Drakkar

The Nords claim that the god Fryr taught their people the secret of the lapstrake, a technique of shipbuilding in which planks overlap each other to create a strong, light hull. Inspection of imperial annals might site this mythic event to just sometime near the year 700, when longships full of warriors first began to terrorize the seas of the north. The drakkar or dragon-ship is the pinnacle of this design, the pride of any jarl’s fleet. Nord chiefs lavish gold on bards who sing of the sleek lines of their drakkars, in the same way an eastern lord might pay a poet to praise his horses. That said, they are smaller than the flagships of most of their adversaries, and usually mount little in the way of ballistae or other auxiliary weapons. Ships like the dromon are made by engineers, who wish to apply the Empire’s methodical battle-winning arts to combat at sea. The drakkar in contrast is a ship for heroes, warriors who want to get to their foeman’s ship, scramble aboard, and start putting axes into skulls.