Northlands Saga Adventure Path: Recommended experience progression?


Advice and Rules Questions


So I managed to get my players pumped up for this viking-style adventure path, which I will run this Sunday. I'm using the Pathfinder rules version.

However, I noticed that the book does not have a recommended experience progression of slow, medium, or fast. I'd guess slow, as that's the personal preference expressed by some of Frog God Games' members in their own games, but was wondering which one closely matched up to the recommended levels for the adventures.

Frog God Games

Hey Libertad!

Sorry for the slow reply. The official FGG recommendation is the standard medium XP track. However, we generally don't ever say it because we try to make our adventures so that a GM can modify his/her pace to fit the game.

Northlands Saga is even trickier than normal. It has a great many opportunities for wandering monster encounters to try and capture the feel of the unexplored wilderness of the North which can accelerate leveling too fast for some games if these encounters are used extensively. In addition, because we know not everyone wants to do an entire campaign of Viking adventures, there is a lot of level overlap between the individual adventures in the series.

The "official" track would be Medium track, but if you do so you'll have to be careful about the number of random encounters you throw at your players to avoid leveling too fast.

My own personal preference for this AP would probably be the slow track though. That way I can use the random encounters extensively to give it that gritty edge-of-the-world feel that it's supposed to have and still not worry much about the level overlap. Plus it keeps a lower power level over all that I think fits well with the old-school vibe of the setting. The downside is that you might run into not leveling fast enough. However, because of that possibility we created the 6 Northlands Saga Series stand-alone adventures (NLS1-6) that you can use to supplement XP when needed.

Hope that's helpful. Have fun with your Viking game. Northlands Saga is pretty fun to play in, and while I haven't had the opportunity to play the AP in its entirety I have run different portions of it extensively at various cons and it's always a blast.

Greg


Thank you very much for your response. As for my own delayed reply, I don't often check Paizo as much as I should, although I'll try to rectify that when I can

I'm about 3 sessions in and things are going well for me. I've been rather light on random encounters, too light in fact. Group is level 3 and beginning Vengeance of the Long Serpent; if you're wondering why, they only cleared out a section of the Ice Palace before it started falling apart after the battle with Prince Uth’ilopiq and didn't explore the whole place. They've been doing fine so far, so I'm not too concerned at the moment.

I may get the stand-alones in the future, and given that Slumbering Tsar is my other campaign which is going fine too, I look forward to trying out more of your mega-adventures, even if it's a long ways down the line!

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