Twilight Vikings
 

I've been into Vikings lately and it seems like the Twilight world would be a good setting for the return of small bands of shipborne raiders, launching hit-and-run attacks on small coastal communities.

Of course, in this context, the term Viking is a bit of a misnomer since I'm not referring solely to early medieval Scandanavian raiders. Basically, what I'm talking about here is seaborne marauders.

That being said, perhaps some Scandanavians would take advantage of the chaos, decentralization of government, etc. to raid communities along the Baltic coast, the British Isles, etc.

Have any of you included Viking-like raiders in your campaigns? Tell us about it.

Thats kind of the premis of my Arctic Raiders Campaign that just kicked off today.

I mean, think of the prime targets that ring the North Atlantic and Bering Sea in the Twilight world. I have thought of dozens of them for my campaign.

... prime targets could include transport ships.

Laden with T-72 tanks :-)

In my campaign Major Po and his band of scalliwags have engaged in waterborne raiding on the CONUS east coast on a few occassions and the new PC being played through his pre-game at the moment has done some of the same with markedly greater success.

Why not? I'm sure piracy will make a return, well, there are still pirates now. BTW, if you read Whitley Streiber and Jame Kunetka's 1988 book. "Warday," there was a lot of talk of submarine crews, mainly Soviet, who were at sea during the missile launches were still humming around and since atomic subs could go a long time, the only real need for the crew was food. There were many stories of a Soviet sub coming close to the shore in order to send raiding parties to isolated towns to either steal or loot food from supermarkets. Some of the subs were in various states of disrepair but still operational to the point where they can move and hide. Some even still have their missiles aboard and even years later, there was a fear one of them could still launch. The subs range from smaller attack subs to even a couple of Typhoons.

Chuck M.

I've been toying with the idea of starting up a 2013 campaign on RPOL once the rules are released that would center on the remaining crew of a Virginia-class nuclear attack sub's last mission. It would sort of borrow heavily from GDW's Med Cruise module and Nevil Shute's On the Beach. Characters could be part of the ship's skeleton crew, special operators, or members of the Embassy staff (and assorted hangers-on) that they had been sent to evacuate.

Sounds interesting. Would this game be using just the T2013 rules, or the T2013 timeline as well?

The 2013 rules most definitely for character generation and for game play to the extent that they would hold up in a play-by-post environment. Probably also the timeline to the extent that it would be relevant. I'm technically still under NDA so I can't discuss specifics, but Keith has deliberately designed a world that is friendly to a wide variety of "roll your own" local situations. Plus a GM is always free to alter or ignore anything that doesn't "fit" in his campaign, though I can't talk yet about just what I might change.

Wouldn't the River Pirates in Pirates of the Vistula qualify? They were more than pirates, as they did attack villages close to the river, so they ought to be in that category of seaborne marauder. Incidentally, the buccaneers in the 1600s were more of this type than pirate, as they preferred raiding coastal (and some not so coastal) Spanish settlements, with ships being hit if the opportunity presented itself. A lot of them were technically privateers, not pirates, but that distinction was lost on their hapless victims.

One of my ancestors on my mum's side was Sir Francis Drake, a notorious English privateer.