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Gods of the Forbidden North is a massive, three-volume mega-adventure series written for the Old-School Essentials: Advanced Fantasy tabletop role-playing game by Necrotic Gnome. It details a campaign setting, a wilderness hex-crawl, a sprawling underworld connecting to multiple entrances on the surface, and most importantly, an enormous megadungeon.
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- Volume 1: The first book covers the arctic frontier’s settlements, cultures, religions, and its vast wilderness regions. It includes 1 urban starter quest and 5 low-level dungeons.
- Volume 2: The second book details the underworld below the continent’s surface, demihuman cultures, plutonian settlements, 4 mid-level dungeons, 1 urban investigation adventure, and 1 high-level dungeon.
- Volume 3: The third book explores the last undescribed hex on the wilderness map (hex 10.02) that contains the legendary Castle Thar-Gannon megadungeon, its upper and lower halls, 3 mysterious towers, and 3 vast dungeon levels. It also includes the Cyclopean City of Chaos, with 23 unique tower dungeons, plus the secret entrance into the Tesseract of Time.
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The 532-page second volume is designed for a heroic party of 6-8 adventurers to begin at 5th level and reach a minimum of 9th level by the book’s conclusion, although most parties will hit 10-12th level if all underworld encounters are exhausted. Though the mega-adventure was originally designed as a sandbox campaign, it also supports episodic adventure path playstyles, as well.
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Product Features
This trilogy is the only mega-adventure product on the market designed specifically for the Old-School Essentials: Advanced Fantasy ruleset out-of-the-box as written. It includes the following exciting features:
- 4,184,489 XP from monsters and treasure
- 375 quests & discoveries
- 169 fully detailed underworld locations
- 103 new monsters
- 34 magic items
- 30 hazards & conditions
- 30 underworld connection points to the arctic surface in Volume 1
- 20 additional rumors in the Black City
- 8 underworld terrain features with their own ecology and wandering monster tables
- 5 mid-sized dungeons (4 mid-level, 1 high-level)
- 2 massive “kaiju”-like demons of the North (the Tarngrak)
- Morgathaur, a subterranean city with 5 districts and 12 fully detailed urban locations
- Simple rules to support an underground setting including light hours, climate, food & water scarcity, wind & sound conditions, hyperthermia, and thermal gradient
- A full glossary of names
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- A meticulously hyperlinked index
- A random wandering monster activity table
- A 5th level starter quest, “The Diggers of Dul’ghuun,” which includes The Beating, an infamous Kangkul tavern
- Dozens of “behind-the-screen” design notes for the referee
- Greatly simplified encounter design rules for Old-School Essentials based on the 1991 Rules Cyclopedia‘s original encounter balance system
- End-of-chapter adventure rewards summaries listing XP totals gleaned from monsters and treasure, as well as treasure locations and all recoverable magic items
- Full color hex map of the underworld (with labeled and unlabeled versions)
- Black & white hex map of the underworld (with labeled and unlabeled versions)
- 197 zipped art files in PNG format (useful for handouts at the gaming table and VTT play)
- 43 zipped map files in labeled and unlabeled formats (useful for handouts at the gaming table and VTT play)
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Gods of the Forbidden North: Volume 2 is available now here at DriveThruRPG
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