a chain of events that lead to vikings taking over.
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Jun 2, 2020 13:47
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Epicurius posted:Just to contextualize this a little, because this is one of those factoids that shows up a lot, this shows up in one 12th century monastic chronicle. To summarize the story, as the Chronicle puts it, "the Danes, thanks to their habit of combing their hair every day, of bathing every Saturday and regularly changing their clothes, were able to undermine the virtue of married women and even seduce the daughters of nobles to be their mistresses". These nobles therefore come to the king and complain and demand that something be done. The king therefore orders the death of all the Danes in England (the St. Brice Day massacre.) One of the people killed is the sister of the king of Denmark. In response, the King of Denmark invades and takes over the country. A fair point, certainly, and I definitely don't think that stupid, sexy Vikings was actually the root cause of the St. Brice Day massacre. And John of Wallingford is definitely moralizing about non-God-approved sex here. But still, the fact that he thought to frame it specifically as being by virtue of their bathing and grooming and not, say, heathen witchcraft or force or something suggests to me, at least, that there's probably some truth to it, even if our boy is overstating the case and its role in geopolitical events. Like, obviously not every English woman threw herself at the first Dane to roll up with a perfumed beard and a toothpick, but probably some did decide that they preferred a guy who didn't smell like actual rear end all the time.
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Jun 2, 2020 14:07
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GimpInBlack posted:A fair point, certainly, and I definitely don't think that stupid, sexy Vikings was actually the root cause of the St. Brice Day massacre. And John of Wallingford is definitely moralizing about non-God-approved sex here. But still, the fact that he thought to frame it specifically as being by virtue of their bathing and grooming and not, say, heathen witchcraft or force or something suggests to me, at least, that there's probably some truth to it, even if our boy is overstating the case and its role in geopolitical events. Like, obviously not every English woman threw herself at the first Dane to roll up with a perfumed beard and a toothpick, but probably some did decide that they preferred a guy who didn't smell like actual rear end all the time. Sure. Most women do prefer a guy who doesn't smell like rear end,, although the actual question is, I think, to what extent Saxon and Viking grooming actually differed, and to what extent john of Wallingford, writing 200 years after the fact, just had an anti-bathing agenda.
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Jun 2, 2020 14:36
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Every setting with vikings should emphasize that they spend plenty of time on their hair and beards though. Magnificently groomed vikings can only be the beginning of good things.
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Jun 2, 2020 14:43
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Night10194 posted:Every setting with vikings should emphasize that they spend plenty of time on their hair and beards though. I remember hearing that they were also total clothes horses, and loved brightly-colored clothes. Especially the rulers. You know you're talking to an important guy when he's got red and white striped linen breeches and his hair is in immaculate plaits.
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Jun 2, 2020 15:07
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Tibalt posted:I wanted to post my thoughts about the Warhammer Fantasy 4e system and the game design decisions they made, but it doesn't really fit the format of this thread, so I started posting them in the WFRP thread instead. Feel free to come by and tell me why I'm wrong. Personally, I don't like the ten thousand word reviews that only talk about fluff. 
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Jun 2, 2020 15:15
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Ratoslov posted:I remember hearing that they were also total clothes horses, and loved brightly-colored clothes. Especially the rulers. You know you're talking to an important guy when he's got red and white striped linen breeches and his hair is in immaculate plaits. Now I like to imagine the Varangian Guard protecting the king of Byzantium but also looking fabulous doing it.
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Jun 2, 2020 15:15
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Speleothing posted:Personally, I don't like the ten thousand word reviews that only talk about fluff. As someone who writes those reviews, this thread specifically exists for EVERY kind of RPG review. E: You even wouldn't be the first person to do exactly that; you'd be following in the footsteps of our venerable Night. Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Jun 2, 2020 |
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Jun 2, 2020 15:24
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Ratoslov posted:I remember hearing that they were also total clothes horses, and loved brightly-colored clothes. Especially the rulers. You know you're talking to an important guy when he's got red and white striped linen breeches and his hair is in immaculate plaits. Oh yes, absolutely. Brightly dyed (or bleached to pure white) cloth is expensive and wearing lots of it is a massive status symbol. Also, they decorated everything with as much embroidery or carving or inlays or what have you as they could afford. So on top of the immaculate plaits and the incredibly brightly-colored clothes, add bangles and broaches and fancy trim all over the drat place. It was probably intimidating as hell to a 9th century Saxon, but there's a reason Vikings' costume design went with "Iron Age biker gang" as their aesthetic.
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Jun 2, 2020 15:25
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GimpInBlack posted:Oh yes, absolutely. Brightly dyed (or bleached to pure white) cloth is expensive and wearing lots of it is a massive status symbol. Also, they decorated everything with as much embroidery or carving or inlays or what have you as they could afford. So on top of the immaculate plaits and the incredibly brightly-colored clothes, add bangles and broaches and fancy trim all over the drat place. It was probably intimidating as hell to a 9th century Saxon, but there's a reason Vikings' costume design went with "Iron Age biker gang" as their aesthetic. Yes, and that reason is cowardice.  Fancy as hell people doing ridiculously badass things is way cooler than everything is brown and grey people doing the same.
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Jun 2, 2020 15:36
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Night10194 posted:Yes, and that reason is cowardice.  On a related note, the common translation of Haraldr inn hárfagri, "Harald Fairhair," would suggest to the modern English-speaker that he was notable for his blond hair, when in fact it's referring to his exceptionally well-groomed hair. Some historians prefer "Harald Finehair," but that might suggest that his hair was unusually slender. King Harald Lovely-Locks is right there, you cowards.
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Jun 2, 2020 15:45
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It brings to mind Fury Road, where Miller said "Just because it's a wasteland doesn't mean people stop making beautiful things." It's an important principle to keep in mind!
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Jun 2, 2020 15:48
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I much prefer Chinese period pieces for this reason. The ridiculous amount of colors and Extremely complex hair ornamentation is so good.
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Jun 2, 2020 16:30
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Let's not forget insanely ostentatious and lavish Japanese helmets. If you've been watching the Nioh LP you've seen at least a couple of really wild ones.
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Jun 2, 2020 16:45
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Cooked Auto posted:Let's not forget insanely ostentatious and lavish Japanese helmets. If you've been watching the Nioh LP you've seen at least a couple of really wild ones. I wish there were more late medieval period pieces, so we could see stuff like the puffy technicolor Landsknechts The Empire's troops were inspired by. Giant prestige production covering The Italian Wars, please make it happen! It'd be interesting to know where this bizarre idea that "grey-brown = authentic" originated; we've seen the same thing taken to absurd desaturated extremes in FPS games... but it goes back to old school fantasy were you'd have characters walking around covered in naked brown leather and furs like a medieval gutter punk (or literal murder hobo??). There's obviously some through line of unhappy attitudes towards anything "fancy".
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Jun 2, 2020 17:43
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