Age of Vikings RPG by Pedro Ziviani

Seth Stauffer

After the Greek pantheon of gods, Norse mythology is likely the second most popular collection of deities. In Pedro Ziviani’s game, Age of Vikings, players will delve into the lore and history of Icelandic Vikings. There is no shortage of love for the Vikings, who pay homage to the likes of Odinn, Freyr, and others. Explore turbulent seas, raid enemies, and develop a homestead. Iceland is harsh and brutal, but so are its inhabitants.

Ziviani used Chaosium’s Basic Role-Playing Game to create a historical fantasy, taking inspiration from classic texts and historical facts. This game taught and entertained. There is information scattered throughout the text, such as in Iceland, where there were no cities. The country was dotted with homesteads and villages. Yet, the book stresses that gamers shouldn’t take things too literally and seek more information from source material. Age of Vikings states clearly that this is a game manual, not a history book.

Some bits were unexpected fun and showed interesting nuance, such as rules for alcohol consumption and drinking contests. Intoxication and farming are both featured in the rules, the latter being a sort of downtime, necessary activities to keep Viking society in good shape when not marauding. PCs are part of raiding parties, plundering the unaware, but also simple farmers tilling the land in their spare time.  Details like these will help give a more unique experience to people playing Age of Vikings.

There is a lot in this book. Sea-faring and naval combat, farming, magic, and so on. I didn’t find myself asking, “What about…?” or, at least, if I did, an answer often became apparent as I read.  Those murky edge cases will become more evident during gamers’ actual play, but I had trouble identifying them in the book itself.

 While the writing is fairly dry, there are many snippets of flavour text to break up the rules. Additionally, and very useful, there are examples of actual play throughout the book to illustrate how the rules function during a session. 

Skills are well-treated and divided along some sensible categories. It would have been nice to see how creating new skills could be implemented. A bit more information for the person running the game would have been nice. Regardless, the core book allows anyone to pick up the game and play it without much issue. 

One of my main problems has to do with the fact that characters can have skills that evolve to over 100% competency. This feels borderline absurd, especially when considering that a roll between 96-100 is a failure, and a 1-5 is a success.   Abilities scores can be raised above 100%, but still only have a 95% of success, which doesn’t make sense. This aspect of the game felt off to me. Why not just set a cap that an ability score can’t be raised above 95%? At that point, the PC has attained almost complete mastery, but still allows for error, even though they are merely human. By contrast, a skill cannot be less than 00%. It’s not clear why competence can exceed perfection, but not incompetence. 

In summary, Age of Vikings walks a line between fantasy adventure and historical realism. It blends facts and mythology, ensuring there is as much space as needed for magic, monsters, as well as more mundane aspects of the Viking world. The rules, as written, contain a couple of points of contention for me. However, this is a flexible game that offers players something that can be extremely nuanced. This is for anyone who loves Vikings or those who want to try a more realistic approach to fantasy role-playing.