Black Friday Sale, Fantasy History, and a Cover Reveal

Black Friday Sale: 30% off all titles on DriveThruRPG

Hi all, and Happy Thanksgiving holidays to those who celebrate it!

I noticed that there is a Black Friday sale going on DriveThruRPG right now, which means that every Lazy Wolf Studios title, PDF or Print, is on sale for approximately 30% off (a few are up or down from there). So if you need to fill out your Thrones & Bones collection, this is a great opportunity.

Today I want to talk a little bit about Norrøngard, and then I’m going to showcase the just-in cover for one of the two books included in the forthcoming Kickstarter.

The city of Bense (pronounced BEN-suh) first appeared in the novel Frostborn. It’s a city on the southern coast of the Norrøngard, and it serves as the main port of entry for anyone coming to the country. I wouldn’t call it cosmopolitan, but it’s as modern as a faux-Viking community as you’ll find.

I modeled it on the real life city of Birka, a Viking city that was founded in Sweden around 750 AD (and probably the inspiration for How to Train Your Dragon’s Isle of Berk as well). I based the general layout of the city on Birka, though I took its estimated population of 500 to 1,000 people and raised that to 3,000. It is a fantasy city after all (and to be fair, Bense had a few hundred more years of growth on its real world inspiration).

Below is the map of Bense by cartographer extraordinaire Rob Lazzaretti, and below that is an illustration of how Birka appeared in its day. You can see how Bense is Birka flipped along its horizontal axis and then increased in population size.

Bense is the setting for the first adventure I wrote for Thrones & Bones, “The Aptrgangr’s Challenge.” It originally appeared in the Norrøngard Campaign Setting and was recently converted to Tales of the Valiant and reissued as a stand-alone PDF.

I revisited Bense in three adventures written for Tales of the Valiant, the first two of which were part of the Adventure Packs in Kobold Press’ two Tales of the Valiant Kickstarters—Banner of the Bull and Keeper of the Drowned (the latter by Brian Suskind). It was followed by a third Bense-based adventure—Troll of the Town (by Kelly Pawlik).

For the forthcoming Kickstarter, in addition to the new adventure hardcover, Fury of the Forsaken, the three Bense adventures for Tales of the Valiant are being compiled in a new hardcover, with expanded setting material, called The Bense Trilogy.

As Florian Stitz did the covers for all three of the individual adventures, it is only right to have him back to lend his talents to the compilation cover. I’m please to show it to you now. So if you will:

Drum roll please… or maybe Viking horns…

Here it is, The Bense Trilogy.

Pretty sweet, no?

I’ll talk about more aspects of Norrøngard’s creation and culture in later posts. For now, have a happy Holiday Weekend if you are on holiday. And to everyone, as they say in Norrøngard, “Be Healthy!”