Player's Guide to the Nine Realms

Mortal or immortal, voyager or god — here is a brief guide for players stepping onto the branches of Yggdrasil.

Limitations

The setting is science fantasy: everything that looks like magic has an underlying logic, even if no mortal mind can follow it. Tone the dials to your table, but the defaults are:

• "Magic" is technology — psionics, exotic physics, nanite seidr, and the inherited gene-craft of the Aesir. A spell is a program; a rune is an interface. It still feels numinous to those on the receiving end.
• The gods are real and present. The Aesir and Vanir are not metaphors. They can be met, bargained with, angered, and — with extraordinary effort and worse luck — killed.
• Mortals matter. Human (and other mortal) characters are not powerless. The gods play long games and need hands they can deploy on Midgard and beyond.
• Scale is vast. Bifrost gates make the galaxy walkable, but the spaces between realms are deep, dark, and full of things older than the Aesir.

Tone Expectations

This is a setting of myth at the scale of the cosmos.

• Expect awe: beings and works so far beyond mortal scope they bend the mind.
• Expect intrigue: the gods scheme against one another constantly.
• Expect consequence: prophecy here is closer to forecast, and Ragnarök looms.
• Expect that loyalty, oaths, and lineage carry real weight — the old codes survived the jump to the stars.

Character Concepts

Depending on the campaign's tier, characters might be:

• A mortal of Midgard — pulled out of Earth's timeline by an Aesir patron who will not fully explain why.
• A Vanir — heir to a conquered people, serving, resenting, or quietly undermining the empire that swallowed your world.
• An einherjar — a chosen dead, reforged in Valhalla's halls for the war at the end of time.
• A lesser Aesir — minor godblood, sent to do the work the great names will not dirty their hands with.
• A jotunn — outcast, exile, or saboteur from the realms the Aesir never managed to tame.
• A construct or thrall of the Dwarves — a made thing learning what it wants to be.