Hello and welcome to this special bonus edition
of Vikings and Valkyries, which is entirely designed
to make your lives easy and distill the past
20 episodes into one 5 minute long chunk of thought
and memory. If you haven't had the time to listen
to nearly 40 hours of Vikings and Valkyries episodes,
then this is the synopsis for you. The story
at the heart of our campaign, the Thought and
Memory Saga, is a tragic tale of sacrifice and
sorrow, involving the twilight of gods and men,
as told partly in my novel The All -Father Paradox,
and then continued in the role -playing game
When the Wolf Comes. Now, we have been lucky
enough on this podcast to have all kinds of Norse
-minded academics, artists and authors enter
the Vikingverse. And so we thank you for coming
with us into this reimagined Ragnarok and exploring
the world of When the Wolf Comes. And just a
reminder not to get too attached to anyone around
the gaming table. Thought, Amunim, Memory are
Odin's ravens. They once perched on his shoulders
and reconnoitered to the ends of the earth, returning
each evening to whisper him news. That is, until
the Skald Order captured the Raven God and stripped
him of his spires. From the secrets they stole,
they built the first thought and memory drive
used for interplanetary travel. But as Odin might
have warned the thieves, knowledge comes at a
cost. Their unwise incisions also cut loose his
wolves, Gerri and Recki, spreading greed and
avarice across the nine homeworlds. The sons
of Ivaldi, already covetous and deceitful, were
driven mad at this moment. They contracted with
tricksters to destroy the Skald and their base
at Mimis Bruna, triggering the cataclysm known
as the Swordfall. In an instant, the Mechanists
and all of their hubris boiled away to nothingness.
Now, five years after the Swordfall, the Sons
of Ivaldi are as voracious as ever. They have
seized the mantle of Mimis Bruna and gained control
of the Skald's technologies. Still consumed by
wolfish fervour, they crave even more wealth
and wisdom, including the greatest prize of all,
immortality. Huginn and Muninn, meanwhile, never
rest. They still fly far and wide on their pointed
wings, searching for instruments of their salvation.
It just so happens the ravens have selected the
player characters as their fated champions. Now,
for those who want a little bit more detail,
please listen on. After the sword fall, Midgard
was left a frigid wasteland, prowled by nightmares
and all but abandoned by the Empire. As the campaign
begins in the far north, a new power has arisen
amid the anarchy, under the pretense of studying
the great sweeping Thimblewinter and Evaldian
Magnet. named Bangsy has led a group of his kin
to help the clan, a small town that has somehow
survived in the shadow of the Marching Glacier.
Goaded by Gery and Trekkie, Bangsy grasps for
yet more power, the mantle of the gods themselves.
The havoc wrought by the Swordfall has given
his so -called Winterwise the cover they need,
the source, the rare materials and minerals for
their ascension. They have opened up exploratory
mines across the polar ring worth trillions and
preparing undersea exploration programs planning
to exploit the untouched resources of the arctic
under the cloak of this legitimacy the sons of
avaldi have also sequestered the backup for the
supercomputer min in cold storage within their
secret facilities stolen under the very noses
of the skull the machine is being regrown and
reconnected in utmost secrecy. When it comes
online, Bangzi's followers in the Church of the
One -Zero hope to use its vast wisdom to accelerate
their ascension to godhood. However, the Sons
of Avaldi have no idea that Hugin and Munin are
part of the consciousness of their new machine,
the Viking -verse equivalent of CPU and RAM.
or that the Ravens continue to whisper news across
space and time. Given advance warning of its
destruction and the treachery of the Sons of
Ivaldi, the original Ming took a risk to attract
the attention of saga -worthy heroes. Moments
before the Swordfall, the machine opened a rift
between past and present, catapulting a hijacked
craft through and providing the pirates within
with the coordinates for... In the present day,
the rift appears to our heroes as a crimson scar,
an unexplained aurora in the ionosphere. Mim
has baited the heroes into the recent past to
expose what truly happened on the orbital ring
station of Mimis Bruna and prevent its future
incarnation coming online. In the background,
centuries ago, the original inhabitants of the
Polar Wilds sold the land around Helmathar to
a maritime explorer named Bjarnason. The land
deed has been passed down through generations
and over the course of the campaign has ended
up in the possession of the player characters.
Should the deed come to light, it could completely
derail the Sons of Ivaldi's nefarious plan. So
that about sums up where we've got to in 20 episodes.
Thank you for listening. If you've listened this
far and made sense of the mayhem and bedlam,
there are only two more episodes to go until
we reach our thrilling conclusion and work out
exactly who is on the stairway.