Icewind Dale Campaign Prep Part 1: Intro Quests and Rumors

In the last post, I expressed some desire to run Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden.

In an usually quick development, I ran the first session last night. Before I did so, I substantially reworked the introduction to the adventure and the structure of several quests. if you're looking at running, as at least one other reader is considering, keep an eye on this blog! Today, I'll show how I reworked the intro quests to be more organic, what I did with a few NPCs, and my rewrite of the Chapter 1 rumor table. 

Source

The Intro Quests

The book advises that the GM use one of the two starting quests, Cold Open or Nature Spirits. They're wildly different in terms of tone, danger and reward.

I and every other commentator on Rime have observed that it's better to use both quests together. Their purpose is to give the party a reason to travel all over Ten-Towns, visiting each one and collecting their local quests. Since both quests end essentially at random, it's better to have two intertwining threads. The contrast in tone is also fun.

The other common comment is that Cold Open should be a proper murder mystery, instead of a kill quest with delays. I'm going to bring this all together. 

Welcome to Ten-Towns

One of the biggest departures from the module I've used is right in the opening. Instead of starting in one of the Ten Towns, I started the party in a sled on the Ten Trail, coming into the Dale. Some party members were Dale natives returning, while others were new to the region.

The party shared the covered sled with a wizard, Dzaan, and his bodyguard, Vetala. If you know the adventure, you see how this is a substantial departure. I'm using Dzaan to replace a couple of the clunkier questgivers in the first chapter, Dannika Graysteel, who gives the Nature Spirits starting quest, and Tali, who gives the Lake Monster quest in Bremen. I still intend to have his execution scene in Easthaven, but now it likely won't be the party's first time in that town, and they'll likely be there to turn in a quest to Dzaan and get a reward. Awkward.

With this, we introduce the Arcane Brotherhood, albeit in disguise, from day one. Also, I like the flavor of Dzaan looking for a live chwinga for much less altruistic reasons, and sending the party on a potentially dangerous quest to investigate the lake monster, while not giving them the magic items he has which, as far as he knows, would make the quest much safer.

(Also, his bodyguard's name in the book is Krintaas, not Vetala. That's just an easter egg for the Indian and Tibetan readers I don't have). 

In the intro as I've run it, the party gets introduced to Dzaan, get offered the Nature Spirits quest, and then get interrupted. The sled driver calls out about a tinker's sled up ahead, and instructs the party to get their purses ready if they want to buy supplies.

When they get closer, they find four wolves eating the tinker's sled dogs, growling at the party. If the wolves are killed or driven away, the party may find that the tinker is also dead. But they weren't killed by the wolves. The tinker has a deep stab wound through his heart, and each of the sled dogs was killed with a similar weapon. The wolves came later.

The sled is still loaded with supplies, which the sled driver insists on taking if the party doesn't. But there weren't enough supplies to take the tinker over the mountains. Why would he be heading south on the Ten Trail if the couldn't make it over the mountains?

Further investigation would reveal humanoid tracks to and from the sled. One set, with large gaps in the tracks, as if jumping great distances. The tracks lead back to Bryn Shander. The work of our mysterious killer. 

The sled driver insists on taking the tinker's body back to town, showing it to the sheriff and getting the tinker his final rites.

Bury them right
Or else!

Cold Open

With this setup, the game is pretty much required to start in Bryn Shander. It's the gateway to the Dale, it's centrally located, it's the nicest city, which helps give the real decrepitude of places like Dougan's Hole more weight. It also has a good town quest, which introduces blizzards and is less likely than some others to result in a TPK. 

Assuming the party took the tinker's body, there's a few hooks to pull. First, taking it to the sheriff in the Town Hall. Getting to the Town Hall puts the party near the market square, which they're likely to go to anyway. If they bring the body with them, they'll be approached by a man with bright blue eyes, who asks how much the body costs.

This is Sephek Kaltro, bodyguard on Torg's caravan, and a bounty hunter on his own time. He assumed the body was a bounty the party was bringing in, and tells the party he makes business out of buying bounties from hunters and bringing them into the final destination. 

The Sheriff can inform them that this is the fourth such murder in similar fashion in a few months. Second time a Bryn Shander citizen has been targeted. He's offering a 100gp bounty for the murderer, dead or alive.

While they're in his office, the party has the opportunity to put their names in the lottery, which is just under a month away (in my own session last night, one party member, an Auril worshiper, put the entire party's names in the lottery. He also detected that Sephek was an Auril worshiper).

Getting the tinker his final rites can get the party over to the House of the Morninglord, where they can overhear a raucous shouting match between the priest and the acolyte. The gnome acolyte, Copper, is a fellow tinker, and recognizes the body as Jericho. He can tell the party that Jericho was paranoid and panicked about the lottery the previous week, but got over it. Inside, there are three frostbitten dwarves receiving medical help. They can tell the party about how they lost Blackiron's shipment, and that they'll offer 100gp in exchange for it safely delivered.

If the party heads over to the Northlook, they can hear the crowd inside chanting, 'Poke the fish!' and see a young soldier poke Ol' Bitey and get bitten for his efforts. Blood, laughter and free drinks abound. The party will likely get rooms and hang about, so they'll each get a rumor. If they hang about until late, they'll likely bump into a drunk Sephek. 

And that's how you make the intro more organic. No Hlin Trollbane, no dwarves walking right up to total strangers and giving them a job out of the blue (and certainly no overpaying). But, of course, there's much more to the chapter. That's what the updated chapter 1 Rumor Table is for.

The Rumor Table

There's a couple rumor tables in Rime, one for the first chapter of the adventure, and another for the second. The first has ten rumors, one for each of the Ten Towns, which points the party at their respective intro quests. The second is called 'Tall Tales', which points the party at the chapter 2 quests dotted across the Dale. Notably, as the Alexandrian has pointed out, these 'Tall Tales' are all perfectly reliable sources of information.

I'm not satisfied with this approach. Not in the least because the tone of the rumors as written feels like a dossier, not a wild tale you heard at a seedy tavern. There's no red herrings or misdirection. 

So I went ahead and reworked the chapter 1 rumor table. First, I mixed up each of the starting quest rumors, rewriting them to give them a more appropriate voice, adding extraneous or deceptive details. Gives some more flavor, and connects to some elements of the adventure that are less emphasized, such as town rivalries. 

Then I added ten more rumors whole cloth. Some point towards quests and encounters from chapter 2, but don't give enough actionable information, giving elements like the goblin fortress or the Id Ascendant some foreshadowing. Others just give some local flavor. A few of these rumors bear further elaboration, included below.

Rumor Table

1. In Bremen, fishers’ boats keep getting busted up by a monster that lives in Maer Dualdon. I think it’s just sabotage by some Termalaine boys.

2. Garn Blackiron’s swords are the flimsiest in Bryn Shander. Now they’ve got costlier somehow!

3. In Caer-Dineval, no one has seen the town speaker for a long time. A hunter from there told me he died and his ghost haunts the castle!

4. Caer Konig is a mess. They’ve got thieves stealing everything in sight, their speaker is a lush, and they don’t get anything in town since the lake froze over.

5. Dougan’s Hole? More like shit hole. Ha! But seriously, don’t go there. They’ve got wolves big as horses eating anyone who comes near.

6. The Easthaven ferry ain’t been running since Lac Dinneshere froze up. Fine by me. Too much evil shit in that lake, and it’s always the fishermen dredging up something creepy. 

7. A frost giant attacked Good Mead! It killed their speaker, their sheriff, then it picked up the whole mead hall and ran off with it!

8. Have you met the Lonelywood speaker? She bakes halfling cookies for travelers. Nothing bad ever happens in Lonelywood! Except for all the hunting deaths. That's probably bad. 

9. Ever heard of Oyaminartok? She’s a goliath werebear, been alive gods-know how long. They say if you fight her and win, you can become one too! Some adventurers have tracked her down to Kelvin’s Cairn. If you hurry, you might be able to catch up!

10. The gem mine in Termalaine is closed down again. You know what that means. Monster infestation. Whoever wins the next round of three-dragon-ante gets to collect the extermination contract - hey, where are you going?

11. There are kobolds on the move. Small packs of them cutting through the snow. Some of them head to Ten-Towns looking for warmth and safety. Others head somewhere else, but won’t say where. 

12. There’s a goliath that came down from the mountains to Easthaven. Turns out she’s a beast at three-dragon-ante. There’s nobody she won’t play against, and no bet she won’t raise.

13. There’s a big game hunter from Neverwinter who’s set up shop in Targos. He’s running a fight ring between hunts. Head to the docks and ask for Mylbor Tafferac. 

14. There’s an old structure in the mountains just west of Ten Trail. Nobody knows who built it. Some say it’s elven or dwarven, but nobody really knows!

15. There’s a tinker hiding out in the tundra, working on some crazy machine meant to end the Rime. But I don’t think that’s what it’s for. What if it’s meant to control the minds of Ten-Towns? Or blow up cities? And why is the Church of the Morninglord bankrolling this? How deep does the conspiracy go?

16. My cousin’s husband’s neighbor caught a hare in a trap, and when he went to slaughter it, it talked! Talked! What if every animal is like that? Watching us with their beady little eyes...

17. Alright, I’ll say it. I don’t mind that Termalaine’s speaker is a half-orc! He was a damn good soldier and he’s a good speaker. 

18. The goblins have a new chief, and he must be a smart one. Rumor is they’ve been building a fortress, and their attacks are ranging farther and farther.

19. The glacier tribes scare the shit out of me. I can never tell if they’re friendly or they’re two seconds from biting my face off.

20. My cousin says she hears voices in her head whenever the sky sparks. I tell her it’s nothing, but now she’s met this guy from Targos who says the same thing. If we don’t stop it now they’ll start convincing other people they hear things!

6. As mentioned before, there likely won't be a wizard burning at the stake when the party arrives in Easthaven for the first time (but no guarantees are made about subsequent times). This part of the book feels off to me, since the execution is a cutscene which introduces the party to the local sheriff, which then sends them on a totally unrelated quest. Yes, it's there to set up the simulacrum in chapter 2, but I'm already doing that by making Dzaan a real NPC. As a result, just hinting at dark things and the frozen lake in Easthaven is enough for me. The Cold Open will be reason enough to visit, since one of the murders occurred there. 

9. This rumor originally pointed to Targos. The issue is that the quest it connects to doesn't actually take place in Targos, but on Kelvin's Cairn, halfway across the map. The intro to that quest is also ridiculous. Adventurers hired a guide in Targos to help them climb the Cairn, okay, fair enough. Then they have a bad time. Sure. One of their sled dogs gets loose, and runs... guess where. Not to Caer Konig, the closest town where the expedition organizers happen to be. Not to the next-nearest town. Not the next. No, not even the next after that. This dog runs 12 miles across the tundra to the guide's husband's house, but before it arrives it happens on the PCs and recruits them.

Nope, sorry, not buying it. I just reworked this rumor to point the party directly to the adventure location. A little more questioning can tell them about Frozenfar Expeditions. Also, we start building Oyaminartok's legend.

13. As written, Mylbor Tafferac just comes into existence in chapter 2 with the Red Yeti hunt, then disappears. I thought the idea of a big game hunter was very interesting, so I'm giving him a little place in Targos. If the party wants they can go to his fight club on the docks, bet or fight themselves, win and lose money, maybe get involved in some other local drama. Not much more detail needed for that, it's a stock scene that the party should be familiar with, but adds some variety.

Also, the Red Yeti quest doesn't give the party a real chance. They just end up coming across an entirely different adventuring location, do that, and when they get back to town find that Tafferac killed the yeti. I'll likely rework that once chapter 2 rolls around. But that section described him as 'the incomparable Mylbor Tafferac' and I got so enamored with that description that I know conceive of him as a camp, self-praising showman (who totally has the combat stats to back it up). 

14. This points towards an adventuring location I'm thinking of homebrewing. I won't say what, but it has some connection to the Id Ascendant, and scratches my itch for ancient alien tech in fantasy.

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