You are fitting out a cargo ship in Iceland to sail west, past Greenland, to a coast that only a handful of people have seen. Make landfall in Vinland with enough people and stores to build a camp, or turn back alive, or be lost.
1 · Fit out
- You have a purse and a hold, and both run out. What you leave on the quay is the game.
- Pick a ship, hire a company, and load her. Every hand eats and drinks; a trade (shipwright, pilot, healer, hunter, trader) earns its wage by making one thing go better.
- Silver you do not spend comes with you, and buys food and repairs at the Greenland settlement.
2 · At sea
- Each tap is one day. Sail on, heave to for a noon sight, fish, or spend the day mending.
- Rations and water are standing orders, and changing them costs no day. Short rations stretch the stores and wear the crew down; thirst is far quicker to kill than hunger.
- Without fresh food the company sickens on a long leg: the sagas describe it and nobody then knew why. Fish, a landfall, green stuff ashore and fresh meat all set the clock back. Sick hands cannot work the ship.
- The ship wears out. Tar and spare canvas mend her; a shipwright makes a day's work go further.
3 · Finding your way
- There are no instruments. You keep to a parallel: hold the sun at noon, or the pole star at night, at the height it stands at home.
- The strip shows where you believe you are and how sure you are of it. The wider the pale band, the less you know.
- Fog and overcast take the sky away, and every blind day sets you quietly north or south. A noon sight costs part of a day's run and tells you the truth, give or take. A sun-shadow board and a pilot both make the reading closer.
- Steer north or south to correct. Sailing across your course is slower than sailing along it. Arrive well off the parallel and you will spend days hunting up and down a coast for the way in.
4 · The people of the coast
- The lands west are not empty, and the people living there are not an obstacle. There is nothing to fight in this game and no way to profit by force.
- Encounters are trade and misunderstanding: what you offer, whether you keep your word, and whether your crew stays calm. Cloth and milk are welcome. Iron pays enormously once, and poisons everything after it.
- Trust is the whole of it. High, and they bring food, furs and the shape of the coast. Low, and nobody comes out to the ship again, which is the worst thing that can happen here, and quite bad enough.
Ending
The voyage is scored on what arrived: who is still alive, what is in the hold, whether the ship can be beached and a camp raised, and how you were with the people already living there. If it ends badly, the log says plainly what did it.