players: Megan, Brian, Cody, Ben

"this is not the Valhalla you're looking for…"

A storm-tossed viking ship crashes on an unknown shore. What they don't know is that the clans of this land have been wiped out by a gaping maw leading right to the Norse Hel. We set up some great character conflicts:

- the chief's son vying with his bastard half-brother and tearing apart the entire whole group in the process

- the captured bride (an English Christian) who wants vengeance more than freedom

- the warrior-maiden who is adored by the lowly stowaway but wants vengeance on the young warrior who (we find out) was once her lover

Plus a lot more. We would have probably killed each other if the monstrous warriors of Hel had not beat us to it, which is exactly how Geiger Counter should be set up.

We may have also hit a high score for reintegrating shots from the trailer into the game. I'm not sure there's a single moment from the trailer we didn't sneak in. Megan brought in the warrior-maiden peacefully wandering in the golden meadow and Cody had the doom-and-gloom warrior swan dive off the cliff, which were both straight from the trailer but surprised me both times anyway.

One thing we talked about a little bit after the game was that it's naturally harder to role-play something like Vikings, compared to a modern setting where you're just role-playing a normal person in the world we all know. It's always easier to play the familiar. Megan and Cody, what were your thoughts about that?

Ben - I don't necessarily think the Vikings itself was the issue for me. For me personally, I think the difficulty was a combination of two things:

1.) I incline more towards silly/light-hearted storygaming. I can do serious (see: Shock) but my natural inclination just tends to be, well, rather silly.

2.) Geiger Counter itself. It was a game I wanted to try since it'd been mentioned, but I'm unfamiliar with/not a fan of most of the tropes the game system pulls from (see: Horror movies), and overall I'm glad I tried it but GC didn't really click with me. I haven't done too many other historical games, though, so I can't say.

In retrospect, I look back at all the terrible movies made about vikings and think to myself it may have been doomed from the get go. I really couldn't get into the characters and about half way through I have this revolving thought in my head saying kill all characters, kill all characters.

I think I'd like to stick with a set of characters that I want to do more with than see how they can be brutally murdered by the monstrous denizens of hell. I also wasn't a fan of being dragged into the catacombs to my inevitable doom.