Voyage of the Vikings: a new D&D resource for YAC
September 2026
As part of this year’s Festival of Archaeology, CBA Youth Advisory Board member Kenny Xie was challenged with designing an engaging new resource for young people. Inspired by Tynemouth Priory, the setting for our recent Youth Activity Day, and utilising his own skills at role-playing games, Kenny has created a fantastic Game Master’s Manual to help young people explore the fascinating history of Viking-age trade through D&D-style role-playing. From the North-East of England to the Baltic Sea and east to Constantinople, young gamers can follow Kenny’s instructions to work as a crew, collect cargo and earn silver as you set sail across the whale-road…
Reflecting on his experience of designing this new resource for young people, Kenny tells us:
Most archaeology committees talk often about two things: going on digs and examining/displaying whatever they dug up. This can be revolutionary (on a good day where you find more than CBM) but I do neither.
Instead of going into a past world, I make that past come to us.
But one group can sometimes find this harder than others: little children. Those who can’t sit still for five minutes. Those who hate (as I did) memorising dates and timelines. Those who would rather spend their day running around hills and exploring, compared to reading.
So we let it be. Here you don’t have to read, to memorise, but to explore, to feel.
And that’s how it becomes real.
Tynemouth. A ruined Abbey with castle walls. One that started with defending against Vikings.
And here, history becomes setting sail. York. Norway. Down the Varangian Road, where waves collided with fog, where birch lined lagoons evolved into steppe, where countless lives like yours and mine came across one another and passed…
As you open the game manual, it’s time. Time to enter someone else’s world – another time, another place yet with the same kindness, camaraderie, family and you get the same sadness, same Murphy’s law and same trade-offs.
Welcome, fellow traveller.
Explore the Voyage of the Vikings game pack here!
Kenny has been a member of the Council for British Archaeology’s Youth Advisory Board for the past year. The board consists of 12-14 people, aged 18-25, representing young people from different backgrounds across the UK. Our Youth Advisors are passionate about making a change in society, eager to upskill, and use their voice to make a difference at the CBA, in the archaeology and heritage sector, and beyond. As an organisation, there is so much we can learn from young people, and equally, we want to support their own personal development too.
Interested in joining the Youth Advisory Board? We are looking to recruit up to ten people aged 18-25, to represent young people from different backgrounds across the UK. Find out more and apply here!
