North Atlantic Flavor Pack Dev Diary 2:
Interacting with Greenland and Vinland
It's time for dev diary two of the
North Atlantic Flavor Pack: From Iceland to Vinland! Today, we'll cover how you can benefit from Greenland, such as with walrus hunts, and how to send expeditions to the Americas.
Before I start, I want to mention (if you haven't heard) that RICE and the North Atlantic Flavor Pack will also be featured in the upcoming
ModCon, a fan-made online event running from Sept 31 to Oct 2 that promotes and showcases mods for Paradox Games. RICE will be featured on Oct 2, Day 3, to be hosted by Laith of
TheSocialStreamers. You can check out the
ModCon website for more details and where to watch!
Supporting Greenland
First, let's bring up the chart for the Greenland struggle from the first dev diary, just in case you might need to refer back to it when the struggle phases are mentioned in this dev diary:
Now, how do you keep Greenland in the good phases? Since Greenland's off-map, the easiest way to do that is to take the decision to
Support Greenland. It also helps maintain Greenland's Resilience and Networks, two global values related to Greenland I talked about in the first dev diary (the other two being Socio-Economic and Environmental Pressures). The 8 types of support are:
- Send Basic Supplies
- Recruit Settlers
- Send Food and Livestock
- Send Practical Materials
- Enlist Clergy
- Construct Hunting Stations
- Construct Shielings
- Construct a House of Worship
Depending on the nature of your support, you may also gain prestige, piety, and/or even other gameplay bonuses. If your support arrives in Greenland safely, this also activates a catalyst towards good phases of the Greenland struggle - another reason to send whatever aid you can!
Beware there’s a small chance the ships you send will end up in a storm and sink, and the aid won’t arrive in Greenland, activating catalysts for bad phases. The chances of this happening depend on Environmental Pressures, and increases significantly after the Climate Change event triggers in the 1200s or 1300s.
Estates
Anyhow, while some Greenland decisions and content can be accessed as long as you’re involved in the Colonization of Greenland struggle, to truly benefit from Greenland, your House (not your Dynasty) needs to
Establish a Family Estate in Greenland. This represents your family having closer ties with the Greenland settlements.
The decision adds a house modifier,
Family Estate in Greenland. Note that this applies to your whole house, not your dynasty. On the plus side, you only need to do this once for your entire house and does not require you to be a house head per se (though it’s cheaper if you are).
The immediate and most important benefit of doing this is that every landed member of your house will get an annual payment of gold, prestige, and piety which you’ll be notified of in the annual report message on Greenland. The amounts are random each year, but depend on the Resilience and Networks. Both influence gold, while the former influences piety moreso, and latter prestige.
In the Subsistence and Marginalization phases, if Resilience and Networks drop low enough, you might actually
lose gold, prestige, and piety - another reason to abandon Greenland if the time comes. Thus, it’s in your best interests to keep Greenland’s Resilience and Networks high to profit from Greenland long-term.
Walrus Hunts
After you establish an estate in Greenland, you can take the decision to
Organize a Hunting Trip to Nordsetur. Nordsetur was a region north of the Greenland settlements that was a major site of walrus hunting back then, and probably corresponds to modern-day
Disko Bay. When taking the decision, you can choose how much you’re willing to fund the hunt, increasing the potential gold you can earn from it.
Because 1) walrus ivory was important Greenland’s economy, 2) Disko Bay was hundreds of miles north from the nearest Greenland settlement, and 3) the hunting and extraction of walrus tusks was demanding in terms of manpower, it is therefore theorized that the walrus hunt was a communal activity involving significant numbers of Greenlanders.
Taking this decision reduces Greenland’s Resilience value, especially in negative phases, and the larger the hunt you fund, the bigger the Resilience loss will be, especially if things don’t go well. Historically, Norse Greenland had a small population (only a few thousand at most at its height), so the absence of these men would have been a huge strain on the settlements.
Ultimately, the walrus hunt is a bit like gambling; in good times, you have a high chance of getting something out of it, but in bad times, it's a risky gamble. Regardless of whether the hunting trip succeeds or not, there is always a chance for random developments. For example, your hunters might get caught in a storm and perish, or find and kill a polar bear and give you its fur as an artifact.
Ivory Carving Centers
Much of the ivory from Greenland was worked on in Europe and not Greenland. The two major medieval centers of European ivory workshops were Trondheim in Norway and Cologne in Germany. To represent this, there are two decisions to
Establish Ivory Carving Centers - one for those in the Greenland struggle region to establish a Nordic Ivory Carving center, and one for those in Europe to establish a European Ivory Carving center. There can only be one of each type of center active at one time, so make sure to get them before your rivals do!
The decision is available in the Settlement and Integration phases of the Greenland struggle, regardless of whether you’re involved in the struggle or not, and adds a county modifier to your capital that boosts tax and development (with the Nordic center more powerful than the European one).
Be careful, though - if the Greenland struggle goes into the Marginalization phase (or has a bad ending), these modifiers will be removed. Of course, if you didn’t get the modifiers the first time, it could be your chance to acquire them… if you can get Greenland back to the Integration phase, that is.
Expeditions
A major decision available to those involved in the Colonization of Greenland is to
Send an Expedition to the West. If your expeditions succeed, they may improve Greenland’s Networks and Resilience, and earn you other benefits like gold, artifacts, modifiers, and even rarely, Native American courtiers. When taking this decision, you need to make several choices. First, you need to determine where in the Americas the expedition will head to:
- Helluland, likely corresponding to modern-day Baffin Island
- Markland, likely corresponding to modern-day Labrador
- Vinland, likely corresponding to modern-day Newfoundland and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence
Generally, you should mainly stick to sailing to Helluland or Markland, as Vinland is a
much more expensive and risky destination (unless the Greenland struggle has a good ending). While historical and archaeological evidence is scanty, Norse presence in Helluland and Markland is attested, even if the extent is debatable. For example, as late as the 1300s, Norse in Greenland may have sailed to Labrador to acquire timber.
Second, you need to choose a
leader for the expedition. Expedition leaders’ stats play a role in some events during the expedition, so choose carefully! You’ll be presented with an initial slate of candidates to choose from amongst your courtiers, but if you're unsure, you’ll have three months to choose another courtier via character interaction. If you don’t choose anyone by then, a random leader will be generated.
When the expedition ends, if the leader returns home successfully, they’ll get the
Explorer trait. For example, Erik the Red and Leif Erikson, who have been added to the game’s history, have these traits by default.
As the saying goes, life is like a box of chocolates, as you never know what you'll get. Expeditions are no different. During the expedition, which can take up to a year or so, various flavor events could trigger with positive or negative effects.
Immigration from Greenland
Although the Subsistence and Marginalization phases of the Greenland struggle are the “bad” phases, they do have a silver lining in enabling a decision to
Attract Immigrants from Greenland for involved rulers.
This decision adds the
Immigration from Greenland county modifier to every county you own. There is also a chance you’ll spawn a courtier of Greenlandic culture. The lower Greenland’s Resilience, the more likely this will happen.
Some academic theories about Norse Greenland's decline posit that Norse Greenlanders left the settlements to seek better economic opportunities in Europe, whether caused by increased demand for labor in Scandinavia due to depopulation from the Black Plague, or a decline in the walrus ivory trade reducing quality of life in Greenland, or something else. Even if valid, however, this might only be one piece of the puzzle about Norse Greenland's decline.
You will hasten Greenland’s decline with this decision, as it decreases Greenland’s Resilience and Networks and further pushes Greenland to bad phases. If you and other rulers rely on it too much, you could cause a vicious cycle where Greenland spirals downward towards inevitable decline.
Miscellaneous & Modcon
That concludes today’s dev diary! I hope I've conveyed again the design philosophy of the Greenland "struggle" at the heart of this flavor pack: you struggle
together with rather than against other rulers. Every team has a jerk who doesn't contribute but leeches off others' hard work, and while you might get by being that guy in the short-term, in order to benefit from Greenland in the long-term, everyone needs to do their part to maintain Greenland's Resilience and Networks, and keep it in good phases.
In the next, third dev diary, we’ll talk more about Vinland in detail and new cultures such as various Native American groups. Due to ModCon, the third dev diary will likely be out in one and a half to two weeks, and the anticipated ETA for this update will be mid to late October.
Speaking of ModCon, as mentioned at the start of this post, ModCon 2 is happening this week! Besides RICE, great mods like AGOT, Elder Kings, The Fallen Eagle, and many others will be participating with trailers, reveals, panels, and much more - there's been a lot of hard work behind the scenes, so we hope to see you there! If you didn’t catch it earlier, check out the
ModCon website for more info on what the events are and where to watch on YouTube.
Suggested Sources for Further Reading
- Ancient DNA Reveals the Chronology of Walrus Ivory Trade from Norse Greenland, Various Authors
- Cultural Adaptation, Compounding Vulnerabilities and Conjunctures in Norse Greenland, Andy Dugmore
- Furs, Fish, and Ivory: Medieval Norsemen at the Arctic Fringe, Christian Keller
- Gunhild's Cross and the North Atlantic Trade Sphere, Robyn Barrow
- Medieval Monasticism in Iceland and Norse Greenland, Steinunn Kristjánsdóttir
- Parishes and Communities in Norse Greenland, Orri Vésteinsson
- Shieling Activity in the Norse Eastern Settlement: Palaeoenvironment of the ‘Mountain Farm’, Vatnahverfi, Greenland, Paul M. Ledger, Kevin J. Edwards, J. Edward Schofield
- The Significance of Remote Resource Regions for Norse Greenland, Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist
- Was It for Walrus? Viking Age Settlement and Medieval Walrus Ivory Trade in Iceland and Greenland, Various Authors
- When Ivory Came From the Seas: On Some Traits of the Trade of Raw and Carved Sea-mammal Ivories in the Middle Ages, Xavier Dectot
- Wood Resource Exploitation in the Norse North Atlantic: a Review of Recent Research and Future Directions, Dawn Elise Mooney, Élie Pinta, and Lísabet Guðmundsdóttir
