Welcome to the Novgorod tribunal!

The Dragon and the Bear is a supplement to Ars Magica Fourth Edition, providing detailed background on the lands of Poland, Russia, and beyond. This background includes a terrific variety of national, religious, magical, dynastic, and Hermetic struggles that will provide the raw stuff of epic conflict upon which a good saga thrives

Saga Starting Date

The recommended starting date for a Novgorodian saga is 1220 AD, but this assumes that your saga begins with a summer covenant. Spring covenants will probably lack sufficient time to develop the strengths necessary to meet the challenge of the terrible Mongol invasions of 1237-41. A troupe wishing to play a spring covenant should consider rolling back the start date to 1200.

Novgorodian Place Names

The word “Novgorod” names both a city and a tribunal. In order to avoid confusion, we reserve the simple use of the word Novgorod to mean the city of that name, while the tribunal is always referred to as “the Novgorod tribunal,” “the tribunal,” “the tribunal of Novgorod,” or some other such formula.

There is also a possible difficulty in regard to certain other Russian place names. There were, for instance, two prominent Russian cities called Vladimir. We distinguish these cities by using their full titles, for instance, “Vladimir-in-Volinia.” Readers should also be alert to the confusion that can arise between Pereyaslavl the northern city, and Pereyaslavl the southern principality.

The Novgorod Tribunal

The Novgorod Tribunal is the Hermetic geographic designation of a vast swathe of eastern Mythic Europe. There are a dozen principalities within this area: Novgorod itself, Suzdalia, Smolensk, Polotsk, Volinia, Kiev, Chernigov, Ryazan, Pereyaslavl, Galicia, and Pinsk-Turov, as well as the Kingdom of Poland (see the tribunal map at the end of the book).

Despite the great size of this territory, the tribunal is numerically weak, with only six covenants. It is also young, with a history little more than two centuries old. Furthermore, it has the misfortune to be situated in a land that is riven by more conflicts than any other in Christendom. Whatever issue can be fought about, will be fought about, be it tribal, social, religious, dynastic, diplomatic, or military. All too often the tribunal of Novgorod has found itself squarely in the middle of things and scrambling to preserve, if not its independence, then at least its survival.

The theme of most Novgorodian sagas will, thus, be conflict. Peace is fleeting, conflict eternal, and though the land is rich and full of opportunity, such opportunities are only bought at the price of bitter compromise.

What then, are these conflicts?

Always there has been the ebb and flow of nomad invasions, bursting out of Asia, sweeping over the south Russian plains, and thundering into Europe. Throughout the middle ages these assaults were continual: first the Huns, then the Avars, the Khazars, the Magyars, and the Patzinak Turks. By the early 13th century a nomadic tribe called the Cumans dominates the south Russian steppe, raiding ruthlessly around Kiev, Chernigov, and Pereyaslavl.

Then there are the native people of this land, the Slavs, whose tradition of religion and magic is over two thousand years old. Two hundred years ago they suffered forced Christian conversion at the hands of their monarchs. These early kings were not weak men, but they were intent upon alignment with the great powers of their time, Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire, the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Pope of Rome. The native priest/magicians resisted vigorously and there are still many secret gatherings of pagan worshippers.

There are the Old Gods of the Slavs, who are suffering a slow and bitter decline. Their battle is grim, angry, and ultimately futile but nonetheless passionate. Around these Old Ones a host of faeries has mustered — the spirits of sky, land, and water — contending against a seemingly relentless fall into the Christian night.

There has been political and dynastic conflict of mighty fathers foolishly rearing broods of bickering sons. Every crack in the solidarity of the Russian and Polish royal houses has been endlessly explored, bringing about envy and family rancor, military adventurers and land-hungry younger brothers, nomadic raids and foreign wars.

And, in time, there will be the Mongols, the last of the nomadic conquerors and the worst. Inspired by the towering genius of Genghis Khan, they will fight for total world domination, carrying their vision forward through three blazing generations of relentless conquest before dynastic conflict brings them down. Their thrust against Europe will shatter the Slavs, crush Russia beneath a foreign yoke for two hundred years, and raid prosperous Poland into a burning wasteland.

In all of this, the Order of Hermes is a small factor: a few score secretive practitioners virtually lost in a sea of strife. Their entry into Russia and Poland was only possible after the Christian conversion, and their tenure has been rocked by internal dissension and external pressures. Soon, it seems, matters will grow tragically worse, for as the 13th cen tury begins two great traditions within the House of Bjornaer come clamoring viciously to the surface. On one side, the Wilderists demand the right to defend land and animals against mundanes. On the other the Harmonists preach a radical integration.

Misconceptions

What popular notions of Russian and Polish culture do we need to discard?

Forget about St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Warsaw. None of these cities is of any significance in our period.

Throw out ideas about the Cossacks, they don’t come along until the 15th century.

Reject all images of cities, fortresses, and palaces made of stone. From peasant’s cot to city wall to royal road, everything, bar, at a relatively late date, the senior cathedrals and great city gates, was built of ornately-carved, beautifully-worked wood.

Think of small rural communities of thirty, forty, or fifty people; this is the Zadrugya, the “great family.” Fathers and mothers, groups of brothers with their families, or collections of close cousins, banded together to work the land. In the original Slavic culture, groups of Zadrugya made up a clan. Groups of clans made up loose-knit tribes. This was the base upon which the Slavic princedoms were built.

Think of trade; think of rivers. From the Baltic one can travel south along the Dvina, Nieman, Oder, Vistula, Velkat, and Volkhov, from the Volkhov to the Volga, from the Nieman to the Dnieper and from these two rivers, and via a host of tributaries, to the Black sea and Caspian. For centuries before the Vikings descended on the Slavs to hammer together the first Russian kingdom, trade swam along a fifteen-hundred mile network of rivers.

And trade made cities. Though the Novgorod tribunal encompasses a mighty wilderness, the rivers have grown great cities: Novgorod in the north, city of merchants by the shore of lake Ilmen; Kiev in the south, “the Mother of Russian cities” on its hills above the Dnieper; and Vladimir, capital of Suzdalia, its glory great but its reign brief.

Geography and Climate

Russia is divided latitudinally into a series of climatic zones.

In the most extreme north there are small fringes of arctic waste.

South of the arctic waste lies a broad belt of taiga. This includes the great bulk of Siberia and sweeps just far enough south and west to clip the edge of the gulf of Finland. The taiga is harsh and windswept, modestly forested with conifers and populated by the hardiest animals and people. The taiga enjoys a brief spring and summer, during which growth is explosive and the local populations boom.

To the south of the taiga is the great forest belt, a dense mixture of conifers and deciduous woodlands. These are the primeval forests of Europe. The forest forms a solid bulwark sweeping east from the Baltic to the Urals, and from as far north as the Baltic and Finnish coasts, down to the environs of Kiev and the Carpathians. All of Poland is in the forest belt. Settlement within the forest concentrates along the rivers which form natural highways. The animal population of the forests is rich with deer, boar, bear, moose, aurochs, and wolf.

South of the forests is a mixed zone, the forest-steppe, a band of plain and pasture interspersed with substantial wooded valleys. Kiev lies on the northern edge of this zone.

South of the forest-steppe lies the true steppe. This is the nomad road from the east, plain and pasture stretching from the Carpathian mountains for thousands of miles, through Mongolia and on to the Pacific coast. The steppe begins about eighty miles south of Kiev and runs due south until it reaches the Black sea. It is characterized by extraordinarily rich black soil.

General Climatic Conditions

There is no significant geographical barrier between Siberia, with its arctic influences, and European Russia. The Ural mountains are the only real highland, and they are old and worn. They are not high enough to block the frigid northern winds that sweep south and west in the fall. In consequence, Russian and Polish winters are very harsh.

In the arctic waste winter never relents.

In the taiga wintry conditions persist for six months of the year. Spring and summer flash past in a limited four months leading into a brief, cold autumn.

The forest regions have winter, with heavy snows, for a good five months. Rivers freeze solid enough to sleigh on (making travel easier than usual). Spring comes with a ferocious thaw and flood leading to a modest summer and a long, cool autumn, with conditions improving marginally as one travels south. Around the latitude of Kiev one can expect really harsh weather to last only about four months.

Finally, the forest-steppe and steppe have only a three-month winter, though the long reach of the arctic winds blowing south can turn even the Crimea into a snow-locked fastness.

Travel

Travel in Russia follows the rivers. They form an interlocking grid, with well-established portages “bridging” the intervening strips of land. Most roads are abominable. Little more than muddy ruts in spring and autumn and dusty pathways in the summer, they vanish under winter’s snows. Conditions in Poland are similar, but the river network is less naturally useful, and as German influence increases in the 13th century, roads gradually improve.

Wilderland

Low population and moderate levels of agriculture have had little effect on the over all vitality of the environment, nor have they remotely tamed it. Away from the heavily settled river valleys the traveler will swiftly find himself lost in a frontier land of sparsely settled dells and trackless woods. One wilderland area of particular interest is the Pripet Marsh. This lies about a hundred miles to the northwest of Kiev, and out of it flows the Pripet River. There is no other area of freshwater marsh in Europe that remotely approaches the size of the Pripet: nearly 200 miles east to west and 150 north to south of reed bed and waterway, wandering channels, and vanishing rivers. The Pripet, like the northern forests, is primal wilderness, rich with mystery and hidden dangers.

=Natural Resources The Russian and Polish lands are rich in a wide variety of natural resources. Timber is the paramount building material; furs, amber, honey, wax, and slaves are the prime trade goods. Iron ore is available in the swamps and shallow marshes. The rivers overflow with fish, as do the many large and small lakes, while game of all kinds is readily available in forest and plain.

This is the land over which the magi of the Novgorod tribunal are pleased to hold mystical sway. In the following chapters we will delve more deeply into the character of the people who live here, and of the drama, pageant, toil, and tragedy of their lives.

Caution

This is not a historical or geographical text book. It contains a lot of information in both these areas, and a considerable amount of effort has been undertaken to make sure that most of this information is accurate. However, in the interests of storytelling and roleplaying, various deliberate fabrications have been worked into the material. Use of this text as the basis for any scholarly endeavor is therefore strongly discouraged.

Other Ars Magica Texts

Complementary use of two Ars Magica texts needs a little thought.

Hedge Magic offers troupes a variety of minor European magical traditions. One of these, the spirit master, is northeastern and pagan. Players should note that the spirit master character type is specific to pagan Lithuanians, Pomeranians, Livonians, and Prussians. Spirit masters may well be found in both Poland and Russia, but they are not native Slavic magic users, and are therefore not common in these areas. Details of the major Slavic magical/religious tradition are found in Chapter 3 of this book.

You’ll also find details about Vedun, Slavic Cunning Folk, in this work (see pages 76-77). They are very similar to standard Cunning Folk, and you’ll need Hedge Magic to use these characters in your saga.

Shamans, the Third Edition supplement, demands a few tricky decisions. A variety of statements made in that book imply that the Shaman character type was native to the Slavic lands as well as to the nomadic steppedwellers. This work takes the position that this is a misreading of the historical reality. The Slavs were a settled agricultural people. Most of their gods related to agricultural fertility, and their priests were known as Volkhvy (which now form a new character type, detailed in Chapter 3). Shamans, on the other hand, are typically found in mobile, non-agricultural cultures, who live by a mixture of herding, hunting, and gathering.

In a few other places, Shamans makes some statements about Slavic culture that this book contradicts. If it will not upset an established saga or especially cherished character, troupes playing in the Novgorod tribunal are urged to give precedence to this picture of Slavic culture.

However, Shamans is obviously the earlier publication, and many troupes may find themselves already playing games in which established Shaman characters are integral to Slavic communities. Your troupe may find itself in one of the following three situations:

1) You have completely accepted Shamans’s view of Slavic society. In this case ignore the Volkhv character class and make what use you can of the historical and cultural information in Chapters 2 and 3.

2) You have one or two Shaman characters and have established Slavic backgrounds for them. In this case, you may assume that your Shaman characters come from communities who descend from earlier nomadic invaders like the Avars, Huns, and Patzinaks. They have been buried amid the Slavs for centuries, and taken on many Slavic habits, but they still practice their own magic and religion. Hence, you have a Shaman character from a “Slavic” community.

3) You have one Shaman character, with no specific background. Re-define the character as coming from a nomadic culture, and follow the rules on Slavic society in this book.

A new Shaman character type, based on the Third Edition material found in Shamans but fully revised for the Fourth Edition, is presented in this book (see Appendix I, which begins on page 168). A troupe with existing Shaman characters will have to determine whether to continue on with the Third Edition Shaman rules, to translate the old characters to the new rules presented in this book, or to do something else entirely.

Malincka's Journey

The forest went beyond anything she had imagined. Mile upon mile and day after day. It could have been boring. As monotonous as a book of a thousand pages. But it wasn’t. Oh no. It was powerful. Dark and vivid, mantling the land like some great, crouching beast. And old. Had she ever seen trees so old? Of such girth? Such height?

Each evening when they moored, she would walk a little way. Under the eaves of the wood.

It felt alive. On every side the trees were budding, new green pushing aside old dead growth. She would put her hands on the trunks, whisper her incantations, feel the life, stirring inside, deeply buried, yes, but powerful and rising urgently now to meet the spring.

At night she dreamed of trees, and green eyes laughing. When she woke it almost seemed to her she could hear the forest breathing, deeply, like a man freshly woken from sleep. But men seemed small beside the forest, and fleeting. After twelve days on the river they reached the Dnieper portage, and she learned that they were neither. It was a gorge, a chasm hewn through the wood.

First though, there was a wide busy beach, scored with the marks of a thousand keels, and the trampling of ten times as many men and horses. The oarsmen drove Fflyfodd up the bank, grounding her hard and high, before stripping out everything: cargo, spars, oars, cordage, and food.

“Now,” the captain grinned at her, “we work!”

There was a team of hired horses, and men to move the rollers from stern to stem. There were other boats moving by then. Several already slipping into the forest ahead, their crews pulling on cables, while the horses, their heads down, strained and stamped.

“Thirty seven miles, lady, to Dnieper!” The captain grinned. He had a cable as thick as his wrist over one shoulder. “Five days, in good weather, with good horses.”

“Are there many routes? Through the wood?”

“Oh yes. All the villages on this stretch. This one is longer than some, but the ground is smooth, better for hull.”

“How many boats go through? Each year?”

“Who counts? Ask a village man, they might know. Hundreds? Thousands? The routes are old, oh yes!”

She turned away. The route was old. The stumps where the trees had been felled were rotting away into the ground, swamped with fungus and bracken. Between the looming walls of the wood the boats spread out like a line of ducklings, sliding down deep, well-worn grooves, the noise of their passage a mixture of rumble and moist, wooden squeak.

They stopped that night at a permanent encampment. Shacks and tents and wagons assembled into a wide circle around a dozen firepits. There were at least twenty ships drawn up nearby, and several hundred travelers. Near the largest group of huts a table had been set out, and here sat a stout official in sleek furs, with mailclad guards and a scribbling clerk at his side.

“The prince’s man,” a squat, dark little fellow commented when she asked what the official was about.

“Which prince?”

“Who cares? Not me. These Russians, too many princes. Now in Great Bulgar, we are sensible folk, terribly sensible. We have only one prince, our Khan, you see? He gives us our law, all the same law, good Muslim law too, and he leads us in battle, and he sets the taxes lightly, oh yes. Now isn’t that sensible? These Russians,” he spat on the ground, “too many princes.”

“But what is he doing?”

“Tax. Portage tax. This man, he’s not boyar, oh no. A man of the Druzhina, put here by his prince, to take tax on the goods on the portage. Let’s hope his prince has a right to do it! If not there’ll be trouble!”

There was often trouble, the little man told her, one prince claiming the portage rights, another disputing it. Sometimes shipments were simply seized, and what could a good, sensible Muslim man from Great Bulgar, who’d only come to trade a little fur and wax do, eh?

She met southerners there, for the first time. Kievans coming north, five Greeks with a coffle of slaves, and even a group of Cumans, bow-legged and glum to find themselves walking, heading north searching for a war; mercenaries. By the time the captain had done his business with the prince’s man her head was spinning and she was glad to retire to her small tent.

It was past moonrise when he came out of the shadows before her tent. A very tall man, but very thin, every rib showing where his long robe hung open.

“Malincka Capcek?” His voice was smooth, and very soft.

“Yes. You are?”

“Captain Ilyich told me kin of mine was here.” His face was smooth, if lean, and with high cheekbones. He tilted his head, studying her. “I see he was not quite wrong.”

“Your pardon? I don’t understand.”

“No. No matter. A happy accident. This helps me, very much. You have solved a riddle for me.” He nodded slowly. “They tell me you are traveling south?”

“Yes.”

“I would not advise you to continue. You won’t find what you’re seeking there.”

She was amazed at his effrontery. “What I am seeking? What do you mean?”

“I mean that the south is not the place for you. It is fine land. But you won’t find what you need there.”

“And where, pray tell, will I find it?” He shook his head, seemingly puzzled. “I . . . don’t know. I see I was given only a small part to play . . . it is very . . . vexing.” He sighed. “My master is sometimes unkind. But seldom wrong.”

She’d had enough. She was tired. She had been meditating, she had been disturbed . . . enough. She wove the spell quickly. Let him bumble off into the woods for all she cared, the day had been a hard march after nearly two weeks of idling on ship.

“No,” he said, and though her spell made no sound as it shattered at his feet the impact of it sent her stumbling backward. For a brief moment she felt another spell burning on her tongue, a strong one, something to make him crumble and mewl . . . she held it back.

“Better.” He smiled. “We do not need to be enemies, Malincka Capcek. And you should not go south. You won’t find what you need there. But if you come with me, well, maybe you will.”

“Where?”

He gestured over his shoulder. To the east, into the forest.

“Who are you?”

“Will you cast stronger spells with my name? I’ve heard the Latin witches can do this thing. Well, I won’t tell you. But I am Volkhv, I am Volkhv and the spirit of my master is with me. Come with me Malincka Capcek, I am a blazed tree on your trail.”

“What trail?”

He laughed. “What does a tree know of the trail it marks? I leave in the morning. Ask Vladim Ilyich of my trust. If you wish to go with me I will meet you at the gray pine, south of the camp.” And then he was gone.

Attribution

Content originally published in The Dragon and the Bear, ©1999, licensed by Trident, Inc. d/b/a Atlas Games®, under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license 4.0 ("CC-BY-SA 4.0)