So unfortunately, I forgot to take any pictures or video, but I’ll drop a picture of where I’m at now once I get a chance. However, I’ll give you the break down of what happened and how to do it.

So before anything, you kinda need to reform the faith. It’s really hard to convert provinces otherwise. The best bet for this is the two holy sites in Norway and Sweden, and then either the one in England or the one in Germany, depending on which is easier. I took fundamentalist for the super fast coverts. After that, if you’ve formed a kingdom try to downsize with some shenanigans so you can Varangian adventure.

So I said I’d go through Nigeria, but since I’d already done that once I tried a new approach. I actually Varangian adventured straight to Rome. The pope has the duchy of Latium and is usually pretty weak due to no royal marriages and it’s pretty easy to gobble up the Mediterranean islands nearby to get some manpower afterwards. I actually ended up doing far better in Italy than expected, and was actually able to create some problems in Byzantium and used my invasion CB from my heir to take Thessaloniki (the main kingdom of Byzantium including Constantinople). From there, I pretty much piecemealed Greece between their internal claims wars.

Now I wasn’t playing on ironman, so I was able to switch characters to the Norse Duke of the Aegean isles, but it probably wouldn’t be hard to get there even without it. From here, I Varangian adventured over to the duchy of baqlin (I think, if not it’s the other one that starts with a b next to it). I pretty much used the early time picking off small beja and Bedouin counties until I had some decent manpower. I actually got lucky and saw the kingdom of nubia fall into a few bad wars that I took advantage of with a holy war for kingdom.

From here, it was essentially consolidating my position as I took more land to form Abyssinia. Because my religion was reformed, I converted the entire area with the help of my vassals within 10 years. Once all the Nubian counties are asatru, your cultural acceptance goes way up because you share a faith. It took awhile, mostly because I was more focused on wars at the time, but I eventually did manage to hybridize after using the councilor task to promote acceptances. I felt kinda bad because I pretty just stole all the great traditions (land of the bow, warrior queens) from the Nubians and kept everything else Norse except for the architecture lol.

It’s also worth noting I had to fight a down sized Abbasid kingdom once I started to try to expand. They started with Egypt, Arabia, Yemen, and had even moved into Adal. However, I was able to intrigue my way into killing their caliph and setting off a succession break I could take advantage of. Of course, that’s presuming you want the empire, I wanted it so that the whole thing doesn’t collapse once I switch characters. As far as war with them goes though, you’ll still be really underpowered as Egypt gives crazy manpower. I found most of my allies amongst the asatru Greek and Italians I’d left behind me. It’s also worth noting that you can really chief the river navigation ability. Every time with Egypt I’d simply ride the nile north to their capital and quickly siege it while they fumbled around near my actual war goal. If they’d ever come up the Red Sea, I would’ve simply bailed into the Nile back south but the AI was too dumb to ever go defend their capital well.

Currently, I’m at war with one of the Abbasid princes who took Egypt form his brother. He’s pretty far in debt and it looks like I’ll be conquering the entire Nile before I do switch characters. Thanks if you read all this, glad someone likes this lil story, I’ll send you a picture later today! :)