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The story, lore, setting, and character creation options are amazing, and my party is already having so much fun with this. My only issue is with how the material is organized. There's the 500-page campaign book, the 70-page player's guide, and a 50-page GM's reference guide, and not a lot of info is duplicated between them.
The setting is beautifully complex, but the campaign guide spreads out a lot of the information, so you really need to read the whole thing to get the context you need to run it properly. For example, it took me forever to get all the information that led to the very first plot hooks in the prologue. There are callouts that will tell you that a detail will be important later, but they don't always tell you where, or how critical the information is (like when the party members are asked what their favorite fish is in Chapter 3 because of how one part of a dungeon crawl is flavored in Chapter 11).
Also, as cool as all of the new options are for background, species, and sub-class, there's not much guidance for DMs on running the game with those options in mind. For example, what relationship could an Ironwood Warlock have with the Ironwood trees? How will it impact the story if a PC is discovered to be a Tuss? What happens if a player picks the Vigilant One epic background, but their species is Wicker? Every option comes with a lot of story implications, but it's not always clear what those implications are.
The combat was also extremely difficult to get organized, partially because a large number of the encounters didn't have battle maps (despite the incredibly detailed descriptions of the combat scene and the emphasis on a tactical approach), and also because it wasn't always clear how many enemies were actually in each area on the map. It was like, "There's a wooden fort with 7 buildings and 100 feet of open area. The druid will retreat with any remaining raiders to the 40-foot shrine and cast Spike Growth so that it covers 10 feet outside the shrine with the rest of it inside the shrine." That's a bit high-level for theater of the mind, so I had some difficulty illustrating this for my players.
Despite my complaints, this book is worth the money and effort. The setting and lore are rich with fun Viking flavor, and the scope and scale of it just helps the players feel like even more epic heroes. It's gritty, it's adventurous, it's scary, it's heartfelt, it's fun, and it's everything you could hope for in a Viking-themed D&D adventure.
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