The mythology of this book is unlike anything else! Every detail feels so rich. Can’t wait to finally play with my group. I know they’re all going to love it.

Gods of the Forbidden North is something between Skyrim and Carcosa. The first volume provides rich, fun to read lore that's open ended enough for the GM to build up on, while still providing solid direction. The introductory adventure is solid session 0 material, incorporating character creation into the opening scenes in a way I haven't seen before. The rest of the adventures are solid dungeon crawls, with lots to interact with and puzzles with multiple solutions.

The highlight for me is the over world hex crawl. Theres an immense amount of content. I don't know the percentage of keyed hexes off the top of my head, but it feels like every 2 or 3 hexes has a point of interest or potential adventure location, with enough detail to run with minimal prep. The book provides a rundown of procedures for running the hexcrawl, and detailed, expansive encounter tables for each terrain type, with a wide variety of potential, interesting, non combat encounters. There are also appendices with rules for running a more brutal, survival oriented game, if that's up your alley.

The settlements all have major NPCs and factions detailed, outlining goals and some suggestions for how progress towards those goals might occur to give you ideas (or perhaps for you to run verbatim if you follow the adventure path provided). Settlements also have bounty boards, providing easy hooks and direction for players who want to get out and explore off the beaten path.

All in all, I could easily spend years running GotFN with this book alone. I'm very excited for the next couple volumes.

What sets this work apart from the rest is the quality of the writing and the story telling. I checked and the author of this has taught as a professor at top level Universities in the US. This volume will keep my group going for a very long time.