The year is Three. You are the new leader of a Norse settlement on the shores of Nýströnd — the New Shore — a vast continent that your people reached after a brutal crossing of the Vestrhaf, the Western Sea. The crossing took weeks. Not everyone made it.
You were not the only ones to come. Five villages now sit within a day's walk of each other around the deep natural harbour your people call Skjaldvik — Shield Bay. Norwegians from the western fjords. Danes who came as investors, not refugees. Swedes who brought their families and their seeds. Icelanders who had nowhere left to go. And the Between-Folk — Norse settlers who crossed via the islands, already half-changed by the sea.
The original goodwill of the crossing — we all survived together — has worn thin. Land claims overlap. Food gets short in bad years. A Norwegian fishing boat was sunk in disputed fjord waters last autumn. Nobody admitted to it. Everyone has a theory.
You are stepping in now, taking over from a founder who is gone. The next years will decide whether Skjaldvik becomes something permanent — or whether the bones of these settlements join the ruins in the hills.
No village has walls yet. The farms are working but vulnerable. The fishing boats are few. Every settlement is one bad harvest or one serious raid from disaster.
Two paths to dominance are already visible. The village that controls the most land and breaks its rivals through force will stand alone. The village that grows so wealthy and prosperous that every neighbour's people simply choose to leave for it will win without a single battle. Most likely, both will be attempted before this is over.
And somewhere in the inland hills, beyond the Eiðis Forest, there are ruins. Stone walls. A road. Carvings in no Norse alphabet. Whoever built this was here long before you. They are completely gone. Nobody knows why.