Crusader Kings III: Legends of the Dead Review (Quammi)
Legends of the Dead is actually one of my favorite DLC for CK3, mostly due to how this DLC changes up the base gameplay and the new challenges that I felt the base game was severely lacking.
TL;DR - Gameplay changes are overall good and fun to play with, with changeable game rulesets to make the challenges included easier or harder depending on how difficult you want your game to be. The Legitimacy mechanic adds realistic historical difficulty that majorly changes the strategy from base game. Legends are a fine addition but you'll probably end up not using them unless you are playing larger kingdoms with vassals that like you. 20$ is pretty steep though, wait for a sale.
-- Legitimacy
Legitimacy added a much needed realistic difficulty spike to the game (as you can no longer marry lowborns with good stats without taking a huge hit to Legitimacy). Low legitimacy has heavy debuffs, however there's plenty of decisions you can take to increase your legitimacy and it feels like you have to go out of your way to take giant Legitimacy hits; the actions and events that do lower it take about 30-50 points and that's not a lot (marrying lowborns is about 200 legitimacy, I believe) in the grand scheme, though it can be annoying if you're already below expectations and you get a random events that lowers it. High Legitimacy is genuinely fun for the buffs it gives you; a diplomatic ruler with max legitimacy can vassalize basically all of their neighbors will barely any outside resources. All in all, I feel like people who have grievances with the Legitimacy rules generally just don't like how they had to change their gameplay style around it and can no longer cheese the game in the ways we could before this DLC.
-- Plagues
I personally am a huge fan of the plague system and its the main reason why I bought this DLC in the first place, though I will agree that amount of plague spam can get tedious, especially when you're managing a larger empire. High development urban areas lead to high plague probabilities, with a consistent debuff that makes plagues absolutely scorch your cities again and again. However with the exception to the Black Plague the plagues are relatively easy to deal with or even ignore; usually keeping your physician on "control plagues" whenever one enters your realm does a fine job with making sure they don't grow out of control. There's also a few game rules that you can set before the game start if you find that you're getting too much plague spam. There's also some genuinely good war strategy you can get into with plague outbreaks as well; tricking the AI armies to walk through plagued towns will force them to take massive attrition debuffs, even more if the commander themselves gets infected. It would be nice if we received a bit more varied plagues as most of them simply follow similar base game sick traits, but plagues in general was a great addition to the game
-- Legends
Legends I'm the most lukewarm on, mostly due to the fact that I personally don't use them much due to how resource intensive they are. The mythical and illustrious rewards to legends are generally really fun to get, however the process itself of constantly begging other lords to spread your legend, the whole spread easily being bottlenecked if one or two vital lands' lords refuse to spread it, the legend costing on average 5 to 9 gold a month depending on the level of the legend, as well as the court chronicallor's spread legend task costing as much as the legend's monthly cost itself (making the costs easily 10-20 gold per month) makes it so you really dont want to pick up a legend unless you're already a large kingdom/empire or a diplomatic ruler with money to throw around. The legends themselves are fun, and the rewards are great, but generally its a forgettable addition that I ignore most of the time as I'm a big 867 Start player.
I agree with critics that 20$ for this dlc is steep and we've certainly seen other games with dlc with the same price that expand and add to the base game much more dramatically than this dlc has. Especially with the 50$ base game price, I wouldn't recommend buying this dlc if you're a first time player and just looking through the dlc catalog looking to buy the best expansions immediately. However, if its on sale I highly recommend getting this dlc as it's truly a good expansion and game changer to the base game strategies.