VikingPunk

[Ancient History]

The World Tree is in ashes, and the children of the Nine Worlds are stranded on Midgard: Jotuns, Aesir, the Alfar and Duergar, trolls and stranger beasts...but it is not the Midgard you know...

The Norse dominion of Europe strengthened as the Vikings spread all along the coasts, and by 1066 AD the Northmen had toppled Rome and Byzantium, and by 1380 had established colonies in the New World where the skaelings fell back before them. Down through the centuries the Viking kingdoms grew, expanded, colonized, and warred. From the joint-viking expeditions rose the first true corporations, and these bloodthirsty enterprises grew and conglomerated until in the present era most peoples of the world are thralls to the great megacorporations. Cyber-Thranes, the remnants of the bloodthirsty degenerate warrior-aristocracy are the elite, having ousted the old kings before the Fall of the Gods. Their navies slice the waves of black, polluted seas beneath skies perpetually clouded, either from the smoke of their factories or the oncoming Fimbulwinter, and commence raids against the rich merchant-nations of Asia, Africa, and South America. The dregs of the Old World hold out in the bastion of the massive southern continent of New Europe, alternately warring against the Norse Corporate Hegemony and hiring them out as mercenaries in their ongoing petty squabbles.

Now the Aesir have returned, and formed alliance with the Thanes. Over London New Aesgard is being built, a floating city ruled by cyborg "gods;" Valkyrie units prowl the battlefields of the world, collecting the cortical stacks of the fallen and sending them to a Virtual Valhalla that has been encoded into the world-spanning Matrix.

Yet all is not thranes and thralls. There exist freemen still, living in the vast dark cities - mercenaries and reavers all, from the cyber-skalds that hack the corporate IC with their harpdecks to the mysterious rune-priests whose powers have re-awakened after centuries to the berserks, chemical combat monsters who step on the path of the Were. They march off not knowing what fate the Norns have woven for them, but march to meet their Dooms with glee, for Valhalla awaits only for the brave...

It is a dark age. A wolf age. A Viking Age...

[Schleiermacher]

I like this, but I have to point out that "Were" just means "man".

[Ancient History]

That is a valid point and I respect it. However, I'm too lazy to edit the opening post.

I'm basically thinking something along the lines of a low-mana world with some Norse mythology critters side-by-side with humans in your general cyberpunk cityscape hellhole. The floating Asgard and cyborg-Aesir is stealing a bit of a march from the Marvel 2099 comics, but I think it fits the setting. Still thinking over the magic system a bit - your general magic-as-skills system is workable, but using the rune-magic system might be more thematically appropriate and keep magic low-key, y'know?

[talozin]

I might consider mining Heresy for potentially useful material -- it has kind of a similar feel to this concept, albeit explicitly Christian rather than explicitly Wotanic.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Rune magic should just be hacking. Secret symbols that affect reality is too good a fit. It's just that almost nobody's literate and even fewer are computer-literate (most computers are Idiocracy-style, large buttons with pictures on them). To learn hacking, you have to go through crazy Wotanic ordeals to earn an apprenticeship - the establishment uses them as hazing, rebels use them as loyalty tests.

I do remember a sci-fi ragnarok story where the gods were gene-augmented humans, their artifacts were ultra-tech weapons, their enemies were giant robot monsters... and the whole thing was an extreme reality show.

Also, I think you should look to Battle Angel Alita for inspiration, which has a lot of good stuff based on people living a brutal cyberpunk lifestyle and fighting for the favor of a floating city.

[echoVanguard]

The floating Asgard and cyborg-Aesir is stealing a bit of a march from the Marvel 2099 comics, but I think it fits the setting.

Haha! I thought I was the only one who remembered this.

"Odin's wrath! He's got a plasma cannon! Stop him!"

echo

[Ancient History]

Ugh, I forgot how weird and convoluted the rune-magic rules are for GURPS...

[sabs]

To be fair, the rune magic rules are weird and convolted for pretty much every game system.

[Almaz]

You're looking for ulfhedinn or ulfhednar for "Nordic werewolf." Interesting stuff to look up. Also see: berserkergang.

[Ancient History]

Okay, paraphrasing things here...

Rune Magic
Futhark is both a secular and a sacred alphabet; people see non-magical runes everyday when they pop open their email, or scrolling as advertisements along the sides of buildings or down the chopsticks they use when they go out for Hanese food. There are many superstitions tied up with the runes, and many fools try their luck at rune-casting as a form of divination, with no luck.

However, there is a body of mystical lore attached to runes - each is more than just a letter or syllable, it represents an idea or set of ideas, and when drawn with the proper understanding and exercise of will, a rune-caster can inscribe runes to magical effect. Some rune-priests see this as an expression of human latent psychic powers, focused through a medium to facilitate the transmission of energies; others see the mystic Futhark as the language of the universe, as glimpsed by Wotan after his 9-days-hanging, the programming language of the universe. Whatever the truth, the runes work.

The main skill is Symbol Drawing (Futhark). Each of the 25 mystic runes of the Futhark has its own IQ-based skill with Symbol Drawing as the prerequisite (no default). Each rune represents one or more concepts - for example, Ansuz ("A") is the rune of Communication and Insight and Raidho ("R") is the rune of Sense, Knowledge, and Name - and the rune-caster casts spells by combining runes with different properties in an effort to achieve the desired effect. So a street runecaster with knowledge of these runes might attempt to combine them to sweep an apartment for listening devices (anything that is broadcasting, really), or to tap into a cellular phone conversation, or as a form of divination to quickly sort through a huge mass of files to fine the one they want. The more runes a spell has, the more complicated and difficult it is. Each spell has an associated energy cost determined by the runes used.

While not mentioned in GURPS Magic, one possible quick way to to handle runes is to assign certain rune combinations to different spells already stat'd out in GURPS. So for example if you know Kenaz ("K", fire), Raidho ("R", sense, knowledge, name), and Naithiz ("N", control, bind) then different combinations include:

RK (Detect Fire)
KR (Seek Fire)
NK (Shape Fire)
KN (Control Fire Elemental)
RN (Command)
RKN (Fire Golem)
&c.

The major advantage of runes is that they can be prepared on temporary items for quick-casting, as well as permanently inscribed on an object to create a long-lasting magical item and/or sustained effect. Most rune-casters have a bag of rune-tokens which can be used to lay out the spell they wish to cast quickly, or have the spells they normally cast pre-inscribed on a runestaff or other object for quick casting. Even without these, the runecaster can cast a spell simply by tracing the runes in the air, though this is more difficult and less sure. Modern runecasters may tattoo themselves with the runes to have access to their spells quickly.

[Ancient History]

GURPS: Vikings does have a section on magic, but it's short. Their basic assumptions are that you're going to play either a no magic campaign (historical), a low-magic campaign with just Vikings and some monsters like trolls (fantastic), or a high-magic campaign, which features mainly suggestions about typical GURPS Magic spellcasting, though there's an abbreviated bit on using magic runes as described above.

Then it goes on in typical GURPS-depth, drawing on accredited historical sources and documents about magic items in Norse mythology and legends - which is to say, not as much as you'd think. Mostly some magic items that various gods had, and most of those were crafted by dwarves and sometimes lent out to mortals, but otherwise scarce. (They note that this is a good way to keep magic item proliferation out of a campaign.)

I kinda think it reminds me of "What if all the 'gods' are actually aliens and their magic items are high-tech items?" Which isn't bad for a VikingPunk campaign, precisely, but it reminds me a bit of Warren Ellis' run on Thor, which was a bit weird.

Still, I could see something like that...maybe throwing in a couple bits from the Thor movie or hell, even WildC.A.T.S. for good measure.

Rune-based supertech jumpstarting the Viking civilization and leading to a weird cyberpunk world where the tech is far ahead of the social advances, where the Enlightenment never happened and the Christian church was thrown down by pagan kings in fealty to to alien "gods" in a floating city fighting a war against seven other worlds. Then some accident occurs, the rainbow warp gate that connected them is destroyed and the various alien races - the elves, dwarves, and trolls, aesir and vanir - are cast down and lost on this world, far away from the war they were fighting.

Also a chunk on shapeshifting in various formats in GURPS Vikings, where they too use the term "were" for shapechangers in general. Go figure.

[fectin]

David Drake wrote a trilogy, Northworld, retelling Norse myths with multiple dimensions and power armor. The "gods" basically just had higher quality copies of the same power armor, and knew how to use the HUDs (so they could actually use strategy). I remember it being pretty awesome, but I was younger then. The opening of the first book drags a bit, because he has to establish his protagonist, then dump him into a completely different setting.

In his afterwords, Drake describes it as something he wrote explicitly to retell Norse myths, so it's actually a decent source for inspiration (IIRC, he actually did it to prove wrong a friend who said that no-one could retell the Norse myths in an interesting way).

[kzt]

"Thor Meets Captain America"

[Schleiermacher]

That story's fun.

It was expanded into a graphic novel, "the Life Eaters", which unfortunately just dragged on and became weird and was a chore for me to finish.

[echoVanguard]

I kinda think it reminds me of "What if all the 'gods' are actually aliens and their magic items are high-tech items?" Which isn't bad for a VikingPunk campaign, precisely, but it reminds me a bit of Warren Ellis' run on Thor, which was a bit weird.

Still, I could see something like that...maybe throwing in a couple bits from the Thor movie or hell, even WildC.A.T.S. for good measure.

The problem is that this has kind of been done to death, and fairly recently too - it's pretty obvious that the Aesir in the current movie-Marvel continuity are just aliens with advanced tech that fakes magic convincingly.

I think it would be significantly more original if you went a different direction, where the gods actually were magical ineffable piles of weirdness, but that technology was such a new and significant change to their game that they embraced it just as much as we did, only moreso.

After the creation of such wasteful and extravagant public works projects as the Bifrost, the Aesir reaped the consequences of ignoring the svartalves' dire warnings about Peak Magic. With their precious reserves of firmament dwindling, the gods were forced to subsist on the fruits of their previous works, becoming more and more reliant on the efforts of men...and ere long, disappearing from Midgard to huddle in the decaying halls of Asgard, gnawing pitifully on the prayers of their followers. But when mortals mastered the atom and the electron, a new and dizzying vista of possibility gaped before the gods, and like ants to a picnic, they swarmed greedily to a new source of power.

Bending their unearthly intellects and powerful wills to the implementation of these new technologies, the gods forge a terrifying future where the vision of man is cast in metal and circuits, uncaring of the human cost. Throngs of jubilant, zeal-mad worshippers clamor to take their places in the virtual halls of the endless feasting, where pain editors and cortical stimulations will keep them enswaddled in a shining fantasy while their motor cortexes slave away at the calculations of the EltrNet. And in the glimmering heights of New Asgard, the gods spin a new web of power cast not of prayers and miracles, but of data and functions. In a world where the lords of reality are the Systems Administrators of humanity's new existence, only the truly brave, who eat the hearts of the cyber-draugen and spit defiance at the enslavement of the masses, can hope to survive and remain free.

echo

[vagrant]

Something you may want to check out is the Ravirn Webmage series by Kelly McCullough. The writing is decent enough and funny at times, but the setting is basically 'What if the Greek Gods actually ran the world through IT?' In the latest book, the main character actually travels to Odinverse, and Odin does, actually, run the world on a mainframe. Not so much cyberpunk, but it could easily be so. (Especially since humans aren't really mentioned, it's all gods and demigods.)

[Stahlseele]

i thing Techno Vikings following the Path of the Berserker would have been better in the opening post, other than that, this is a nice idea ^^

[downzorz]

I know it's not the best game, but I can't think of VikingPunk without picturing Too Human. It's pretty cool aesthetically, and it has a (sort of) different take on the whole "gods are just more advanced species" thing.

[Ancient History]

I haven't given up on VikingPunk as a setting concept, but I'm wondering if it might be better as a collaborative setting game. Let each of the players make their idea of a VikingPunk PC, and then build the world around that.