Looking for assistance in creating a Scandinavian-style setting for my players and ideas for what adventures and quests could take place in such a world to justify the inevitable bouts of mead consumption and Saxon murder.
Humans, light elfs, dark elfs, dwarfs, and jotun of many kinds roam these lands, but what other creatures, races, and monsters from Scandinavian folklore could exist? Has Veeky Forums ever played in a Norse setting and, if so, do they have any wisdom to spare?
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This is all you need.
>Hoi, murderhobos, want to go on a real GLORIOUS ADVENTURE? Jump on my ship and let's sail to kill those rich and lazy southerners!
literally the only plothook you'll ever need.
Or, you could have them retrieve artifacts for me. I am in need of a Book of Vile Darkness, or a Staff of Evilness! I'll give you plenty of money, and alcohol, and don't forget plenty of innocent people to murder.
Be carefull about old one eyed men walking around the land
So pirates?
>what other creatures, races, and monsters from Scandinavian folklore could exist? Has Veeky Forums ever played in a Norse setting and, if so, do they have any wisdom to spare?
Many houses and farms have a resident nisse (something vaguely like a brownie, gnome or house-elf) who must be placated with occasional offerings. Feed the nisse and it'll keep other supernaturals away. Fail, and it'll curse the everloving fuck out of your household from wherever it's hiding, requiring serious adventurer help.
Depending on version, the nisse may sometimes be a genius loci in a symbiotic relationship with humans, or the spirit of the first settler on that plot still watching the place with protective jealousy.
And: Draugr, the barrow-wights/revenants. Regular European people with unfinished business come back as ghosts. Scandinavians with unfinished business possess their own corpse, sometimes to guard the treasure they were buried with, but often just to get vengeance on the living or fuck up some particular fucker.
And since you mentioned elves, you might want the Elf King and the Wild Hunt, but if not, consider it's norse relative the Oskorei. This one is a mob of ghosts and witches and demons that ride or fly through the country during the dark of winter, particularly near Christmas time, and unwary or unwarded mortals may get dragged along. Sometimes it's said to have Odin or similar at the head.
Advice: Put in a Christian-style antagonist religion if there isn't one already, and play up the conflict with the White God as a sideplot.
The giant in English-language Jack and the Beanstalk usually growls "Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman". But the Norwegian equivalent says "I smell Christian blood". Elves hate the sound of church bells, and can't steal children who are validly baptized. Priests keep showing up trying to either evangelize or banish trolls, the trolls keep killing the priests, and now some foreign king is very unhappy that his chancellor was eaten by a monster. In addition to the regular pillaging and looting of churches for money that Vikings do, there's also some burning and razing of even poor churches on general principle to demonstrate "ha ha, the kike on a pike is a faggot and his followers are weaklings".
What the hell did you think Vikings were? Really angry fishermen who got lost?
Totally agreed.