The History Behind the Fantasy
A look at the inspiration for a fantasy city
Hi everyone, and welcome to the latest issue of Lazy Wolves, the newsletter for Lazy Wolf Studios and the Thrones & Bones games for Tales of the Valiant and Dungeons & Dragons.
Recently, I talked about the real-world inspiration for the city of Bense and the city of Herkeby, two cities in the Scandinavian-inspired land of Norrøngard.
Today, we’re going to continue this series with a look at the city of Aarvik (map by cartographer Rob Lazzaretti).
Aarvik was actually the last city added to the Norrøngard Campaign Setting. I was writing the adventure “Airships and Landslips” in Sagas of Norrøngard, and I needed a city to be near a mountain where adventure was taking place!
For the general size and shape of the city, I looked to the real world Viking-age town of Aarhus. You can see how the moat, the bridges, the bit of beach in the southeast corner all carried through. Even the central field.
But that’s just the general shape of the place. To make a fantasy city, we need to add fantasy elements, and we need to create details that are memorable, gameable, and unique.
And like I’ve done before, I accomplished that here by taking bits of real world culture and dialing them up to eleven.
The Norse practiced animal sacrifice. And sometimes they would stake the bodies of small animals up on poles outside their homes as an offering. I took this common practice and amped it up in Aarvik. From the description:
“While animal sacrifice is common throughout Norrøngard, the Aarvikir have a tradition of impaling the sacrificial animals on poles outside their doorways so that their neighbors may know exactly how pious they are. This can be off-putting to visitors, especially during holy days and festival weeks, when Aarvik seems a place abounding with fly-encrusted, rotting carcasses.”
Right off, Aarvik becomes a memorable place.
But look at that circle of land between the moat and the city walls.
See all those bumps?
Those are burial mounds.
Instead of placing their dead in a field apart from their homes, the Aarvikir bury them in a ring around the city. Of course, in Norrøngard, not all the dead stay dead, and you can rest (un)assured that there are going to be some very malevolent, life-hating draugar in some of those mounds. This “ring of the dead” is believed to protect the city at night, but of course, it also somewhat traps the inhabitants inside after dark!
When you put these two features together, you get a city where the line between piety and death, and life and death, is very thin and somewhat blurred.
I take this one step further with the leader of the city, Jarl Fálki Lotrisuson. There are several people in Norse mythology who claim to be descendants of gods and giants (several of whom are mythical ancestors of real-world lines of kings). I decided Fálki would be one of those, or at least claim that he is. He has a “found in a basket” origin like Moses or Superman, and he talks to his unseen goddess mother as if she is always with him. He’s one of the few practitioners of actual magic in the setting, so he may be telling the truth, or he may be insane. I don’t say, and I leave that up to GMs to determine in their individual campaigns.
But again, Aarvik is a place where the veils between this world and the next run thin…
Aarvik will appear again, in the Labyrinth Adventure Book from Kobold Press. More on that as we get closer.
Meanwhile, that’s it for this week. You can learn more about Aarvik and other cities in Norrøngard in the Norrøngard Campaign Setting.
As always, thanks for being here! And as the Norrønir say, “Be healthy!”
