Personally, I'm a huge fan of this product as I think it strikes a great balance between adventure path & sandbox, while also giving you the setting info. And I love that he didn't go Viking, but rather went for Alaskan folklore. And he does an excellent job of working the OSE rules into the adventure while providing his own tweaks. Plus, there are lots of revised or totally new monsters. But we skipped the character creation process and just started in Valkengard.
I actually like the idea of the author trying to create backstory and immersion in the campaign. Thanks for the review - I'm going to back the Kickstarter now.
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All you have to do is modify. If some artifact necklace is a thing, and you don't go on some adventure to find it, they might find it some random location in the place the players end up going. Poof they found it, and now it can lead them to wherever that item leads them to. Of course, as a Sandbox the players could get to the place it led to and say "Nope, I ain't going in there". Let's go find some Taco's to eat and your other characters say "What's a Taco?".
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If the players engaged in the adventure path well and good. If the players don't then the DM decides whether somebody else stepped in and took care of the problem or whether there are consequences in the sandbox because no one undertook the adventure path. No reason you can't have both together. Some groups like being on the railroad others don't this way you can do either.
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Well now I know what to put in and what to skip in a setting book. I really think the OSR could use a lot more setting books. Right now we've got a ton of core rule books that do slightly different things with the 6 stats and a d20, but not a lot of settings.
10:41 the stupidly long backstory with silly years (30k years) is a pet peeve for me as well. People have no conception of how long 1k is let alone 30k … Looks useful as fodder for a Viking based campaign.
I see why no one would want to sift through dozens of pages of history, but what would be your take on the topic of myths, legends and archtypes that last through the ages in a fantasy setting?
As I suggested in the video, those are OK, if they're presented as such, and especially if they are still relevant to some facet of actual play, be it of cultural significance to the present setting, or as adventure cues for the campaign.
@@RPGPundit Relevance being in the forefront, of course. The more I delve into modern culture, the more I understand how it stems from, and fed by, ancient myths. The reason I'm asking is with the goal of making a campaign more believable and immersive.
Well, to some degree it depends what style you want. If you want relatively gritty medieval authentic gaming, I'd certainly suggest my game Lion & Dragon, and settings like Dark Albion or Sword & Caravan. Or for sci-fi, Star Adventurer. Or if you want an occult modern RPG that isn't about Cthulhu, check out Invisible College. If you want a setting to play weird Gonzo Fantasy, try World of the Last Sun. Now, if you want a game closer to classic D&D you could check out Greg Gillespie's Dragonslayer. But all this is just a tiny list of a vast design movement; you can also check out the works of The Red Room, Alexander Macris, Kevin Crawford, or Lamentations of the Flame Princess. And if you want really wacky stuff, Venger Satanis.
These types of books usually end up on people's shelves and are never played. I'm interested in your books and the red room as well, due to the fact that I use more from concise, well written books.
Love the videos always. Im old, busy and I dont really have time for giant books that are nothing but backgrounds. Seeds and random charts I like. Short compete adventures (which I may hack), I like even better. I something advertising itself as the worlds biggest 5e adventure with something like like 900 pages. Lol.... not a chance Id ever buy it
17:42 I know you're not a videogamer Pundit, but the in-world character creation introduction reminds me a lot of some of the Bethesda games like Oblivion or Skyrim, where your character will go through a tutorial scenario/dungeon and interact with NPCs who will ask the player questions about his or herself as a way of immersively prompting the player to pick a name, class, race, etc. I wonder if this was a source of inspiration for the author. I appreciate the immersion, but I wonder if the effort will be wasted considering how deadly OSR tends to be with characters very likely not surviving the first adventure. Regardless, I think it looks like a very cool setting. Definitely on my wishlist.
Curti a resenha do cara, sincerona. O autor da GotFN também curtiu, até a compartilhou no site da editora. Mano, sei lá, eu acho que o primeiro capítulo com a história da região não é tanta encheção de linguiça assim. São um pouco mais de 20 páginas, não ocupa tanto espaço no livro e é um lore interessante, que pode ser muito bem aproveitado. Eu e meu grupo jogamos 12 sessões e estamos bem no início, mal arranhando a superfície. Estamos rodando sandbox, porém, rolamos a aventura introdutória, que não é ruim e é bem curta. Passamos por pouquíssima coisa do módulo, pois, claro, como todo bom sandbox, o hexmap possui muitos hexágonos em branco para o mestre trabalhar em cima. Então os caras estão num hexcrawl, conhecendo a região, às vezes entrando em alguns lugares, às vezes só mapeando mesmo para retornar depois, etc. Enfim, estamos apenas esquentando. Eu sou fã de megadungeon e este módulo se apresentou como uma megadungeon, mas na verdade é uma megacampanha. Diferente de outros módulos de megadungeons, neste aí o autor deixou a megadungeon para o final, para o volume 3. E ela fica bem longe mesmo do ponto de partida. E os volumes trabalham com a questão de progressão de nível, prevendo os níveis que os personagens sobreviventes alcançarão em média. Portanto, essa megadungeon aí será de alto nível em termos de nível de personagem mesmo. Provavelmente as área iniciais da dungeon devem ser algo num padrão de nível 10, algo assim. E pelo que vi, essa megadungeon aí realmente parece ser enorme. Sobre o sandbox X adventure path, o autor deixa claro que dá pra rodar a campanha das duas maneiras, de acordo com o gosto do freguês. Pela minha leitura do livro, acho que isso é perfeitamente possível. No mais é isso. Recomendo.
This seems like too much. Also I left 5E and modern games to get away from "adventure paths". Thanks for the advice that I don't need to worry to much about the past. I was thinking of making a setting for my own table and I was concerned about jow detailed that should be. I was thinking of a kind of Conan like world and I wanted it to be around discovering ruins of the ancients (Atlantians). So wait it has the Marrowind intro...thats annoying.
@@RPGPundit My idea is that most of the history has been lost and forgotten due to the fall of the ancient civilizations. my plan is to be intentionally vague, partially because I'm lazy but also because I want my players to be discovering mysterious things for themselves. Kind of like the scene in the Conan the Barbarian movie when he finds the Atlantean sword in the tomb, that's really my conceptual inspiration.
Huh. That's different from how I took it. Then again, I've developed a peeve about writers who drop completely unnecessary exposition or explain things that don't need explained. In the case of _Forbidden North,_ I saw it as an example of "Just because _you_ know every jot and tittle of the backstory is no reason to waste pages (and the readers' time) on it." * You can just let people know when/if it becomes relevant. It's okay if you never get to publish/use a specific detail. Neither you nor your players' game is likely to be ruined because they never found out the bar was built over the ruins of the town's first house.
12:15 this also applies to the woke people. But in thier case they don't care about the history of the franchise they are working on. They just want to shoe horn thier fetishs and stories into it.
As long as a long past section gives me the info I need to know what kind of ruins exist in the setting, what they are like, their condition, and what sort of S&S horrors dwell within I usually give it a pass. That said, I think Tekumel did this well iirc; there was tons of background history but it only gave you what you needed up front. Would it still aggravate your pet peeve if he put it in an appendix I wonder?
I get why you blah-blah-blah the deep history and background that people painstakingly created ... but man that makes me feel so bad for the people that poured their heart and soul into the work. I'm all for sandbox, but by definition the sand is "in a box". There has to be some notion for how things came to be and why the present conflicts exist right? When I am a player in a campaign, my brain shuts off and my interest level tanks when I realize there is zero depth to the world I'm playing in. I'm too old to mindlessly hex crawl to kill random encounters. Just doesn't do it for me anymore. I need a story to be part of. This book seems like it is overflowing with such info to make a rich many-session campaign out of. But I guess to each their own? Anyhow good review, it seems like a well made book as you said. I'm jealous you get to review so many pieces of work! But also glad we all get to benefit :-)
I'm not against deep history or background; if you look at my own campaign settings (Dark Albion, Sword & Caravan) they're VERY culture and history focused. What I was saying in the video is that you want an emphasis on stuff that is actually playable and applicable in the game-play, not just lore for lore's sake. That's why I say very good things in this review of the descriptions of the culture of the North, for example.
Knowing how a world got to be the way it is is useful for a game master but pointless for the players. As you say nobody in the setting NPCs or players is going to know most of the history, but it can be helpful to the GM to know how the world got the way it is I'm guessing you hate the Silmarillion because it's just a huge lore dump just to set up The Hobbit.😅
I actually disliked the Silmarillion, but because it was bad Myth. It failed to live up to a mythic saga the way that LotR lives up to an epic saga. So like, while LotR is not far from on par to Beowulf or Arthurian legend, the Silmarillion is very poor compared to the Old Testament, or the Mahabharata, or the Theogony.
this review seems to be missing focus, maybe you can watch other reviews and structure your video more, and really get into the meterial youre reviewing, it will give you more wievs as well, and likes im sure
I don't think I need to take advice on reviewing, thanks. I have literally reviewed hundreds, possibly thousands of RPG products, all of which were sent to me for free by the publishers. This video, in fact, got higher than average views in the first 24 hours than a typical review video. The publisher was very pleased with my video, and it has had a longer average viewing rate than typical. So maybe there's something more useful and interesting to this approach than writing up something like it was a kid's book report?
yes and ive seen the last few hundred of your videos, your quality and your focus back then was better. but hey if number go up = you happy, then its all good i guess lol
