If you stick with RPGs for any length of time, there are certain products that you inevitably become aware of. Tomb of Horrors. The Temple of Elemental Evil. Undermountain. Rappan Athuk. Ptolus. They have a certain status and mythology about them, and, sooner or later, you go and have a look. Even if you never run them, you read them, have opinions about them. They are monuments of the hobby.
I believe Gods of the Forbidden North from Pulp Hummock Press is destined to become one of these. Maybe it already is. It is already, by some distance, the largest single product I have on my shelves. My wife could barely lift it!
I reached out to the primary author, Rob Alderman, because I was interested in review copies. I had assumed he would send maybe a PDF or two. Instead, what arrived from the States (I’m in London) was the deluxe slipcase set from the most recent Kickstarter: three hardbacks, stitch-bound, ribbon markers, the lot. It’s a beautiful thing; so much so that I have since bought the PDFs with my own money, alongside the Player’s Guide to the North, a 57-page supplement. I was not paid to write this review, and Rob, like you, is reading it now for the first time. I should add, though, that Rob has been extremely generous with his time over email, and answered numerous questions including several that he would have been well within his rights to ignore. Snippets of that exchange appear here, but I’m going to upload the full interview to Patreon because I think you’ll find Rob’s answers interesting in their own right.
Two more disclaimers before we move on.
First—regrettably, and unsurprisingly—I have not run this yet. I do hope to, however, and am now actively planning how I can call up some old friends to join me for an adventure online.
Second: I have not read all of it, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The trilogy runs to something like 1,600 pages, which is The Lord of the Rings and then some. Anyone who says they have absorbed the whole thing is probably lying. Or maybe they just have fewer children than me. I have read a heck of a lot of it, but to some extent I’m generalizing from a sample.
Finally, I’m hoping this review is spoiler-free, but very light plot detail is inevitable. Read at your own risk!
What is it?
I think I first discovered Gods through the Chubby Funster’s videos on YouTube, as part of my gradual drifting away from 5e towards Old-School Essentials. I don’t know if it’s something I otherwise would have stumbled across. I saw a bit of online advertising when the final Kickstarter was live, but I wasn’t sure it was something my group at the time would have liked. Maybe I’m wrong about that.
Gods of the Forbidden North is a trilogy. I really admire the structure of it:
- Volume 1 is the overland: the frozen frontier of Titherion, a massive hexcrawl with wilderness procedures to support it, as well as the city of Valkengard and several adventure sites scattered across the map. It’s a sandbox, but you can also run it as an adventure path; either works. It was Volume 1 that won a Judges’ Spotlight award at the 2024 ENnies.
- Volume 2 then goes down into Malgorgia, the underworld. Another hexcrawl, more adventures, and some nice connective tissue back to the surface. This is mid-level; the lowest adventure starts around 5th.
- Volume 3 is entirely focused on the enormous Castle Thar-Gannon: its lower and upper halls, towers, warrens, undercity… It’s 608 pages, runs from 9th to 14th level, and is all one dungeon. It is one of the most exciting megadungeons I have ever seen.
Linking all three together is Baalor the Skull God, an undead sorcerer-king (how metal is that?) who ruled the north for two hundred years from Castle Thar-Gannon. I won’t tell you any more than that.
Volume 1 also contains a great little starter adventure, and one of the things I really like about it is that it incorporates character creation directly into the story, so the players build their characters by answering questions as they go. It’s a bit like the census office at Seyda Neen in Morrowind, if that’s not a ridiculously antiquated reference at this point. It’s a lovely way of breaking players into both the system and the setting, and I will definitely start with it for my own run-through.
As I write, Pulp Hummock have the deluxe slipcased hardback trilogy at $299.99 (about £226), the three volumes digitally at $59.99 (about £46) as a bundle or $24.99 (about £19) each, and the Player’s Guide to the North at $9.99 (about £8) in PDF. Prices on DriveThruRPG may differ slightly, so it’s worth checking both.
The object and the maps
The hardbacks are gorgeous. The interior is wonderfully readable: clean, sensible type and a great deal of black and white art that varies considerably in register. Some of it is lightly cartoonish, some feels highly polished, some sketchy. My favourite pieces have what I’d call ‘classic dark fantasy’ vibes (see ‘Undersea’, above). I like it all. It isn’t necessarily unified, but that doesn’t bother me. (As a side note: given all this wonderful human-made art, it’s a little odd that the promotional trailer for Volume 3 used generative AI. It probably put more people off than it lured people in.)
The maps are a real strength: hex maps for the overland and underworld, but also slightly stylized and simplified overview maps that I am rather fond of. Adventure sites have maps that feel like Dyson Logos’ work: clean, simple, easy to read. Some are quite small, and even the biggest are not at all unwieldy. The colour versions of the hex maps from the DriveThruRPG PDFs (see below) are markedly clearer than the black-and-white ones.
On the subject of PDFs, I love the hardbacks, but I value them mainly as collectibles and for reading through of an evening. They’re not hugely practical. I still expect to run this from a laptop. The tomes are heavy, and I am not carrying one across London for a game. You may want to consider this when choosing what to buy.
1,600 pages? Is it overwritten?
No. It’s just long, and that’s not the same thing.
As I have opined elsewhere, there are several WotC adventures that could be trimmed by half and improved by it. I don’t think this is the case here. I get little sense of Alderman wasting words. At the end of the day, this is an ambitious, dense project, and the text reflects that.
What I will say is that it could sometimes be a bit easier to parse at the table. Alderman has described his approach as sitting between two poles: Rappan Athuk, which he considers overwritten, and Stonehell, which is so sparse that it doesn’t even use complete sentences. He aimed for the middle, and said he wanted people to be able to run it without much prep. Which I think is fair. I sometimes wanted more bullet pointing or quicker signposting, perhaps more like Gavin Norman’s books in terms of at-a-glance usability, but Gods needs you to digest the setting a bit first. Once the party leaves the road and heads into the wilderness, you increasingly fall back on procedural play, and what’s great about that is that you, the referee, discover it at the table, too. The adventure sites, likewise, are very manageable.
In essence: don’t be put off by the size of the trilogy. It’s intimidating, but it’s easier to run than it looks!
One minor warning about the structure: the first chapter of Volume 1 is 20 pages of history. It is important for the setting, and there is a summary, but you might want to come back to it later.
How it plays
Alderman offers two modes, and I asked him about this via email. His view, which I share, is that busier groups—older groups, groups who maybe only get four hours a month—may be grateful for the adventure path structure, because side quests and wandering monsters are a luxury when table time is scarce. But he prefers the sandbox, and so do I. It feels more like an OSE product than a 5e one.
Something noteworthy: with the exception of the wandering monster tables, which draw on much of your standard fantasy fare, almost every scripted encounter in the trilogy uses a monster of Alderman’s own devising. In an interview back in 2022, Alderman said that the count was approaching 100 and still growing; I could well believe it. While this might require a little more prep and attention to detail, it does mean you’re kind of getting a monster book thrown in, and it’s nice to know that nobody at your table is going to have the system mastery to bypass what you throw at them. I’m particularly impressed by the boss monsters; they often have a trick that you need to work out, a bit like Shadow of the Colossus or Silent Hill, and you can’t just stab them to death. They’re mini-puzzles.
Some other things you should know before you buy:
- It assumes a party of six to eight—but that’s not the same as six to eight players. Retainers, of course, are part of the strategy, and there’s a whole mini-game in OSE about deciding who to hire, and how much of your treasure you’re prepared to give up as a result. If you turn up with three characters, you’re going to have a bad time.
- It assumes character death. The Chubby Funster’s own campaign recently ended in a TPK; he’s running Dolmenwood now. Encounters are not calibrated to the party, and players should not expect them to be. This is combat as war, not combat as sport: if the fight is unwinnable, run.
That said, you’re not completely abandoned to your fate. Alderman adapts the encounter design guidance from the 1991 Rules Cyclopedia—sound, if a bit convoluted—and modernizes it into something usable. As far as I can tell, the OSE core rulebooks don’t cover encounter building at all, and anyone arriving from 5e or Pathfinder will be a bit at sea. No challenge ratings here! It’s good guidance for the referee, but the previous warning remains. ‘Balance’ is not really a thing here.
Factions are another aspect that Alderman has clearly thought hard about. Something I love about old-school adventures is that you often have an adventure site ‘in stasis’: several competing forces with different aims and resources, holding one another in equilibrium—until the PCs turn up. Several adventures in the trilogy have this at a local level, and Chapter 2 of Volume 1 has wonderful detail more broadly on the northern cultures and their religions, but Castle Thar-Gannon is one of the best expressions of the principle that I have ever seen.
It’s also worth mentioning that Volume 3 doesn’t really engage with domain play—strongholds, followers, and so on. There’s a sidebar two-thirds of the way through which observes in passing that the party have reached name level and are building strongholds in the north, but that’s it. I don’t begrudge this, though. OSE has its own stronghold rules, and there’s a limit to what an adventure writer can cover.
Difficult material
I want to take care here.
If this book carried a content warning (and it doesn’t) it would be a long one. Sexual violence, torture, slavery, harm to children, violence against women, body horror, suicide and ideation, addiction. Probably more. It’s not just a couple of dark moments or an aesthetic. And for some groups, this alone would be enough not to touch it with a ten-foot pole.
So what can we say about this?
Well, nearly everything on that list was also in Game of Thrones—and that was the most popular show on TV for the best part of a decade, and many of us watched and enjoyed it, including me. Depicting a thing is not endorsing it, and I don’t think Gods endorses any of it either. (There’s a counterpoint here of course, which is that plenty of people objected to the material in Thrones, so you might, too—and switching off a show that you don’t like is much easier than walking away from a game session with other people.)
I put the case to Rob, and he made a good point:
‘Most products today play tippy-toe around certain evils while being totally at peace with others. Take violence and murder, for example. There isn’t a D&D product that gets published that doesn’t have such things appearing in spades within its pages.’
(I really recommend reading his answer in full here.) When asked what advice he would give referees who might want to remove some of these darker elements, he said:
‘you know your players best. If you feel certain subjects aren’t something they would enjoy, then remove them from the game. But I think any referee worth his salt knows this and does this already.’
I largely agree. I’m not squeamish about dark fantasy, I’m not running a game for children, and I don’t think a completely sanitized game would appeal to me very much. I also don’t think the darkness is necessarily gratuitous or uninterrogated. (Although there are a few missteps, I think. The setting’s orcs reproduce by raping captive women, and rather than leaving this in the ecology text, it appears as a stat-block trait. I don’t think it needed game mechanics. It is a very small part of a very large work and can be cut in an evening, but I wonder whether the editor queried it.) It’s very clear that the book doesn’t invite you to enjoy the evil. The slavers of Volume 1, for example, are unambiguously the enemy, and you are there to defeat them. Where I might gently push back on Alderman’s position is that the difficult content might have been better signposted. A referee can only make a judgement call if they know what’s coming; you wouldn’t want to deal with it mid-adventure, or mid-session. As much as anything, that’s a ‘usability at the table’ issue rather than a moral criticism.
One other aspect, which in fairness shouldn’t be filed under ‘difficult material’ but is still something I was a little wary of, was the trilogy’s Christian elements. I’d read about this in comments online before I acquired the books. As an atheist, I was worried about preachiness—a silly prejudice, perhaps, but we all have them. (I love The Lord of the Rings, for example, which has plenty of Christianity in its DNA and was written by a devout Catholic.) The books are not preachy. Alderman’s position, which I admire, is that he is drawing on real religion and history for depth exactly as any designer draws on real cultures, hence the Hadean Temple and its Trisagion, the thrice-holy one. Alignment is redefined in Gods as something close to religious affiliation. Law means pledged to the Hadean Temple; Chaos means pledged to the old gods; neutrality is defined largely by its absence of commitment. And the setting does treat this as objectively true rather than as one view among several. That is the author’s position, not mine, but it’s sincere, not proselytizing. I never once felt lectured by Tolkien, and I didn’t feel lectured here either. And is it even particularly radical? Law as order and goodness is embedded in original D&D and was clearly Gygax’s own view. Besides, there’s also an enormous amount of cosmic horror and demonic material to offset it. If it’s not something you like, you can always downplay it.
Verdict
Overall, Gods of the Forbidden North is an outstanding piece of work, a landmark in the hobby. The Chubby Funster called it the gold standard, and I think he’s right. Yes, it could be shorter. Yes, it could be less dark. But the scope and the darkness are precisely what make it what it is, and a tamer, tidier version would leave it much diminished.
My advice: start with the Volume 1 PDF. It is not technically standalone—there are threads that continue into Volumes 2 and 3—but it will give you at least a year of play on its own, and plenty of groups will never need more. If you like it, get the rest! Per page, and per hour of play, it is remarkable value, even if the initial outlay doesn’t seem cheap. I also recommend the Player’s Guide to the North, which is player-facing setting material as well as 13 pregenerated characters with a pleasing amount of backstory and worldbuilding. The detail on the different kin is particularly welcome, and isn’t in the original trilogy.
If you are wedded to 5e: well, this might not be for you. Converting something this size would be a huge undertaking. If you like your fantasy light and whimsical, likewise—you should probably pass. And if your group is three people who want a campaign they will definitely finish? Maybe not.
Otherwise:
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Rob’s next project is The Overlords of Steel, set on the same world after the fall of the Hadean Empire. He has sent me a little more about it, which is in the interview. I am already looking forward to it, and you can follow along on BackerKit here.
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