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. It made for one of those really juicy Crusader Kings moments, where a sense of faint stagnation gets wiped away by a sudden change, and leaves you buzzing with a whole new set of threats and opportunities. I had a couple of goes with this, most notably in my playthrough with custom character Horaszdottir, who spent the first 30 years of her reign consolidating a unified Iceland, before pressing the big button and trading up for most of Scotland.

Upon the successful prosecution of such a war, your player nation moves to the site of the conquered foe, and your former lands are abandoned to a bunch of rando brute nobodies, cooked up by the game. This decision allows any Norse ruler - in theory - to declare a war with a special cassus belli, and comes free with a special army of howling beardsman, to help you get the job done. But the thing I want to frame my opinion with, since it’s the single thing that most attracted me to the DLC, is the Varangian Adventure. If you want a list, you can find a wealth of information in Paradox's C K3 dev diaries. There’s a lot of new stuff you can do in Northern Lords. Also, there's an amazing new 869AD start where you can play as Dyr, the mythical founder of Ukraine. They're based on Viking-style roaming and boatsmanship, and allow for some creative new lineage-buffing. One genuinely rich seam of new content in Northern Lords is the duo of new perk tracks added to the dynasty bonus system, which was probably my favourite single feature of CK3. 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. They certainly wouldn’t have been my first pick as a focus for CK3’s first meaty DLC. It has been released alongside the free 1.3 “Corvus” patch, which also bears a few new Norse-centric features, but also applies a broader coat of small spruce-ups across the game.īeing completely honest, I feel like the old Norsoes have been culturally done to death over the last decade.

The corner of the map revamped by Northern Lords is, as the expansion’s name suggests, the bit inhabited by the Norse cultures - aka the Vikings, for people like me who take perverse pleasure in insisting that Frankenstein was the name of the monster.

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