Rollin' to Roskilde

Yes, we went to Roskilde.  For those not familiar with Dark Age naval history (I can't even imagine), Roskilde is the site of the most significant Viking archaeological find.  Like Oseberg and Sutton Hoo, it opened up a whole world for researchers.

For us, it was a side trip from a long weekend in Copenhagen.  We took a cheap regional train from the capital west to the island of Zeeland.  The twenty mile trip took about forty minutes from platform to platform.  It's an ideal day trip if you happen to be spending time in the area.

A side note on Copenhagen and Denmark: it's wickedly costly.  The exchange rate seems great.  You hand over your dollars or euros for lots and lots of colorful kroner which seems amazing.  Then you go to spend that and realize that everything, especially in Copenhagen, is fabulously expensive.  On our last night there, I spent 144Kr on a single bottle of good American beer.  A hot dog from a street vendor was was roughly $7.

Expensive as it is, it's still full of happy people riding everywhere on rickety bicycles, pleased with their quality healthcare and high standard of living.  It's a real socialist hellscape.

In the town of Roskilde is the site of the cathedral where Denmark's royalty are married and buried, going back as far as Harald Bluetooth, the viking who famously made the practice of talking on a cell phone while driving legally despite it being just as dangerous as when one is actually holding the phone.  Dammit, Harald.

This guy's the Danish Norm Abram.

It's also the site of the Viking Ship Museum.  For dark age gaming fanatics, it doesn't get much better.
The museum has a collection of ships pulled up from the bottom of the fjord and a group of replicas that patrols can take out onto the water.  They even have craftsmen onsite, building new replicas and fashioning ship fittings.

All in all, there were over a dozen ships in various stages of seaworthiness, with more than half of them being incredibly accurate replicas.  That means that the Danes have built more real viking ships in the last decade than Gripping Beast has.  To this day, I'm convinced that they only have those things in the catalog to round out the line-up.  It's like Honda continually teasing the idea of bringing back the NSX just so that car enthusiasts will think the company is still capable of more than boring family cars.

Let it go, Rasmus.

My Danish friend Rasmus was caught looking longingly at the ships, no doubt thinking of a happier time when his people had a much rowdier, though less informed notion of what constituted a good day trip.  I think he was ready to chuck his European sports coupe and Surface tablet for a longship and an ax.

His Australian girlfriend was present to remind us of what happened when folks put her people on ships.  No more "green and pleasant land".  Just Paul Hogan, Yahoo Serious, and drop bears.  Pretty grim stuff.

One thing that did surprise me a bit was how low these things sat in the water and just how narrow they were.  With the exception of the knarr, they all had relatively little freeboard.  I'm fairly certain it was so the rowers could dip their hands down and make ripples in the water.

A small knarr, or trading ship.

There's no way I'm painting a Gripping Beast ship like this.

Actual Danes commuting.

Not everyone was as excited about the ships as I was.

I've Got A Boat!

To recap, SAGA is a game of skirmishing factions from across Europe and the Middle East during the Dark Age/Early Medieval period.  There's quite a bit of variety to the factions, especially in the later expansions.  The game goes beyond Anglo-Danes bashing Anglo-Saxons.  There are also Skraelings (Native Americans), Pagan Rus, Byzantines, and Merovingian Franks.  It's a real United Colors of Benetton ad.

While those other factions add depth to the game, the one faction that is above all others as an icon for warfare in the period is the Vikings.  When we think of Europe in the 800s, we think of raiders rowing longships across stormy seas to plunder and pillage.

Outside of gaming, I love of all things maritime.  It therefore stands to reason (that word probably doesn't fit in this post or even in this blog) that I should endeavor to build a Viking ship model to decorate my SAGA games and give my wife something else to shake her head over.

There are only  a few options for 28mm Viking ships.  Old Glory will sell you one for only $36 without crew, but in order to get the rudder, you have to buy the crew.  Getting it with the crew adds another $30 dollars.  The Tapestry did a write-up of it a while ago. Sixty-six dollars puts this one at the high end of the offerings.  Then again, that Old Glory Army card saves you 40%, which is great if you plan to spend enough in a year to justify the $50 cost of the card.  I'm not totally sold, given that I don't know if I'd use that membership to full effect.  I do know that if North Star offered such a card, I would have abused the snot out of it this year alone.

Plastic model maker Revell produces a very nice kit that comes in right around $28US.  The only downsides are that it doesn't have a crew and it has a full hull, so it will need to be cut to the waterline.  Still, for someone who just plans to park it on the beach as scenery (as I do) and is willing to break out the razor saw and miter box, it's an easy choice.

Option three is Gripping Beast.  They do a series of Dark Age vessels.  There's a large trading ship, a small trading boat, a "Pictish/Scots/Irish boat", and the "Oseberg Style Long Ship".  The last one is the largest by a wide margin.  I find it impressive that Gripping Beast has a bothered to create a full line of vessels to populate the beaches near your little resin abbey.  What's frustrating is that the images on the website, with one exception, look like they could be spy satellite imagery imagery taken during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Tiny, fuzzy little pictures and little sense of scale do not sell these models.  Also, no masts or sails.  Old Glory at least provides dowels for the masts.  Even if you were willing to take the leap on such an unknown quantity, you've got to deal with the fact that they're frequently out of stock.

That last hindrance is the most baffling to me.  Try Googling these things.  There aren't a lot of bloggers writing up their experiences with them.  In fact, there are only two that I can find.  One fellow built up the knorr trading vessel to use as a raiding ship (it's a bit small) and another bought the Oseberg ship for a fantasy game.  Beyond those folks, no one seems to own one.  I've asked in several SAGA groups and just get crickets.  My suspicion is that they're made in small batches and then immediately scooped up by one those large English wargaming groups that love to stage those massive convention demonstration games showing the entirety of the fall of Incan empire or a 1:1 model of Wagram.

I really wanted a Viking ship, but wasn't quite willing to lay out that much cash on such an unknown quantity.  As luck would have it, a gentleman on Facebook happened to be selling off some SAGA things and put an Oseberg long ship up for sale.  As he was only in the Netherlands, that would make it a quick ship to me and not terribly expensive to do so.

Turns out, shipping was a bit pricier than initially thought.  Sorry, Arvid.  It was fast, though.  Only a few days after shipping, it was at my doorstep.

The ship is surprisingly large.  I measured it at 18" from stem to stern.  The picture below is with a 28mm Empress T-26 for scale.  It's certainly impressive.  Given that SAGA games are supposed to be played on 3x3 or 4x3 boards, it's almost a bit too much.  It's the size of a small village.  Anyone who has seen the real things in Oslo or Roskilde will know who much this conveys the very real mass of the subject.


The ship comes with the rowing crew shown in the pictures, a mast cap, a fitting for a crossarm. With masts and sails installed it will definitely draw the eye to a gaming table.  A Dark Age board on it's own may not make a clear impression in a convention or shop game, but adding a full-sized ship like this let's people know at a glance what the game is about.

It's about Vikings!