NorsePlay Reviews: When The Wolf Comes, the Vikingverse TTRPG. 🐺🔚

NorsePlay was proud to help crowdfund When The Wolf Comes, the tabletop role-playing game based on the Vikingverse novels, and was glad to see it surpass its needed monetary goals to get to publication in 2024 CE. Only now have I recently had time to sit down and give my shiny hardback copy the reading it deserves.

[Because in the Vikingverse's Hulfviðr Torga, I'm the center square! Photo from a 2024 CE Shieldwall backer mosaic.]

Forwarding context: I'm writing this review only after reading the core rulebook without having ran it, so I'm not addressing the mechanics (which use Shadow of the Demon Lord) or playability, just the contents. If you want the flavour of how it does play, author/creator Ian Stuart Sharpe did a 23-episode gaming podcast called Vikings & Valkyries that was superfun to listen to, and had great cybervikingsphere guests like Saga Thing podcast hosts John Sexton & Andy Pfrenger, and exceptionally talented Heathen Artist Sam Flegal.

At a whopping 389 pages, this is a core rulebook that stands alone without you having to buy a trifecta of books (looking at you D&D!) to start to play. This makes the $60 pricetag worth it compared to other systems (still looking at you D&D with your $150 needed core rulebooks), though if you bought a digital copy of WtWC it'd only run $20, but I think you'd be cheating yourself of a great physical product. While I came to this TTRPG having read both the Vikingverse novels and The Jötunn War graphic novel, I think if you only had secondary sources or tertiary retellings of Norse Mythology, you would still become fascinated by the technomagical buildout in an alternate timeline that Sharpe has given us to sandbox in.

And there's so much not in the books that gets filled out or added onto. Having to flesh out the races and paths and magical spell types alone says alot about how characters must make their way through the challenges presented by the feudal/classist social structures inherent in an imperial Viking-run world, plus the adversity of dealing (or siding!) with its monsters.

This all incidentally addresses a larger question: Often enthusiasts & believers seem to long for a present where the Norse endured, thinking it would be better, simpler, and more honorable. Sharpe seems to answer this specifically in his TTRPG that it wouldn't necessarily be better (although the technology & magic seem to make for a far ecologically sounder Mother Jörð) just different, and while my romantic leanings don't necessarily agree with that (but then no society will ever be perfect or flawless -- those are subjectively impossible standards), Sharpe's alt-history is quite the amazing run at projecting an outcome to this idea. The appendix's Timeline alone provokes the imagination by showing side-by-side where the Real World versus the Vikingverse have points of deviation and how the latter seems to race ahead of the other in terms of facets of development, plus in-game there's the potential for parallel timeline incursions and use this as a source to draw from if the Norns (well, your Gamemaster actually) weave it so.

All that worldbuilding context praise being said, I still wanted more more interstitial fluff. While I'm aware a rulebook's not a novel, there are systems like Warhammer 40K that inserted really badarse in-world colour texts, or Vampire: The Masquerade/The Dark Ages with very short but intense character-slice gothic fictions or quotes, that felt like excerpts of the world that made it more concrete by just using that simple device. There is one two-page intro story for the included first part of the Thought & Memory Saga campaign which leans in this direction as an intro for that adventure's first part, just wish we'd gotten more of that throughout the book.

In the Bestiary there are some creatures not depicted. While this has been happening since white box D&D's 0 Edition, and I get that you can't commission art for everything, there are certain creatures in the abstract that require a visual. Sure, maybe this leaves more play for the imagination to run, but there were a few of these, like some of the jötnar or dvergr, where I didn't even know how to wrap my head around what their build/construction would look like.

Conversely, for the actual bunches of commissioned art we do get, I have to again highly praise the work of Buenos Aires porteño Ger Curti! For example, his Fenrir-based Vikingverse take on the RCA "his master's voice" logo! The two phonograph bindrunes are "gift of the Gods" & "Grace", which the book doesn't tell you, but NorsePlay is telling you right now. The implied expansion here might be that the Æsir perhaps tried to soothe the savage beast with some music to pass all his imprisonment time with, or maybe are sneaking in some ameliorative galdrar recordings to try and control & train him before he busts loose at Ragnarök. Curti's origin and path character examples in each of those sections are also so distinctly expressive, setting each one definitively apart (the Sons of Ivaldi cyberwoman's a total favorite). There is also illustration work by Deumalya Pramanik, and Paul Little, along with Jeremy D Mohler's firey-eyed angry wolf confrontational cover:

Marketwise your local gaming store has so many shelves of TTRPGs to choose from, but it's the unique Vikingverse setting here that's the selling point. It's grim, fatalistic, saga-influenced, deadly, and world endingly doom laden, but these are the earmarks of the Norse Lore where adventurers, outlaws, & heroes bravely stand in the face of all that to believe they can win. Will you stand with them When The Wolf Comes, NorsePlayers? Let us know in the comments below!

#    #    #

Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'Aulaires' Norse Gods and Giants at age seven. Since then he's been fascinated by the truthful potency of Norse Mythology, passionately read & studied, embraced Ásatrú, launched the Map of Midgard project, and spearheaded the neologism/brand NorsePlay. If you have employment/opportunities in investigative mythology,  field research, or product development to offer, do contact him.