So with our play-through of Pendelhaven’s introductory adventure, Fafnir’s Treasure done, I’ve been able to take a look at what is actually in it and have some final thoughts on the game. I want to wrap up my thoughts on the game, Fate of the Norns: Ragnarök and the introductory adventure before we move on to the next campaign (more on that in the next blog post).
First and foremost, the books for this system are beautiful. The stylized artwork evokes the feeling of viking art from the 900’s without copying it. This was not bog-standard Medieval art for a generic European knock-off fantasy. The art was pervasive through everything that wasn’t core rules, and I’m led to believe that was a design choice by the translator to indicate material he reworked to present better in English.
The down side to all of this beautiful artwork is when you need to print out a character sheet or a play sheet for keeping track of your runes during combat. These drain toner/ink tremendously due to the are and the background pattern. While Pendelhaven made all the pages you might want to print out as hand-outs a free PDF (sample characters, play sheets for tracking runes in combat, a hex map, initiative tiles, and so forth), they are just the same pages in the book exported into a separate file. Pendelhaven would do well to make versions of these pages with blank white backgrounds to ease printing costs.
Fafnir’s Treasure starts with a simplified version of the rules. This, theoretically, allows a group to just buy Fafnir’s treasure and play through it with only the rules necessary for the adventure and then graduate up to the full rules if they want. What it actually did was provide a simplified version of the 1st Edition rules that our Norn learned from while the rest of us learned the full version of 2nd Edition. Changes happened between editions that occasionally led to arguments when the Norn tried to do something the 2nd Edition rules prohibited, but the simplified rules allowed. In some places, the material had been updated to 2nd Edition in Fafnir’s Treasure (write-up of the trolls, notably), but it was spotty and inconsistent. I’ve seen a PDF of the original Fafnir’s Treasure and it feels like Pendelhaven spent a lot of money on upgrading the appearance for a 2nd Edition release and very little money updating the contents of the adventure actually to 2nd Edition.
On top of this, the editing the book was not the best, particularly doing the maths. For example, weapons that clearly do 3 damage in the equipment description unexplainedly do 4 in the summation of basic attacks for Zealots. Grizzled Warriors have an actual power that covers this gap and I wonder if this is a cut and paste issue that was never caught. Things like this happen often in both Fafnir’s Treasure and in the main rulebook.
While I’m on the NPCs (referred to as Denizens in the rules) – almost every opponent faced has weapons with Piercing, meaning they bypass a certain amount of armor, usually as much or more than we had. The notable exceptions are opponents that do Mental or Spiritual attacks which also tend to bypass relevant defenses. This made having armor almost pointless. This would be fine as a design choice, but it would have been nice to know that the game made that choice before we bought gear. Armor is some of the most expensive gear available and turned out to be a waste of time. As the introductory adventure for the game system, this gotcha downgraded our enjoyment of the system as a group.
In neither the main rulebook nor Fafnir’s Treasure was a section expectations and assumptions built into the game system. We went in cold not fully understanding what the game was designed to do, so we really had no way to lean into that curve to increase our enjoyment of the game. We spent nearly half of each session digging through the rules and hashing out what they meant, especially when what they said contradicted themselves or seemed to. Editing flubs made this worse (for example, the description of Taunt is missing a critical last half of a sentence explaining how to end the condition).
Finally, combats were very slow. We are not certain if that was due to all of us being new to the system, but we also play HERO System and these fight felt longer than a HERO System fight. Take that as you will.
Despite all of the above, there were aspects of the game we liked. We liked making characters, even though some guidance would have helped avoid the case where we built a Maiden of Ratatosk that could not invoke the Taunt condition, a major aspect of the archetype. The charts for powers and skills (we called them “bingo boards” as you put runes down on them to select powers or skill) worked well and forced us to make design choices, but also provided different flavors of the same archetypes based on which direction you spent your runes. Again, some guidance or design philosophy would have helped. We eventually worked out in play which archetypes benefited from more Essence or more Destiny, but some recommendations from the game designers would have helped. [You may be detecting a theme here.]
Fafnir’s Treasure has the option of a very condensed version of the adventure (basically the Norn reads the setup and then cuts directly to the final fight). This led to two different sets of expectations. In the condensed version, the reward is “one item from the treasure” with no explanation if that is one item for the group or per viking. The expanded version mentions in the descriptions of the relevant NPCs exactly which treasures are being offered (there are enough for 1 each for 5 vikings) and lets the PCs decide who gets what. Our Norn remembered the first part but missed the second part, a small mistake caused by combining the two versions of the adventure, but it changed the way our vikings felt about the guy that hired us. We were certain he was not who he said he was and was going to rip us off. At the very least, if we had continued playing with these characters, our group would have been more likely to side with the Jotun after this adventure and not the Aesir.
Summary:
There were aspects of this game we liked very much and it is beautiful, but I wouldn’t shell out the money they are charging for hardcopy. The base rules are US$70 and seem incomplete (need Norn guidance at the least). I suspect the Norn will also need to buy the Denizens of the North book (another US$70) for opponents (I do not recommend Fafnir’s Treasure at all) and everyone will need runestones (the Norn will need 2 sets to have enough).
PDFs are available for the rules, but they seem pricey and printing out anything will be ink/toner intensive. Runestones can be hand crafted (which we did with wood bits I was using for wargame minis and colored Sharpies) or purchased. If purchased, prices vary based on the quality you want – Pendelhaven sells a wooden set for US$25 that looked OK. One of our players bought just a set of runes online for something between US$10-US$15, but I don’t remember exactly.
Session 1
Session 2
Session 3
Session 4
Sessions 5 and 6
First and foremost, the books for this system are beautiful. The stylized artwork evokes the feeling of viking art from the 900’s without copying it. This was not bog-standard Medieval art for a generic European knock-off fantasy. The art was pervasive through everything that wasn’t core rules, and I’m led to believe that was a design choice by the translator to indicate material he reworked to present better in English.
The down side to all of this beautiful artwork is when you need to print out a character sheet or a play sheet for keeping track of your runes during combat. These drain toner/ink tremendously due to the are and the background pattern. While Pendelhaven made all the pages you might want to print out as hand-outs a free PDF (sample characters, play sheets for tracking runes in combat, a hex map, initiative tiles, and so forth), they are just the same pages in the book exported into a separate file. Pendelhaven would do well to make versions of these pages with blank white backgrounds to ease printing costs.
Fafnir’s Treasure starts with a simplified version of the rules. This, theoretically, allows a group to just buy Fafnir’s treasure and play through it with only the rules necessary for the adventure and then graduate up to the full rules if they want. What it actually did was provide a simplified version of the 1st Edition rules that our Norn learned from while the rest of us learned the full version of 2nd Edition. Changes happened between editions that occasionally led to arguments when the Norn tried to do something the 2nd Edition rules prohibited, but the simplified rules allowed. In some places, the material had been updated to 2nd Edition in Fafnir’s Treasure (write-up of the trolls, notably), but it was spotty and inconsistent. I’ve seen a PDF of the original Fafnir’s Treasure and it feels like Pendelhaven spent a lot of money on upgrading the appearance for a 2nd Edition release and very little money updating the contents of the adventure actually to 2nd Edition.
On top of this, the editing the book was not the best, particularly doing the maths. For example, weapons that clearly do 3 damage in the equipment description unexplainedly do 4 in the summation of basic attacks for Zealots. Grizzled Warriors have an actual power that covers this gap and I wonder if this is a cut and paste issue that was never caught. Things like this happen often in both Fafnir’s Treasure and in the main rulebook.
While I’m on the NPCs (referred to as Denizens in the rules) – almost every opponent faced has weapons with Piercing, meaning they bypass a certain amount of armor, usually as much or more than we had. The notable exceptions are opponents that do Mental or Spiritual attacks which also tend to bypass relevant defenses. This made having armor almost pointless. This would be fine as a design choice, but it would have been nice to know that the game made that choice before we bought gear. Armor is some of the most expensive gear available and turned out to be a waste of time. As the introductory adventure for the game system, this gotcha downgraded our enjoyment of the system as a group.
In neither the main rulebook nor Fafnir’s Treasure was a section expectations and assumptions built into the game system. We went in cold not fully understanding what the game was designed to do, so we really had no way to lean into that curve to increase our enjoyment of the game. We spent nearly half of each session digging through the rules and hashing out what they meant, especially when what they said contradicted themselves or seemed to. Editing flubs made this worse (for example, the description of Taunt is missing a critical last half of a sentence explaining how to end the condition).
Finally, combats were very slow. We are not certain if that was due to all of us being new to the system, but we also play HERO System and these fight felt longer than a HERO System fight. Take that as you will.
Despite all of the above, there were aspects of the game we liked. We liked making characters, even though some guidance would have helped avoid the case where we built a Maiden of Ratatosk that could not invoke the Taunt condition, a major aspect of the archetype. The charts for powers and skills (we called them “bingo boards” as you put runes down on them to select powers or skill) worked well and forced us to make design choices, but also provided different flavors of the same archetypes based on which direction you spent your runes. Again, some guidance or design philosophy would have helped. We eventually worked out in play which archetypes benefited from more Essence or more Destiny, but some recommendations from the game designers would have helped. [You may be detecting a theme here.]
Fafnir’s Treasure has the option of a very condensed version of the adventure (basically the Norn reads the setup and then cuts directly to the final fight). This led to two different sets of expectations. In the condensed version, the reward is “one item from the treasure” with no explanation if that is one item for the group or per viking. The expanded version mentions in the descriptions of the relevant NPCs exactly which treasures are being offered (there are enough for 1 each for 5 vikings) and lets the PCs decide who gets what. Our Norn remembered the first part but missed the second part, a small mistake caused by combining the two versions of the adventure, but it changed the way our vikings felt about the guy that hired us. We were certain he was not who he said he was and was going to rip us off. At the very least, if we had continued playing with these characters, our group would have been more likely to side with the Jotun after this adventure and not the Aesir.
Summary:
There were aspects of this game we liked very much and it is beautiful, but I wouldn’t shell out the money they are charging for hardcopy. The base rules are US$70 and seem incomplete (need Norn guidance at the least). I suspect the Norn will also need to buy the Denizens of the North book (another US$70) for opponents (I do not recommend Fafnir’s Treasure at all) and everyone will need runestones (the Norn will need 2 sets to have enough).
PDFs are available for the rules, but they seem pricey and printing out anything will be ink/toner intensive. Runestones can be hand crafted (which we did with wood bits I was using for wargame minis and colored Sharpies) or purchased. If purchased, prices vary based on the quality you want – Pendelhaven sells a wooden set for US$25 that looked OK. One of our players bought just a set of runes online for something between US$10-US$15, but I don’t remember exactly.
Session 1
Session 2
Session 3
Session 4
Sessions 5 and 6
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