[magnate]

As others have said, the biggest problem with your design is that Bless effects cannot be obtained by empowerment or items, so you have to have level 4 paths on your pretender from the start. You definitely want F4W4B4 - I would choose S4 over A4, because you can recruit powerful air and earth mages (vanadrotts and smiths), although the D4 blessing is ok too and D4B4 does open up some nice spells.

I would pay for these extra paths by getting rid of your growth scale. With Order 3 you will have no money problems so a death scale would be fine.

I'm playing Vanheim in my current game, with a setup a little like yours:

Great Sage pretender
F4W4E1A1S4N4D4B4 - for summoning, forging, site searching
Watch tower (I never build castles)
Order3Prod0Cold2Death3Misf2Magic1

- it's been great so far, though I have lost three provinces to barbarian/knight attacks, and neither hero has arrived.

If you want your vans and valkyries to really kick ***, you need F9W9 blessing instead of any of the above. I don't know how you pay for this though - I suspect you have to sacrifice order3.

I research construction to get winged shoes for my scouts and SDRs for my blood hunters, and then straight to Blood5 for Ice Devils. I was very lucky to find garnet sorceresses in an indy province - they are B2 so much better blood hunters than vanjarls.

Good luck,

CC