Viking Apocalypse - Another story with the same pieces as the others
ok long story short: the gods (aesir and vanir-alikes) are gone, maybe dead. the afterlife is closed, and undead now roam the lands of the living. not all these undead are bad, like the mighty but strange einherjar, but a lot of them are. what actually happened is unknown to the people of the world, but a popular story is that something happened to offend the gods so badly that they simply kicked every mortal soul out of the afterlife and shut the gates. nobody knows what could have caused this offense, or if it even happened to begin with, but a lot of people believe it (and use it as justification to do bad things to others).
its a story about viking warriors, necromancy, ghosts and skeletons and basically a just-barely-pre-apocalypse world. it hasnt ended yet, but its getting there. ragnarok is on the horizon my dudes. maybe there's a giant snake out there too, who knows. and there are definitely bottomless holes appearing all over, because the world is slowly crumbling and returning to its primordial state (ginnungagap, basically). hollow earth stuff as well maybe. actually its definitely not-jormungandr digging through the earth like a big earthworm, consuming the very world and leaving behind a bottomless black void. cities have been eaten and literally nothing is left behind.
there's mostly humans in the world. elves used to exist, but they died long ago. trolls are said to still exist out there somewhere but nobody actually knows. and now, with the afterlife in shambles, there are the einherjar; basically reborn humans, closer to the gods but further from humanity. they are all stark colors; hair a golden blonde or fiery red or raven black, skin pale as snow or blue like the sky. they stand taller than any man, but they lack that spark that makes humans human. they don't joke, they don't sing, they merely exist, seemingly always waiting for battle. luckily for them, the world has plenty of those. oh also, they each have a scar made up of runic writing spelling out a single word. people believe that this word speaks to who they were in life and what they did to gain access to the afterlife, but the einherjar quite frankly don't know. there are also the so-called "woodsbloods", or changelings. these people are taken as evidence that trolls exist, and that they very much muck about with children. woodsbloods can be recognized by their prodigious size, bright yellow eyes and pale-gray rough skin. the name woodsblood comes from the idea that trolls live in the woods, and that the changelings therefore are "blood of the woods".
worth noting is that there is no Lifra-equivalent to the einherjar, and this has made quite a few people think real hard about what the afterlife even means. necromancy is a thing in this story. it used to be one of the forbidden, dark arts that no civilized person would be caught dead (heh) using, but times have changed. the world is full of death, and so the magic of death has become necessity. necromancy, in this story, deals with both the physical and spiritual aspects of death. this means reanimating corpses and communing with spirits both. the two sides of necromancy have been at each other's throats for a long time, and most people don't even remember why. for some reason, einherjar aren't affected by necromancy like other undead are, and nobody knows why. some think its because the einherjar aren't really undead but something else, and some believe that they are simply too powerful or too close to the gods. sidenote, the character "Ward" from the other story is definitely an einherjar. if hes even around.
speaking of characters, it will definitely be about Fjalar, Bjarn and Vanja. their names might be WIP but whatever. vanja isn't going to be a chosen one because thats a bad word, but im thinking she's special in some weird way. she can see things other people can't, she dreams about people dying in scarily accurate ways, and people don't like hearing that. the secret is that vanja is a valkyria, a servant of the gods charged with collecting the brave dead and bringing them to the afterlife. when she got kicked out of the afterlife, she lost her memories and much of her power (because you gotta be close to the gods to keep sippin that god juice), but this will gradually wear off as the story progresses. she was adopted, a foundling, but her parents never said anything because picking kids up in the forest isnt and wasnt ever cool.
fjalar is still a gross soul guy, trapping ghosts in objects and using them for his personal ends. bjarn is just a big, strong woodsblood who works with/for fjalar.
ok so what is the afterlife in this not-viking story? i'm thinking that unlike actual viking stuff where there are two good afterlives and one bad one, there's definitely just one good one. Vaalgard? valheim is copyrighted so i cant use that. im thinking instead of two places, there are two gods who care about the people who get into the afterlife. like, one warrior-centric and one good person-centric. so like, one is all about the people who kill in service of something good, and the other one is about people doing other good things. one warrior god and one good-samaritan god.
the other half of the afterlife is the Hel-equivalent. oh i know, the Hel-like is literally the maw of the giant snake. all cowards, betrayers and all that get gulped up by the great serpent. oooh and maybe the reason why the snake is now eating the world is because all the damned souls got ripped out of it and put back into the world! the big snake is RAVENOUS right now and its literally gorging itself on anything and everything it finds. also, the snake might just have a grudge against Vanja just because she's one of the very, very few fragments of divinity left. in the snake's eyes, she and hers are the reason he's now starving. of course, vanja doesn't know that, and in her mind this snake is just everywhere isn't he? what a weird coincidence. the snake, like most things, can't get into Vaalgard anymore so he can't go there to get revenge.
also, fjalar and vanja are vibing because they're both into ghosts. bjarn doesn't really get it and he feels a little left out, but he will live with it because following Fjalar has worked out before.
So lets talk about the gods and the afterlife. Not every god is directly associated with the afterlives, but they all live in the realm OF the afterlife, if that makes sense. They're all there but they don't all have a say in who gets to be invited.
The two afterlife-centric gods are named Jorn and Lifra. Jorn is a god of warriors, weapon-making and the general act of struggling to survive. Lifra is a goddess of healers, teachers and general knowledge, especially when the knowledge is used to benefit others. These two have the final say in who gets to enter Vaalgard.
Other important gods are:
I'd love to make a map but I'm really, really bad at making maps, so maybe I won't. So I will simply list the names of cities, towns and other places.
First of all, every god has a sacred site somewhere in the world, and every sacred site is host to a really big runestone, covered in prayers and tales of the god in question. Smaller versions of these stones can be found in other places, but these big ones are considered the first and the mort important. Also, just for future reference, the endings of place names are different based on the size of the place. -Gard is the name of whole realms (like Vaalgard). -Heim is large settlements. -Lund is smaller settlements close to forests. -Torp is for smaller settlements in general, often named after a specific person or family. -Berg is used for settlements close to mountains or based around mining. Feel free to break these rules though. Visagard is the name of the world by the way. Like the mortal world. It's named that because its the world of humans, and humanoid sing songs unlike the animals around them, so they named it Visagard.
its a story about viking warriors, necromancy, ghosts and skeletons and basically a just-barely-pre-apocalypse world. it hasnt ended yet, but its getting there. ragnarok is on the horizon my dudes. maybe there's a giant snake out there too, who knows. and there are definitely bottomless holes appearing all over, because the world is slowly crumbling and returning to its primordial state (ginnungagap, basically). hollow earth stuff as well maybe. actually its definitely not-jormungandr digging through the earth like a big earthworm, consuming the very world and leaving behind a bottomless black void. cities have been eaten and literally nothing is left behind.
there's mostly humans in the world. elves used to exist, but they died long ago. trolls are said to still exist out there somewhere but nobody actually knows. and now, with the afterlife in shambles, there are the einherjar; basically reborn humans, closer to the gods but further from humanity. they are all stark colors; hair a golden blonde or fiery red or raven black, skin pale as snow or blue like the sky. they stand taller than any man, but they lack that spark that makes humans human. they don't joke, they don't sing, they merely exist, seemingly always waiting for battle. luckily for them, the world has plenty of those. oh also, they each have a scar made up of runic writing spelling out a single word. people believe that this word speaks to who they were in life and what they did to gain access to the afterlife, but the einherjar quite frankly don't know. there are also the so-called "woodsbloods", or changelings. these people are taken as evidence that trolls exist, and that they very much muck about with children. woodsbloods can be recognized by their prodigious size, bright yellow eyes and pale-gray rough skin. the name woodsblood comes from the idea that trolls live in the woods, and that the changelings therefore are "blood of the woods".
worth noting is that there is no Lifra-equivalent to the einherjar, and this has made quite a few people think real hard about what the afterlife even means. necromancy is a thing in this story. it used to be one of the forbidden, dark arts that no civilized person would be caught dead (heh) using, but times have changed. the world is full of death, and so the magic of death has become necessity. necromancy, in this story, deals with both the physical and spiritual aspects of death. this means reanimating corpses and communing with spirits both. the two sides of necromancy have been at each other's throats for a long time, and most people don't even remember why. for some reason, einherjar aren't affected by necromancy like other undead are, and nobody knows why. some think its because the einherjar aren't really undead but something else, and some believe that they are simply too powerful or too close to the gods. sidenote, the character "Ward" from the other story is definitely an einherjar. if hes even around.
speaking of characters, it will definitely be about Fjalar, Bjarn and Vanja. their names might be WIP but whatever. vanja isn't going to be a chosen one because thats a bad word, but im thinking she's special in some weird way. she can see things other people can't, she dreams about people dying in scarily accurate ways, and people don't like hearing that. the secret is that vanja is a valkyria, a servant of the gods charged with collecting the brave dead and bringing them to the afterlife. when she got kicked out of the afterlife, she lost her memories and much of her power (because you gotta be close to the gods to keep sippin that god juice), but this will gradually wear off as the story progresses. she was adopted, a foundling, but her parents never said anything because picking kids up in the forest isnt and wasnt ever cool.
fjalar is still a gross soul guy, trapping ghosts in objects and using them for his personal ends. bjarn is just a big, strong woodsblood who works with/for fjalar.
ok so what is the afterlife in this not-viking story? i'm thinking that unlike actual viking stuff where there are two good afterlives and one bad one, there's definitely just one good one. Vaalgard? valheim is copyrighted so i cant use that. im thinking instead of two places, there are two gods who care about the people who get into the afterlife. like, one warrior-centric and one good person-centric. so like, one is all about the people who kill in service of something good, and the other one is about people doing other good things. one warrior god and one good-samaritan god.
the other half of the afterlife is the Hel-equivalent. oh i know, the Hel-like is literally the maw of the giant snake. all cowards, betrayers and all that get gulped up by the great serpent. oooh and maybe the reason why the snake is now eating the world is because all the damned souls got ripped out of it and put back into the world! the big snake is RAVENOUS right now and its literally gorging itself on anything and everything it finds. also, the snake might just have a grudge against Vanja just because she's one of the very, very few fragments of divinity left. in the snake's eyes, she and hers are the reason he's now starving. of course, vanja doesn't know that, and in her mind this snake is just everywhere isn't he? what a weird coincidence. the snake, like most things, can't get into Vaalgard anymore so he can't go there to get revenge.
also, fjalar and vanja are vibing because they're both into ghosts. bjarn doesn't really get it and he feels a little left out, but he will live with it because following Fjalar has worked out before.
So lets talk about the gods and the afterlife. Not every god is directly associated with the afterlives, but they all live in the realm OF the afterlife, if that makes sense. They're all there but they don't all have a say in who gets to be invited.
The two afterlife-centric gods are named Jorn and Lifra. Jorn is a god of warriors, weapon-making and the general act of struggling to survive. Lifra is a goddess of healers, teachers and general knowledge, especially when the knowledge is used to benefit others. These two have the final say in who gets to enter Vaalgard.
Other important gods are:
- Grundr, a god of building and maintaining what has been built. Also kind of a god of the defenders of a siege due to his affiliation with walls.
- Loga, a goddess of fire and passion. She tends to represent the kinder aspects of fire, such as the hearth that warms the home and family, but sometimes she is seen as a straight up goddess of battle, especially if the battle is waged to protect yourself and yours.
- Disa, a goddess of freedom and travel. She is also associated with birds a lot.
- Aegar, a god of water, marine life and storms.
- Veitr, a god of hunting and general wilderness. he is prayed to very carefully because while having his blessing is nice, you also might not want him to pay attention to you in case he's in a sour mood. this is why shrines and sacred stones to Veitr are always raised quite a bit away from where people live.
I'd love to make a map but I'm really, really bad at making maps, so maybe I won't. So I will simply list the names of cities, towns and other places.
First of all, every god has a sacred site somewhere in the world, and every sacred site is host to a really big runestone, covered in prayers and tales of the god in question. Smaller versions of these stones can be found in other places, but these big ones are considered the first and the mort important. Also, just for future reference, the endings of place names are different based on the size of the place. -Gard is the name of whole realms (like Vaalgard). -Heim is large settlements. -Lund is smaller settlements close to forests. -Torp is for smaller settlements in general, often named after a specific person or family. -Berg is used for settlements close to mountains or based around mining. Feel free to break these rules though. Visagard is the name of the world by the way. Like the mortal world. It's named that because its the world of humans, and humanoid sing songs unlike the animals around them, so they named it Visagard.
- Vedlund is the village Vanja comes from, and maybe where the story begins. Most people there are hunters, lumberjacks, trappers and assorted woodsfolk. The village came to be as people traveling from Seaxheim further north essentially created a half-way stop that slowly became a village of its own.
- The Rafswood is an appropriately named stretch of forest trailing the road north from Seaxheim to Bjornsberg. Well known for being just generally unpleasant, it is still the livelihood of not only the people on the road, but also of the people living in the small town of Vedlund. One of many places where people believe that trolls lurk in number.
- Seaxheim is one of the biggest cities in Songrgard. Seaxheim used to be quite famous for their blacksmiths but as time has passed that tradition has fallen by the wayside in favor of becoming a very general trading hotspot. It sits quite close to the only real path that leads safely further north, and this position has made Seaxheim very wealthy. While the name Seaxheim most likely comes from the weapons the city used to produce en masse, people today are fond of saying that the name comes from how likely it is that someone will pull a seax on you in a dark alley.
- Whitegrip is the name for the entire northern region beyond the Skar Mountains, so named because the world up there is entirely in the grip of winter all the time. At a certain point, Whitegrip gets absolutely unbearably cold, so not everything is fully mapped and discovered yet. It's popularly thought of as the place where elves still live, somehow.
- Bjornsberg is not only quite a sizable town, it is also the "final outpost" before the north becomes truly uncivilized. Bjornsberg is still plenty wild, and is well known for the animal skulls decorating much of the public spaces. Also used to be a popular spot for the rich to do a spot of big game hunting before the world became very anti-travel.
- Lifrastad used to be one of the largest settlements in the world, completely built around the Lifra runestone. Lifrastad was a city of peace and prosperity, rich in healers, scholars and funeral rites of all kinds. Thousands came to visit the city to pay their respects to Lifra every year, and living there was generally considered very nice. However, Lifrastad is currently in the belly of the great serpent, and standing in its stead is a bottomless, black pit. The remains, barely an appropriate word, of Lifrastad serves as a stark reminder of what is actually happening in the world.
- Jornstad is the hard, bloodstained counterpart to Lifrastad. This is a city of blacksmiths and warriors, fighting pits and taverns where skalds tell stories of war, death and loss. Despite all this, it's a pretty cheery place. However, nobody mourns the loss of Lifrastad harder than the people of Jornstad, as they were very much connected both in trade and in spirit. Jornstad is also home to the king, although this is causing some issues currently. First of all, people are doubting the validity of the king remaining in such an obvious place due to what happened to Lifrastad, and many are suggesting that the king should be hiding somewhere else. On the other hand, many people are doubting the validity of royalty in general these days, and it's pretty well known to most people that outside of Jornstad, the king's authority is shambling at best. If the king's men come riding by, people will of course speak of loyalty to the crown, but only then.
- Saltholm is both the name of a city and the name of a group of islands just off of the western coast. Saltholm has always been very adamant about their independence, and they don't give a damn about any mainland kings and they never have. In truth, before the world broke, Saltholm wasn't far from being straight up conquered by the king of Jornstad, but the end of the world obviously put a stop to all that. Currently, people don't really ever think about Saltholm. There's no real trade going on because the ocean is terrifying now, and some people believe that Saltholm is just dead already. Saltholm is in fact not dead, but they are struggling with the undead consequences of being ocean bound.
- The ominously titled Endwood marks the end of the realm of mankind as far as the south goes. This forest is singularly thick and almost impossible to traverse. What's worse, people who enter the forest have a tendency to never return, and this has of course spawned uncountable rumors and folk stories about what this forest actually is, and what actually lives there. It does crawl with wolves, bears and lynx for a fact, but people of course talk about elves, trolls and other monsters. As far as mankind goes, the map ends here. Also a great spot for gathering berserker mushrooms (name WIP). Actually, this is where berserkers supposedly come from; long ago someone supposedly got lost in the Endwood and actually made it back, and he came back with a bag full of weird mushrooms that when consumed turned him into a terrifying (and horribly addicted) warrior.
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