HomeFeaturesCrusader Kings III
Crusader Kings 3’s Northern Lords is a feast for roleplayers, even if you’re sick of VikingsGuards of glory, and of might
Guards of glory, and of might
After having a good go with it over the weekend, I can safely say that the Northern Lords DLC forCrusader Kings 3is entirely what I had hoped it would be. That is to say, an utterly reasonable sell at just over £5, which does little to reinvent the game. That’s A-OK, in my book, because CK3 needs very little reinventing in the first place. It’s ace. What Northern Lords does do, however, true to its branding as a “flavour pack”, is offer a lot more mill-grist for those coming to the game with roleplay in mind.
CK3: Northern Lords - Announcement TeaserWatch on YouTube
CK3: Northern Lords - Announcement Teaser
Being completely honest, I feel like the old Norsoes have been culturally done to death over the last decade. They certainly wouldn’t have been my first pick as a focus for CK3’s first meaty DLC. Nonetheless, I’ve had a lot of fun with them here, and I’d stress that my recommendation stands wholeheartedly, no matter how lukewarm you are on blokes with comedy eyeholes in their helms, ravens, and braided moustaches.
I love the new personal combat system, introduced as part of the free patch content, which implements an exciting text adventure minigame about fighting that you can use an alternative to jailing people.
Still, it’s worth noting that like all events capable of generating such a moment, it’s not something you should count on being able to do as often as you’d like. Both the blessing and the curse of interesting events in Crusader Kings, is the rigid list of prerequisite conditions required to trigger them. It’s a blessing, because it ensures that special decisions don’t become commonplace, and it’s a curse, because it sometimes feels like you’re being kept from having fun on a technicality.
The other thing worth noting about the Varangian Adventure is that, in many circumstances (such as mine), making the jump won’t actually leave you much better off in your new lands than you were before. In my opinion, though, this is absolutely a point in favour of it.
Tickets to the boat show.
In fact, pretty much all of Northern Lords’ content is there to facilitate deeper roleplaying. The Grand Blot, for example, is mechanically very similar to a regular feast with a ritual strangling thrown in for good measure. When you’re fully Norsing it up, however, with Northern Lords’ package of doleful, Scandinavian murder dirges playing in the background, it’s the perfect finisher to the conquering of a hated enemy.
The same goes for the god dedications attached to the revamped Norse religion (technically just minor character buffs), and the Runestones you can build to commemorate dead family members, victories and the like. Really, they’re just buildings with fairly tame territory bonuses, but in the story that a good playthrough can build, they feel much more than that.
Maybe the greatest example of all of this is the addition of the “berserker” character trait. In all honesty, I have no idea what it actually does. But what I do know is that, during the blood-drenched conquest of Scotland that brought Horaszdottir’s Varangian Adventure to a close, I saw a message appear in the information panel of a battle informing me that one of the big lass’s grimmer sons hadtorn off an enemy’s head and become a berserker.
HE’S GONE FACKIN BERSERK.
Whatever change to his stats might have occurred then is, frankly, irrelevant to me. Once I knew that he’d twisted a bloke’s head off like he was opening a bottle of Fanta, I considered him very differently in all my interactions thereafter.
