That’s an anglicization of a Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian word meaning “cheers” or “your health,” which seems appropriate with the release of the Northlands Worldbook (for 5.5 D&D, with ToV coming on its heels) and Northlands Sagas. Going on now!
These books represent Kobold Press’s long-awaited return visit to adventures in the cold North. Whether you play in the Midgard setting, another published world, or a realm of your own creation, the Northlands is ready to add Viking-inspired fantasy elements to your game.
Born of Myth and Legend
As mentioned in the introduction of the Northlands Worldbook, we’ve felt the pull of the myths and legends of the North for centuries. These are stories of great heroes and mighty monsters. They are tales of determination in the face of an unyielding world. Epic is the word most people use when discussing the legends of Thor and Wotan and Loki, yet I’m not sure any word encapsulates the sheer number of elements we mine from the North for our TTRPG games.
While I’ve been writing for Kobold Press since before the Warrens were dug, this project was the first assignment I got when I joined the company as a full-time designer. Looking back, it was kind of funny because they handed me the Northlands and basically said “Go” and then left me alone to . . . do it. I was both honored and downright petrified by the trust Wolfgang and the whole company had in me.
A Big Edda-tude
The actual writing of the two Northlands books began in October 2024, and the bulk of the writing was done by May of the next year. That’s around 300,000 words in 142 days. Between all of the designers we averaged 2,112 words per day (not including weekends). While that seems like a lot, it doesn’t even factor in the hours spent by the editors, layout team, artists, and all of the other people who made the book a reality.
We had a great Kickstarter thanks to all of our dedicated backers. However, we didn’t quite reach a few stretch goals we had planned during the funding campaign. Most notably was the ratatosk and ravenfolk lineages. I also thought I’d share with you some of the other stretch goals we were contemplating if Northlands really blew up. Looking at our stretch goal document I can see:
- At $400,000, we were going to have a 7th-level adventure called Ulfberht’s Fabled Blade. Sounds cool, huh? Honestly, we had the title but no idea what the actual adventure would be.
- At $600,000, the document just says, “bonsai world trees for everyone!”
- At $700,000, the Kobold Team rents a boat and goes a-viking in the San Juan Islands.
- At $800,000, Wolfgang commissions the construction of a period-accurate longship and travels on it to hand out hacksilver and golden torcs to all the backers. Not sure how that was going to work for our landlocked backers.
While I’m sad we didn’t reached those goals, I think some of them might have been a bit hard to pull off.
Hit the Viking Trail
With the release of the Northlands Worldbook and Northlands Sagas, you hold an amazing collection of game mechanics, flavorful setting materials, and epic adventures. One of the highlights was writing for Loki in Northlands Sagas. Now, I didn’t consciously channel my inner Tom Hiddleston . . . but I’m not saying that version of Loki didn’t come to mind.
Designing the entire adventure path for Sagas was fun since I got to pull on my screenwriting and film school background. On the mechanics side, I loved working on the Raiding system, and, while it was only a small part of the book, the Flyting rules made me chuckle as I was writing them.
Now that the Northlands Worldbook and Northlands Sagas are out and in the hands of players and GMs, I hope people enjoy using them in their games as much as I did writing them.
So may all of your stories be epic, may the cold winds of the North be blunted upon the fires of your longhouse, and may the howls of Fenris and the long night of Ragnarok remain a problem for tomorrow.
Read more at this site