Talking with Balbinus about his game of Viking Pendragon made me think about my similar game from a few years back (c. 1996-99). I used a few techniques in this game that served me very well, so I thought I'd outline them here.
So, the setting is Scandinavia in about AD 500. Astute readers will notice that this is several hundred years before the historical Viking period. It is in fact the period of Pendragon, but it coincides with the period usually attributed to the poem Beowulf. Nice!
The book Land of Giants (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=16234) itself was a good foundation, but in the end I went far beyond it. I have an arseload of reading notes from special trips to the library etc (reading list supplied on request). I think of the setting as 'proto-Viking' – more pagan, more magical, more primitive; but with more or less the same activities as real Vikings got up to (raiding, trading, exploring, feuding etc).
Basic problem with PD: the combat system is pretty brutal. There's a good chance in any given fight that your character will be killed or disabled. Chargen takes time. Yet combat is a basic activity in the game.
One solution I tried was to encourage the creation of new characters. For instance, after a major battle several of the chrs looked like going separate ways. I followed one particular chr and had the other players create new chrs around him. After we'd played out some stuff around those chrs, I returned to another of the original chrs and had the players create more chrs around him. At some point the new groups began to split and recombine to create yet more story arcs. We had groups from Britain to Byzantium and all through Scandinavia itself, doing all sorts of different things from getting involved in Arthur's wars to exploring the Russian rivers.
In this way everybody built up a stable of chrs, and we had a game that consisted of many different stories about various groups of chrs. At any given session we theoretically had half a dozen threads to follow. It all happened organically at the time; I didn't have a master plan when it began. It was a response to the system that worked.
Not only did it solve the problem, it gave a very interesting texture to the game. It felt like a book of short stories set in the same period; with a variety of adventures, but not all about the same chrs. It really helped the feeling of a larger world beyond any individual chr.
When I left the game we were following up one particular thread involving the crew of a longship. I went to town on the detail with this one. I had names and basic info for the whole crew of about 30, and I had full chr sheets for three or four NPCs.
So any time somebody suffered death or incapacity in the game, one of the statted NPCs was available as a temporary substitute. Interestingly, they all passed through many hands and became well-known and popular. One of them was eventually taken over as a full PC because the player liked it so much.
The players, in effect, took on the whole crew as a sort of collective character. We kept notes and now and then promoted a name to statted NPC or full PC status.
So that's two ways I addressed the problem of lethality in PD, and discovered an interesting campaign structure in the process. Maybe it's useful to somebody.
Very cool. Did you jump around during a session, or was each session devoted to one storyline/group of characters?
It was generally a few sessions on one group, then a few on the next etc. I'd switch at what seemed to be a concluding moment in one group's saga.
Excellent. I've been toying with the idea of a "stable" of PCs, and letting players expand theirs with new ones essentially whenever they want, to match the current adventure. It strikes me as a great way to avoid "over-investment" in a particular character and encourage players to take chances, do dumb but interesting things, and have fun whether they live or die.