Ben Redmond

Midgard: Viking Legends

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

Midgard is a mythic-historical roleplaying game, where you take on the role of a legendary Viking hero and complete your own epic quests. With unique and highly-thematic dice mechanics, in-depth grizzled combat and plenty of viking magic and special combat powers, in Midgard you’ll find a shield-splitting, berserk-stoking, rape and pillage of a game.

Midgard is a roleplaying game, where you take on the role of a legendary Viking hero and complete your own epic quests. I am specifying this as a mythic-historic setting—that is one in which you try to stick closely to the history or the period, but assume that all the gods, myths and monsters that the Viking people believed are actually true.

I also think it’s important to point out that Midgard is really only a roleplaying system rather than a setting. As its an historical setting what would be the point me spending hours rewriting Wikipedia’s Norse myth and Viking history pages for you, you can do that for yourself, or just make it up from what you’ve learnt from the films, comic books and other popular culture avenues open to you. There’s always someone who knows more about a given period of history than you so I’m not going to put myself on the spot,, and anyway I’m not sure whether I think it’s that important: if you’re all having fun, who cares about historical accuracy.

At the end of the day, I hope I have managed to capture the flavour of films like the Thirteenth Warrior that were the inspiration for this game in my systems. If you don’t like them, fair enough—you’ve not paid anything for it so you shouldn’t feel cheated. I’m also pretty open to constructive
criticism, so if you have any thing useful to add then let me know and if I get a chance to do something about it I might update the doc with your ideas. Just pop over to whatever blog or forum site you got this from and post your thoughts. If I spot it (and I’m sad enough to regularly check these
places) I’ll reply and discuss your idea.