The Edda of 5th Edition

About a year ago, we were playing a game set in a fantasy 9th century Scandinavia using the Old School Hack Rules. (http://www.oldschoolhack.net) It was the first campaign in a return to RPGs from an almost ten year hiatus.  Starting with just three of us at a table on a birthday lark and blooming to a Roll20 game with a large and varied cast of players.  The game was a blast, with an epic story, great characters and plenty of brutal Dark Age violence.  Eventually we sort of reached the limits of the OSH system, and I was house ruling most of the game. Borrowing from AD&D 2nd ed Of Ships and the Sea, and inventing my own Mass Combat Rules.

(Here are the OSH Mass Combat Rules if you are interested: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6M_e2bSTRh5RFJtWWFMV3Z6UlE/view?usp=sharing )

This game rekindled interest in RPGs for my friends I that was dormant for far too long. Since then we have played almost every weekend for over a year. I became interested in the OSR, we began a new campaign with Swords and Wizardry and through play we crafted a set of “old school” D&D rules: (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6M_e2bSTRh5MHNTXzdsVU9MaW8/view?usp=sharing) These rules have seen us through my homebrew sword and sorcery game Shulim, as well as the I6 Ravenloft module.

During the course of this last year of play, WOTC released D&D 5th edition. I was on the fence about a new edition as I did not care for 3rd and 4th. After reading the favorable impressions in the OSR blogosphere however and receiving an Amazon gift card for my birthday I made the plunge and got the books. I like the new game enough to let go of my almost intuitive understanding of “old school” D&D and explore a new set of rules. Fortunately, I think 5th ed is close enough to pre 3rd ed D&D that my understanding of the “old” game will allow me to make proper rulings, hopefully this will make the transition a bit easier.

So what to do with 5th ed? Shulim is built from the ground up for old school D&D, 5th ed would probably work but the task of converting the huge amount of material we have created is a bit daunting. Also, I am not ready to fully switch to the new edition; our house rules and the old school in general are awesome.  What we need is a new campaign for 5th edition. Fortunately, the Viking game was never satisfactorily finished in a narrative sense, we just moved on because we outgrew the OSH system.  So 5th edition Vikings it is.

I will convert the old OSH characters to 5th ed, and we will return to the Saga of Godlauggr the Godi. Creating 5th ed versions of the characters should help me to better understand the system before we play, and the campaign will be a great test drive of the new rules.

I will write a synopsis of the Saga thus far and post it here, along with the 5th ed versions of the characters once they are created.

“An eleventh I know, if haply I lead

my old comrades out to war,

I sing 'neath the shields, and they fare forth mightily;

safe into battle,

safe out of battle,

and safe return from the strife.”

-Lee M. Hollander, trans. Poetic Edda