Cheatsheet for Lee's Viking Game

Steads

• Grimstead -- mostly Rita at this time. The stead-older is named Einar and is supposed to be Barry's PC. I sometimes call it Einarstead by mistake.
• Amundistead -- mostly Tim who says, Armundi-stead's matriarch, Bjarna, aged 65, is the widow of Alti Armundison; she's been managing the stead since her husband's death sevenyears ago."
• Thorkelstead -- Mark. The lineage alternates the names Thorkel and Gunnar. (Pedro lives here, and Olivia is sometimes here)
• Urrstead -- John Redden inherited it from Richard Aronson, but steadholder Gizur Urrsson remained in Vinland, so his wife, Barry's Gudrun Peace (named after her magic sword), is running the place. (The reindeer is here at least some of the time.) (Olivia has been living here and hanging out with Dima a lot of the time)
• Gizurstead -- Rick. At one time the steadholder was Gizur Not-A-Rune-Mage.

Magic

Black and White Magic

All the students at the Paris Black School learned See in the Dark (as a twisted Sensation / Irritability spell -- involving Anger at Light)

Note: This also means that the ability to see in the dark may be a sign of another Black School graduate.

Black School magic is based on the diabolic extension of the four signs of life: GRIM (growth, reproduction, irritability {sensation}, and metabolism).

White Magic is a PC invention, and still in progress involving inverting the principles of Black Magic.

For instance, Black Magic:

• AGE: weakness, forgetfulness, sicken, deafen, sleep, impair healing, etc.
• MIRROR: change shape, change form, change material, change size, language
• ANGER: fear, despair, guilt, lust, hunger
• EAT: destroy food, heat, light, air, space, time, water, fertility, soil, gravity, magnetism, magic, speed, timeflow (= fast forward time).

Back then I wrote that "there weren't any illusions or charms. Satanists don't get to change people's beliefs or emotions; they have control over their bodies but not their minds. The strong mental spell above is forgetfulness, and characters will be able to struggle against that every turn."

   Later on, I did give Black School students illusions (as a Mirror spell), but victims still got to save every turn.

White Magic

White magic, then, goes back to GRIM (although oddly, my naive inversion of the black magic distortions didn't end up exactly in GRIM):

   GROWTH:  heal, waken, speak truth convincingly, understand/speak someone else's language (but not be able to lie in it) (and this can be used for a craftsman's tech talk)
   REPRODUCE:  restore fertility, look at a seed and tell what it'll flower into,
   IRRITABILITY (sensation):  sense friends/enemies, sense truth speaking/lying, circle of light, hear,
   METABOLISM:  create food, create drinking water, create circle of warmth,

We may add more spells to these categories.

Olivia's Black Magic:

All the students at the Paris Black School learned See in the Dark (as a twisted Sensation / Irritability spell -- involving Anger at Light)

Besides that Olivia seems to have learned Sleep and also Impair Healing -- which she then twisted back as White Magic to Healing when helping out the reindeer

I think she also learned either Fear or Impair Fear (both Anger spells, the latter dulling legitimate fear). She might be able to twist this to a White Magic spell of Calmness or something similar that would make people not be afraid of her or others who weren't a threat to them.

Anything else you'd like to do?

Dema's magic involves practical stuff -- kindling fire, finding food, cooking food, healing sick people and animals, curing the sterile or impotent, making plain or ugly people beautiful or sexually attractive, detecting or banishing evil, telling the weather, staying warm in winter or cool in hot weather, detecting predatory animals, detecting enemy warriors, detecting lies, and other stuff usseful to a Newfoundland Indian girl. What would you like to learn from hr?

Pedro's Black/White Magic

Pedro focused on Eat and Mirror spells as a black magician -- he presumably knew Destroy Heat, Destroy Food (probably the most basic hunger spell?) and Destroy Gravity (flying?) among others -- and maybe shapechange as a mirror spell.

As a white magician, then, he's best at Metabolism and to a lesser degree Reproduction spells. We've established that he can look at a seed and see what it will flower into -- and help it grow into a plant quickly (I'd argue as metabolism, not reproduction).