(originally posted at TenkarsTavern.com)

The Northland Saga Part 1, Vengeance Of the Long Serpent, is an adventure that comes in two flavors: Pathfinder and Swords & Wizardry. Today we are looking at the S&W version. After removing the cover, credits, contents and OGL pages you are left with 16 pages of fairly dense text, which is a decent size for an adventure meant to be run in a session or two.

My first impression is that this adventure would make a decent mash-up with LotFP's Weird New World Campaign setting. Yes, this is more Viking in flavor and WNW is more Finnish in flavor, but I think the two would mix well. The majority of the adversaries / monsters in this adventure aren't over the top fantasy, which should help in fitting this with WNW.

I'm a little surprised that the first adventure in a planned 10 adventure series is written for levels 5-7, but I guess one could always move the party north as they gain some experience and survivability.

I like the fact that it isn't much of a dungeon crawl but is primarily story driven. This does however, lead us to the one issue I have with this adventure. To give the party the backstory, we have an NPC regaling everyone with his deeds. I estimate his tale to be approximately 750 words or so... one side of a two column page... that the DM has to read to the players. As a player, unless my DM is a thespian, this is gonna put me to sleep. The rule of "show, don't tell" comes into play I think. I'm not sure yet how I'd rework this if I were to run the adventure, but it's not the best way to start an otherwise well written adventure in my opinion. Still, lots of pieces to steal even if not used whole for a Nordic campaign.

I picked this up because I am playing in a Pathfinder game called "The Northlands Group" (unrelated). I am glad I did since this is a very interesting little adventure for low-mid level characters. Combining different cultures (Eskimo, Viking/Norse and others) and working on the "Lot's of planets have a north" theory, this adventure can be easily dropped into any campaign world. Brought to us by Frog God Games, which is what was Necromancer Games, it has the same high quality layout and writing you would expect from Necromancer.

This adventure comes in both Pathfinder and Swords & Wizardry versions, but I did not see any loss of fidelity from one version or the other, just the mechanics have changed. The Pathfinder version is longer by 4 pages, but that is entirely due to stat blocks. It would be interesting to me anyway to hear how the playtests for the different versions went. Is there that much of a difference in playability. In any case this adventure is a very good example of how the game design can change in 3+ decades, but game play is still what matters.

Designed as part of Frog Gods new Northlands campaign setting it shows a lot of promise and certainly will be something I am going to want to pick up and use.