AD&D Session 5: His Cohorts Were Gleaming

In the last session, the Order of the Perfect Circle escaped the quiet halls of Stonehell, partied and leveled up, traveled to Clifton, defended a sage from attack and got stuck in a cave during a supernatural hurricane. They now have more clues towards the lost treasure of the Clifton family, but also new problems to face. Will they succeed in their search? What shall come of Ingvar's strange ring-box and

Agatha's ancestry? Join them in this week's journey to find out...

The Party

Norbeth Yelfiel, elf mage/thief with a periwinkle wide-brimmed floppy hat, played by Finn

Akiva ben Moshe, beetlefolk fighter with a short ponytail, played by Ali

Agatha, human paladin with a smiling-masked samurai helm, played by Anne

Innus Entus, goblin cleric/fighter with a bishop's mitre, played by Cao Linh

Ingvar Duram, human cleric with an extravagant tricorn hat, played by Jackson

Dra'kon Deznitsz, beetlefolk cleric with a spiked, tasseled helmet, played by Felix

Precious, domesticated rat

Casualties

None

Loot

8000gp in fine metal ingots

2500gp in fine fabrics

Ring of warmth 

Trollbane, broadsword+1, +3 vs regenerating creatures 

Plate+2 

Uzakear, scimitar of speed+2

Trident of fish command+1

Potion of ESP

Potion of Flying

Potion of Invisibility

Potion of Speed 

Potion of Water Breathing

Mine of pseudo-ambergris (value unknown)

Commendation from the Clifton Sheriff

High-class tavern

A very minor enemy

Heathcliff

A birthday

The Game

12 Low Summer 1113

• The Order of the Perfect Circle stepped out of their cave into the rainy, miserable, but non-hurricane weather. They soon ran into a relief effort, sent from Clifton to search for Eramay after the Order left to warn her and didn't come back.

"Wait, who are you guys?"

"We're the pre-lief effort"

• They were overjoyed to see everyone alive, and while most of the relievers went to greet Eramay, a beetlefolk cleric came to speak with the Order. He was getting on in years, but still quite stout, and was a member of Akiva's sect. After a short discussion, he resolved to join the Order in their adventures.
• His name... was Dra'kon Desnitsz. 
• They all returned to Clifton to briefly resupply, and from there traveled the muddy road down to the coast. By evening, they arrived at the high, rocky cliffs. Though much of the forest along their path had been blown down by the hurricane, the area the map indicated was long since bare of trees. 
• As they admired the setting sun, they soon found themselves on the wrong end of several spears. Lightly armored warriors, their faces and the exposed skin of their arms covered in a grey, clay-like paint, blocked their path. Selkies. 
• The Order tried to spin a half-truth about the last Clifton lord and how they were his inheritors, but the selkies soon got the truth out of them. 
• At the same time, Dra'kon's long life experience came in handy: he had spent a short time among selkie many years ago, and recognized the grey paint as a mourning rite.  
• The selkie led them down a treacherous path, to the hidden village cut from the cliffside. It looked all but abandoned. The selkie led them to a waterfall, and instructed them to step through. Beyond was a high cavern run through with rivers and pools of seawater, and an iron bridge led to a two-story hall of painted wood carved with shamanic imagery. 

From Tintin: Prisoners of the Sun
Fucking loved that book as a kid

• The bulk of the selkie villagers were there, wailing and keening before the body of an elderly woman on a slab. The guards pulled one of the mourners out and introduced her to the Order: she was Khunney, daughter of the late matriarch, and one of the leading elders of the tribe. 
• She confirmed that the last Clifton lord, Haemedelian Clifton, had left a key with the tribe decades ago before his disappearance, stating that it would open the way to his treasure, and that the selkie would one day share in his inheritance. 
• If only the party had come earlier, they might not be mourning today. 
• Some time ago, the selkie were approached by Maylorites, strange eel-like creatures from the deep sea descended from a human tribe of this region, transformed by their dark god to flee their destruction. They were searching for a treasure on the nearby sea floor, and wanted the selkie to cooperate, if not by helping the search, at least by concealing their presence from the humans, with whom the Maylorites have a long enmity. 
• The selkie sent a delegation to meet with them and discuss terms, but received a ransom note and a delegate's finger. When the matriarch saw this, she fell into shock and passed away some days later. 
• One of those delegates, Khunney's aunt Ogdo, was the distant cousin of Haemedelian Clifton who inherited the key and kept it on her person. 
• The Order and the selkie negotiated: for the Order's help in ransoming Ogdo, the selkie would help access the treasure, and would receive at least a portion equal to double the ransom. The Order agreed. 
• Khunney's brother Ergey and his faction among the warriors advocated a night raid upon the island where the Maylorites and their pirate allies were holding the hostages. Khunney advocated sending an armed escort with the ransom, with a secondary force hidden behind to fight if they were betrayed.
• The party went with Khunney's plan, and got put into the secondary force along with Ergey and his warriors, to keep them in line. They equip themselves, and that very night set out under reddish moonlight. The main force goes out on a conspicuous ship, while the secondary force follows behind in broad-keeled boats low to the water, both guided by selkies swimming below to avoid the fossilized reefs. The Order talks philosophy with Ergey and discuss the merits of circles and triangles. 

13 Low Summer 1113

• They soon arrive at the island, and the hidden boats beach silently on the sand. The island was covered with patches of trees, which should have been knocked over by the recent hurricane, but somehow remained standing. A great dhow is anchored on the opposite side of the island, doubtless belonging to the pirates. A human crew came out and escorted the ransom delegation beyond the treeline at the island's high point. A roar like that of a big cat was heard, then nothing. The secondary force had been instructed to wait twenty minutes, and if they heard nothing else, to fight their way in. Ergey wanted to head in immediately, but the party held him back. 
• Still, they weren't idle. Norbeth's ultravision became very useful, and he snuck up to the treeline. He observed three pirates standing guard, lightly armored, several fire pits dug into the earth to hide their glow, a starved leopard in a cage, and a cave entrance leading down into the island.

We don't want no trouble, do we?

• After the dwindling of their candles marked twenty minutes, the Order and Ergey's soldiers fell on the lookouts and slew them without a sound. Ingvar noticed the leopard had two small cubs, so he opened the cage, threw in the corpse of one of the pirates, and left it open. 
• Down into the caves beyond they went, and they captured another group of pirate lookouts. These ones they interrogated, and learned a bit about the situation. 
• These pirates, the crew of the Black Parrot, had been hired by the Maylorites from the City of Vultures. They knew the eel-creatures were looking for something on the sea bottom around Cascabel, and originally planned to bribe the selkies and get their help. However, one of the selkies was too smart for her own good, and figured out what the eels were looking for. They captured the delegates and sent for a ransom instead, with the plan to capture the rest and kill them too. 
• The pirates agreed to drop hostilities and leave the island, as anyone capable of killing the lookouts without a sound wasn't someone they wanted to mess with. 
• Further down in the caverns, in a cave flooded with seawater, they found the remainder of the pirate crew. In a shallow island in the center of the cavern the captives sat, both the original delegates to be ransomed and Khunney's disarmed rescue party. A shimmering dome hung in the air around them: a spell of silence. 
• There were three tall, lanky figures in long robes, with slick and oily skin: the eel-like Maylorites. One of the eels held aloft a trident, the point to the head of a middle-aged selkie, Elder Ogdo!
• The Order and their accompanying warriors launched an assault without hesitation. Agatha yelled a warning to the pirates, telling them to leave and they would not be harmed and that their ship would sail away soon. Struck by the paladin's words, the pirates turned tail and fled out of the cavern. 
• However, the Maylorites stood fast, and the one with the trident raised it high and called forth a school of sharks! The predators attacked both the party and the fleeing pirates, and the eel-people proved formidable opponents in close quarters. 
• Yet, in the face of dire odds, they prevailed. Akiva managed to cut the bonds on some captives, and Norbeth's swift arrow caught the trident-wielding eel in the side. It turned to flee, and would have escaped through the underwater tunnels, but Agatha picked up a pirate's discarded dagger, threw it with all her might, and struck the eel in the back of the head. 
• After that, the sharks fled as well, and the remaining Maylorites were cut down. The selkie were freed, still mostly unharmed, and they recovered some treasure from a hidden chest, including some coinage and potions. In addition, Norbeth determined that the trident was a trident of fish control. It didn't have many charges left, but even when they were depleted it would still act as a magical +1 weapon, the party's first!

Innus Entus: Fish want me, women fear me!

Akiva: What about fish women?

Innus Entus: It's a wash. 

Sic-em!

• By the time they surfaced, dawn lightened the sky through the rainclouds. The pirate ship was gone, but the leopard was still chewing on the bodies of the dead. Agatha felt bad about leaving the leopard and its cubs on the island, which surely would not have enough to feed it after it finished with the pirates, so she resolved to tell Occam (who spoke Feline) have him take care of it. 

15 Low Summer 1113

• They returned to the selkie cove and alternated mourning and celebration as everyone recovered for a couple of days. During that time, Norbeth took the holy herbs he had purchased in Clifton and burned them in front of the sea. Shortly thereafter, a black cat appeared on the rocks, and Norbeth sealed his familiar contract with a name: Heathcliff.

Norbeth: It's a reference. You wouldn't get it. 

• On the 15th, elder Ogdo and a band of selkie soldiers accompanied the party away from the selkie cove, toward the old Clifton Manor. 
• Since the Potentate's soldiers torched it, the manor and the land around it lay abandoned, because of a persistent sense of dread that emanates from it. Despite that, the land is filled with life: varicolored flowers bloom everywhere, high mountain chocolate brush sprouts with many pods, beartooth hedges cover everything; but the hedges on the side of the dirt road have only started to encroach: someone has cleared it recently. 
• The manor lay in ruins, with most of it totally fallen down, and only the west wing, which abutted a dome-like hill, still stood, though slowly collapsing. The great doors leaned ajar on broken hinges, inviting them in. 
• Norbeth scouted within. Down one path, he found some inhabitants: a group of armed mercenaries, some robed worshipers kneeling before a plaque on the wall, and the sound of porcine grunting. Though he snuck forward, a hidden guard placed a blade to his neck, and the two had a little chat. 
• Norbeth told him he hadn't come looking for anyone, and was just examining the ruin. He promised not to interrupt the 'clients' worship and was allowed to leave. He noticed that a bony, preserved index finger hung on the plaque, and the grunting came from a chained-up boar, huge and bloody-eyed, that the guard promised would 'fuck him up' if he caused trouble.
• Down the other way, the party found what they were looking for, mercifully free of weird cultists. On a wall adjacent to the stony hill where the ruined mural of sheep cavorting amid golden fields of grain stood, Ogdo found a tiny hole, just a pit in the wall. It was a perfect match for the Clifton key, which had a shaft and no head, but was carved with runes. 
• She placed the key within, turned it, and a doorframe outlined in light appeared, and swung open. Beyond, the thick scent of perfume emanated. 
• The tunnel spiraled down, and came to a well-dug cave room. It was an armory. Hundreds of pieces of armor, weapons, and ammunition, enough to outfit a small army. The value of the mundane arms alone far exceeded the amount the Order had promised to the selkies. 

Hell yeah!
Source

• But there was more: a chest filled with valuable metal ingots, mostly gold but even a pair of adamantine bars, and piles of linen, satin, and rarest spidersilk. Add to that several potions and an enchanted ring!
• But best was the suit of shining plate armor, sitting on its rack, with a broadsword and scimitar at each hip. 
• The Order and selkies eyed one another, and came to a new arrangement: they split the fine metals and fabrics cleanly, and while the selkies claimed the immense quantity of mundane weapons and armor, the Order took the handful of magical items. 
• But this was not the end: the tunnel spiraled yet deeper. They trudged down into the earth, and the scent of perfume grew yet stronger. At the bottom, the caverns opened up once more, with porous, spongelike structures of stone. At first it seemed empty, and then they found the wall. 
• A wall of greyish-amber, semi-opaque matter stood before them. It was soft enough that a fingernail could leave a dent and steel tools cut through it like butter, and most certainly organic in nature. And it was very fragrant, reminiscent of ambergris, though it was far more diluted. The Order recalled how the Clifton family made a fortune selling ambergris-based perfumes,  and managed to scavenge much more of the rare substance than anyone else in the region. Now it was clear how: they weren't hunting or scavenging it, they were mining it. 
• The Order and the selkies floundered at the possible value of the find. Even the portion visible here was worth thousands of gold pieces once it could be processed and rendered down, whether as a base for perfumes or fine oils. There might well be tens of thousands of gold pieces worth here. The two groups once again came to a decision: the Order would ensure the safety of a future mining operation, and the selkies would lend the manpower. That way, nobody else needed to get involved in the business. 
• Many obstacles stand in the way of profiting from this find: the order needs to kick out any strange cultists in the area so they don't get too suspicious, get rid of the strange, ominous feeling emanating from the ruins, and find an alchemist willing to work quietly. All the same, they were optimistic, and left behind the forboding mansion with high spirits. 

22 Low Summer 1113

• They returned that night to nearby Clifton, and got down to partying even as they offloaded their haul. It turned out that Dra'kon's birthday had passed during their adventures, and they celebrated his 270th together! In the course of their first week of carousing, Norbeth wound of swiftly befriending the proprietor of a high class tavern who, in an emotional and drunken state, signed away his tavern to the adventurer and retired from a life of business. Thus did Norbeth become the proprietor of Clifton's own Cracked Flagon tavern. That same night, a swiftly-intoxicated Ingvar insisted on firing the Flagon's veteran bartender, and when a row broke out between them, Innus Entus stepped in to brawl for his compatriot's honor. Thereafter, Ingvar and that bartender were bitter enemies. 
• With Akiva's help, Norbeth sent for Eliezer to come and work as the tavern's manager. By the day of the 22nd, the tavern was closed for renovation and all the papers were signed and sealed. They also got a visit from the Sheriff, who thanked the Order for their help in ensuring Eramay's safety. Since the sage's house was blown to matchsticks by the hurricane, she took up residence in Clifton, which in no way hurt the town's prestige and promised to bring in a great deal of business. In gratitude, he gave the Order a Commendation: with this letter, they could go up to the capital, Cascabel, and apply to become a Free Company, allowed to carry all weapons and armor within the walled cities, though they could be called upon to join the kingdom in warfare. 
• All seemed to settle down, until that morning the Cracked Flagon received a new patron. He had a sword at each hip, wore a gambeson (illegal within city walls), and had a face like a naked mole rat: not so much as a single hair anywhere on his body, as though he had been born without them. 
• At the same time, a squadron of soldiers carrying steam rifles (also illegal within town walls) lined up in front, just visible through the window. He introduced himself:

"Captain Fen, of the Zangaran Third Mounted Dragoons. You are the Order of the Perfect Circle, yes?"

No, you heard me right

• And that's where the session concluded. What does this strange visitor want from them, and what is his relation to the Order of the Ultraviolet Flame, which also hails from Zangara, domain of the Undying Witch King? How will all this business with the inn go? What shall come of the pseudo-ambergris mine hidden under the Clifton manor? Join us for next week's session of Cascabel!

Takeaways

Hot on the heels of last week's session, I came into this one rather antsy, but left much more confident.

I did feel that the treasure reward here (though split halfway with an NPC party and with most of the value locked up in the yet-inaccessible ambergris) was getting into Monty Haul territory in comparison with the challenges faced to acquire it. When I wrote up these locations, I also expected the possibility of combat with the cultists in Clifton Manor, but this was coming right at the end of the session and I didn't want to have another big combat and was also unsure that the challenges I had written down would challenge the party, so I toned down their aggression. 

That said, my impression might be wrong. My thinking as a DM was 'clearly, that fight with the Maylorites didn't threaten the party, none of them even went to 0hp!', while Agatha's player told me after the session, 'I almost got eaten by sharks!'

This is, perhaps, a weakness of spending so much time on the DM side of the screen and not so much on the player side. I do recall, when I sit down to play, a real terror and suspense that I obviously don't experience as a DM, and I have difficulty telling what the internal experience of my players is like on that front. This makes it a little bit more difficult to calibrate challenges, methinks. 

In either case, I shall use today's victory as a springboard for future woes to shower upon the party!

In other news, around the same time this game was running, a Cauldron was overflowing across the deep blue sea. It's really inspiring to read about that con (Melan's account of it here). Is AD&D 1e experiencing a renaissance, or is this a blip on the radar? I suppose time will tell. 

Speaking of Melan, I just picked up Echoes #10 and the Nocturnal Table, which will really bring my urban adventures together. Not going to do a full review, but I have to say I'm consistently impressed by the quality coming out of EMDT, right down to the physical paper. 

This session is also a victory for my Mundane Treasures, which... I now realize I have never mentioned on this blog. A while back I got inspired by DMG p.92 and figured that converting monetary hoards into items of similar value and weight was the way to go wrt stocking treasure. So I buckled down and tried to convert every piece of equipment, armor, and weapon in the PHB, plus every type of trade/grave good I could think of into a gp/# ratio and group those into approximate categories, 'copper', 'silver', 'electrum', etc. It was really nice being able to turn a big electrum hoard (boring!) into spears, ammunition, armor, and the like, and to do so pretty quickly. Unfortunately, that piecer of work is in a sweet spot where it's developed enough I don't have to do more work to use it, but undeveloped enough I can't share it outside of a small circle. Whether I ever get around to completing and professionalizing it is up in the air. 

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That's all I have for you today. If you enjoyed the post, do comment below, follow the blog, and share it around. Until next time, have an excellent week. 

Icewind Dale Remix Notes (Chapters 6-7) and Addenda

We continue from the last post with remix notes for chapters 6 and 7 of Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, as well as some rather extensive and hastily written addenda, including notes on making Auril an actual tripartite goddess with folkloric flavor, an exploration of Auril's motivation and a clean writeup of our new continuity, some alternatives to the text of the Rime, including a musical recording (!) and notes on prophetic dreams foreshadowing/replacing the trials in Chapter 5. 

As written, the timescale of the adventure shortens as the level increases. The first couple chapters feature a lot of travel and will have the party facing a large number of small problems, probably split up over the course of several weeks. Then Sunblight and Destruction's Light play out in the course of a couple days, max. Auril's Abode and the Caves of Hunger are dungeons that the players will take on in the course of a few in-game days, and Ythryn is basically a pointcrawl with a few small dungeons. Anything after that is likely to feel like an extended denouement. 

Chapter 6: Caves of Hunger

This section is quite solidly done all things considered.

There is one issue Justin Alexander brings up in his review: the PCs are the first people to enter the caves in a very long time, and they had to steal a scroll from Auril's basement to do it, but this is undermined by the quite substantial number of other creatures that are also here. 

FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS I LAY DORMANT
WHO DARES DISTURB MY SLUM-
Oh, it's you

In fairness, the specifics of this are handled pretty well. Most of these creatures are constructs or undead that have been around for a while, the rest are mostly minions of a vampire which the PCs woke up by opening the entrance. The presence of drow mages looking to get into Ythryn is a bit too coincidental. It can be justified: maybe the presence of the duergar in the region also led the drow to pay more attention, and they dug a way in or found one as a result. But it needs to be set up a little more. I don't have many more notes on the content of this section, and didn't make substantial changes. That said, this chapter's place in the structure and pacing of the campaign needs some attention. 

Campaign Structure

This is the home stretch. In all likelihood, the PCs are leaving Icewind Dale for the last time on their way to the Caves of Hunger, which lead directly to Ythryn in Chapter 7. The previous events of the campaign need to set up the climax and connect with it. Do they?

In the first two parts, the focus is on the Dale and its people. There's lots of travel, gaining renown among the survivors, and coming face to face with the effects of the long winter. 

Then the duergar show up, you do a dungeoncrawl, and a substantial number of the towns and people get destroyed. At this time, the focus switches from the Dale and its people to a treasure hunt. There's little support or guidance for sticking around and helping to rebuild, or leading the survivors out of the Dale. Nor is there a sense of pressure to actually try to solve the problem of the long winter. 

The players might wind up doing this by accident, by slaying Auril in her abode, or by killing her pet bird. There's a very loose sense in which exploring Ythryn can solve the winter, in that the floating city was powered by a device which could probably control the weather, and which might still be operational. However, as written, it doesn't quite do the trick. While the mythallar does exist, is functional, and can control the weather, as written it's not powerful enough to be a permanent solution (the weather controlling spell has to be recast 3x a day, might require concentration to maintain depending on how you interpret the rule, and, eyeballing the poster map, its range doesn't even seem to reach Bryn Shander). 

Not to mention, from the perspective of characters in the world, this has to seem pretty far fetched. If the goal is to end the Rime, why uncover an ancient frozen city instead of taking the fight to Auril (which is far-fetched in a whole different way, but simpler in comparison). 

In any case, going to Ythryn is the quickest way to solve the winter... because 24 hours after you get there Auril shows up out of nowhere and wants to fight to the death. For some reason. And if the players win, which is fairly likely, there goes the winter and the players' biggest reason to explore Ythryn. 

Chapter 7: Doom of Ythryn

In my own campaign I made some substantial changes to Ythryn, mostly to make it consonant with my version of Auril's plot. I put the city in a 12-hour time loop which gradually turns the mortals who survive it into nothics. There's more details, but they're so specific to my own campaign that they're not worth hashing out here, especially because I would do it differently if I had to run it again. 

More than any other part of the campaign, Ythryn needs a solid answer to 'What does Auril want?' and suffers for the vagaries of the base text. Auril is weakened and afraid that other gods will come to attack her so... she draws attention to herself by blanketing a whole region in endless winter? It doesn't quite add up. I ad-libbed an explanation dealing with Auril's daughter, the end of Dungeon of the Mad Mage, a phaerimm, and the aforementioned time loop, (how's that for a noodle incident?) but looking back on it now there's a much simpler solution.

What does Auril want? She's trying to drag Icewind Dale off the material plane and make it into a demiplane under her own control. Why do the other gods have difficulty reaching their followers? Because she's deliberately cutting off their connection. Why the endless darkness and winter? To transform the Dale into a place suited to her own divinity. You can also do some neat stuff with Auril as a tripartite goddess, a separation of herself into three parts which has weakened her, but is also necessary in order to fuse with the Dale and take control of it. 

Home sweet home

If you take this route, then the role of Ythryn likewise falls into place: it's the core of the whole ritual, a fallen city which she has already basically turned into her own plane (hence also why reaching it requires the Rime, as opposed to a really big drill); it's the proof of concept for her whole scheme, and also the fulcrum on which it turns: I would make it so that the mysterious obelisk the Netherese were messing with that caused the city's fall is also the thing Auril needs to fulfill her plan. 

[EDIT: These two posts were originally written and almost finished around June 2023. As I come back and finish them in November, it turns out that my post-hoc explanation for Auril's motivations is basically the same as the evil mind flayer plot in Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk. Someone owes me money.]

Now it makes sense for the PCs to come here to end the winter, and it makes sense for Auril to come here and stop them. 

The other details on Ythryn are going to depend a lot on your table and other changes you've made, but it's mostly a matter of maintaining consistency. 

One issue might be that Ythryn as written is both too large and too small. It's too small in that, if you look at the map and the attached scale, the whole city is... half a mile across. 

Now, I've never built a magic flying city, and those who can, do, and those who can't, write blog posts. But all the same, it's really underwhelming for the city to be so tiny. But at the same time, there's a ton of stuff packed in there. Which makes sense, it used to be a city filled to the brim with mages and their crazy experiments. But in terms of pacing, it's in an awkward spot. The players will see an appreciable fraction of what the place has to offer, but then Auril shows up and... denouement. 

There's a whole laundry list of things to collect in the city which ultimately lead to opening the forcefield and getting to the mythallar, but I just don't see any party getting close to collecting all of them before Auril shows up, especially because the random encounter table is going to throw about a hostile random encounter at them every other hour of exploration. Even if one can explore basically the whole city and unlock the force field in a day, that just makes Ythryn feel even smaller. 

If you do defeat Auril, end the winter, and then decide you still want to explore Ythryn, great, but... where's the urgency? You can bring in some rival parties, maybe Arcane Brotherhood or some drow, but that'll feel like a huge letdown. 

This is the change I would advise: first, make the city way, way larger. There's a disconnect in the mapping with the Caves of Hunger: the region map makes it look like the distance between the cave entrance and Ythryn should be several miles, but the caves as mapped are nowhere near that large. This works to our advantage. In this new continuity, Ythryn is colossal, dozens of miles across. Virtually all of that is frozen solid under the glacier, but this central section is intact and accessible thanks to the lingering power of the mythallar. 

You might also split up the Caves of Hunger a bit, so some rooms are separated not by a few feet, but miles of icy caverns. Alternately, perhaps we're leaning into the Caves/Ythryn as Auril's personal domain, and it's more like an extradimensional space that the Rime is needed to access; the entrance and the city have geographical locations, but spatial relations have gotten so messy that you can cross miles in a single step.  

Epilogue

The conclusion to the adventure admirably acknowledges that the ending is likely to change based on both player decision and the whims of the dice, with broad descriptions of what may come if the players defeated Auril, were defeated and allowed winter everlasting to fall on the Dale, or even transported themselves back in time to Netheril. 

I have no particular insight here. My game ended early with the party destroying Ythryn and killing half their number by calling down the Ebon Star, leading to the land's subsequent takeover by Hastur. Good times.  

Fuck that one planet in particular!
Source

Addenda

Addendum: Tripartite Goddess

In his review, Justin Alexander notes that the premise of Auril as a tripartite goddess (full of feyish mystery and promising really interesting interactions) was rather underutilized. 

I did not make Auril a tripartite goddess in my version (my party only ever managed to destroy her first form before they fled/got killed [by their own damn foolishness and a meteor], and never saw her third), but I would recommend doing so for anyone remixing the campaign. 

We can keep each 'form' pretty much as is, but now they're separate aspects, and destroying one does not transform it into another. 

The first form, a giant chimera of woodland beings, is wild and animalistic. It is the boogeyman that snatches children in the night, kills livestock, lurks beyond the treeline. Rather than putting this form in any one place, put it on the wilderness encounter table. At CR 9, it's a tough cookie, but by no means insuperable even for a level 4 or 5 party: most of those wilderness encounters will be the only ones the party faces that day, and single monster encounters of a given CR are easier than equivalents with many monsters, as a general rule. 

Having Auril, albeit in her weakest form, on that encounter table elevates the wilderness and gives it a nice touch: it's one thing to be big and deadly, it's another thing entirely for the bestial avatar of an evil goddess to actually stalk the land! Coming up with some situations in which the first form could be found might also be good. 

Since defeating Auril permanently is likely to require defeating all three forms, this means players might not get a chance to do so just by going from dungeon to dungeon: they might instead have to be proactive, organize search parties, and hunt Auril down later in the campaign. Imagine running down an evil god on axebeaks, undead sled dogs giving chase! Now that's pulp flavor!

The second form should be on Grimskalle, and works very well with the more thorough remix of that location mentioned in the last post. This one is a frost queen, beautiful as the dawn, treacherous as the sea, whom all must love and despair! This carries the most oomph if Auril is surrounded by her devotees the frost druids. Again, this requires much more work in remixing than other changes I've mentioned, but I think it's worthwhile: of all the elements in the campaign that don't get a lot of payoff, the cult of Auril itself and the frost druids who serve it are a big lost opportunity. 

Chapter 5 is big on Auril having a genius loci (basically local omniscience) of the island of Grimskalle, which I too quite like, especially if played intelligently. At the same time, she can't leave the island, and is instead focused on coordinating the frost druids and keeping up their morale, as her primary agents in the Dale. Do note that the goal of Chapter 5 has not changed: we want to get the Rime out of the basement, not kill Auril. Granted, destroying the second form is more doable than defeating all three forms, but our addition of frost druids should swing the party's chances back the other way. 

The third form should be in Ythryn, hidden away inside the mythallar chamber. In addition to being a cool setpiece for the final showdown, it makes obtaining the mythallar conditional on defeating Auril and gives every party a reason to investigate the city and take down the force field, which leads them through an interesting treasure hunt with a lot of neat encounters. 

It also makes more sense given our remixed motivation for Auril, but even makes more sense in the original. Whether Auril is on the run from divine enemies or trying to turn the Dale into her own demiplane, there is no better place to hide her divine spark: a powerfully magically protected magic item, whose power she can siphon to heal to heal or do whatever else she needs, hidden away for millennia under a glacier in a frozen, preserved city. Arguably moreso than Grimskalle, this is her home turf, the place that resonates with her divine essence. In any case, it should be clear that her control over the endless winter comes from the mythallar, and defeating her here ends the winter, even if her other forms remain extant. 

To add some more folkloric flavor to our tripartite goddess, we might make defeating her take more than just reducing her to 0hp. Maybe the first two forms can't be destroyed in combat, instead reappearing the next 'dusk', but they can be destroyed for a year and a day under certain conditions. The bestial first form crumbles to snow if caged or otherwise restrained from dusk till 'dawn'. The second form recreates itself from the surface of Grimskalle within an hour of destruction, but is likewise destroyed for a year and a day if it is tossed into the ocean, where the hostile energies of her enemy, Umberlee the Bitch Queen (yes, that is seriously what Ed Greenwood called his evil sea goddess) unmake her. The third form, I think can be destroyed the usual way. That boss fight has enough already, no need to complicate it further. 

We might also make it explicit that Auril's tripartite nature (which is apparently new to this module) is actually a ritual component of her attempt to absorb the Dale: becoming three to merge with the land and become one again.

Of course, she's still a god. Each destroyed form will return after a year and a day (perhaps they all return a year and a day after the most recent destroyed form), but if all three are destroyed before the others can return, that does something more lasting: perhaps she cannot set foot bodily upon the mortal realm until a powerful summoning is conducted, or she is at the mercy of her divine enemies. 

Sovereign of summers lost
Source

Addendum: Auril's Motivation

Let's collect all the things we've implied previously and put them together for clarity, laying out Auril's plan and a how it interfaces with likely player action. 

In our revamp, Auril wants to turn Icewind Dale into her own demiplane by shrouding it in eternal winter, eventually blocking off escape and killing the remaining sentient beings (maybe including her own cultists, maybe not) as part of a mass blood sacrifice. By the time the campaign begins, the winter has gone on for two years, and the ability of other gods to interfere in the region is patchy (not sure how clerics are still getting their spells, in that case, but let's roll with it). 

Through her cultists and frost druids, Auril has instituted a climate of fear and paranoia in the Ten Towns. They say that Auril is wroth and wants to kill them all, but her wrath may be spared with a sacrifice, chosen by lottery. These killings are doubtless secretly sanctified to the Frostmaiden (or perhaps, after two years, it's not secret at all) but it's a lie. Auril doesn't want to kill everyone yet; she just wants to keep Ten Towns in line and keep the fear and cruelty and suffering and murder at a steady, controlled simmer. This is evidenced by the continued survival of other groups like the goblins, orcs, and the Reghed tribes. They aren't making sacrifices, and they're suffering, but not nearly as badly as they ought to be if Ten Towns' condition is being bettered by sacrifices. 

The Sunblight duergar were invited into the Dale by Auril under false pretenses: a sunless surface would be great for them, conditional on them being able to survive the cold, and she must have promised them some favor when it's all over. This too is a lie, as Auril just wanted more sacrifices and figured that a struggle for dwindling resources between the Ten-Towns and duergar would give the Dale's last days some extra kick, just a nice little spurt of rage and despair. 

Unfortunately, she underestimated the duergar and their ability to construct colossal robot dragons. The flight of the Chardalyn Dragon blindsides everyone, including Auril and the frost druids, and both its attack and the simultaneous duergar invasion kill too many too quickly, thus galvanizing resistance and giving rise to heroes in Ten Towns, instead of continuing the slow, steady decline into helplessness and despair Auril wants. 

This is probably the first time the payer characters seriously appear on Auril's radar.

Whether motivated by a treasure hunt, a search for answers, or range against Auril and her cult, seeking their headquarters in Grimskalle is a natural move that lots of PCs will do on their own, eventually. If they know from some studious source that the Rime contains the secrets of the cult's inner circle and that Auril's second form simply reforms from destruction, they will probably focus on retrieving the Rime and sabotaging whatever they can. Lady Frostkiss' genius loci over Grimskalle is still a big problem, but some thing like, say, a coalition of human and orc tribes, ten-towners, and goliaths launching a coordinated raid might just distract her long enough to heist the Rime. Or whatever other plan the PCs can come up with, it's their call. 

Here's where we add another wrinkle: the Rime not only contains the teachings of her cult's inner circle, not only contains the formula to open the way to Ythryn, but contains this very plan, as outlined to the cultists and frost druids (whether she told them the truth about their own eventual death is up the GM). With this in hand, the PCs likely set out to abolish the lottery and destroy the cult's influence in Ten Towns. 

Auril realizes her plan is now seriously threatened. She mobilizes her remaining followers and sends the first form to hunt down the party, but PCs being PCs it's likely not enough. Her second form is bound to Grimskalle and her third has to stay in Ythryn to control the mythallar. She steps up her timetable. The winter takes a sudden turn for the much worse and leaving becomes much, much more difficult. She wanted to smother the Dale and let it die slowly, but now a quick and dirty death will have to do. 

Going to Ythryn now becomes a must. Chapters 6 and 7 play out as outlined above. Hopefully, Auril is defeated in time, the spell is broken and the Dale can begin to recover. 

Within our new structure, the campaign only really needs a few assumptions about player behavior, those being:

1. The players want to fight the evil robot dragon burning down their home,

2. Want to get answers about the winter/stick it to the frost cultists,

3. Want to steal the book with said answers holy to the frost cultists from Auril's basement,

4. Want to explore a city of lost magical wonder and in so doing end the winter,

I think most parties will do all four without NPC hand-holding, not least because all of these are awesome. Now that the Rime is a source of answers about the adventure's plots and going to Ythryn is actually a reliable way to end the winter, our linear campaign structure is much more robust, with the Chapter 2 sandbox available to fill in the interludes, and proactive play is rewarded. I'll call this a good day's work.  

Addendum: Wilderness Encounters

I gave the wilderness encounters short shrift in the first post, I think for good reason, but it stands that having those encounters is useful in making the wilderness feel big. 

Of course, they collaborate with other elements to this end. If you want wilderness journeys to feel long without actually making them take longer at the table, your bets bet is do have them deplete resources. This is more challenging in 5e because the most important resources to the players (their daily abilities and hp) come back almost entirely after a long rest, and is made more difficult because most games don't track things like food, encumbrance, light, et cetera. 

Before changing the encounters table, take steps to enforce these things. Of course, if you don't want a game with resource depletion and survival elements (my own campaign dropped these elements for expediency), then the wilderness encounters table can become a sometimes food as well. 

I might advise turning it into a 1d8+1d12 table, adding a few non-hostile encounters, and having some entries pull double duty, like 10: 1:2 chwinga, 1:2 dwarves. The blizzard die can stay. 

For a more ambitious remix, prepare variant encounters with higher difficulty to use either in the deeper tundra or as the winter gets worse. That peryton encounter won't challenge parties after Chapter 4, but increasing their numbers a bit and giving it some other new spin or buff can breathe some new life in and keep it fresh and challenging.  

Source unknown

Addendum: The Rime

The whole module is named after a poem ('Rime' being a pun, both an archaic spelling of 'rhyme' as in 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and meaning frost that covers an object like a window), but the actual poem is pretty meh. The community for the module on reddit had some good alternatives, with Shelley's The Cold Earth Slept Below being my favorite alternative. 

I also edited the original to be a consistent trochaic tetrameter catalectic, reproduced below, and someone else put this version of the Rime to music. 

Bow to She who bears the Crown

Shiver all in whispered Dread

Clad in winter’s whitest Gown

Snow enshrouds the blesséd Dead

Fury sheds but frozen Tears

Wolven howling issues Forth

Wind across the wasteland Shears

Breathing blizzards from the North

Ice-kist flowers caught in Bloom

Beauty kept in perfect Place

Summer swiftly locked, Entombed,

Stilling in Her cold Embrace

All the world in winter’s White

Gossamer of sleet and Ice

Set on never-ending Night

Calls unearthly Paradise

Spy her everlasting Rime

Grace in every sparrow’s Fall

Pray that you be trapped in Time

Fill her glacial palace Halls

Sovereign of summers Lost

General of winter’s War

Long live queen of cold and Frost

May She reign Forevermore

Addendum: Dreams

I mentioned in the first post that I cut out the trials from Grimskalle, both for pacing and just because I didn't like them. However, I took some of those elements and put them earlier in the game, specifically as prophetic dreams. After the players experienced cruelty, isolation, endurance, and preservation in some significant way, I'd give one of them a dream. I still have the texts written up, and they follow.

First set of dreams

You spend the night in Dougan’s Hole. The wind howls hatefully through the Stones of Thruun. Your dreams turn toward the cold, and in a moment, you are elsewhere.

You are the shaman of the Bear Tribe. The Bear King’s third wife has come to you for help with her morning sickness. You brew her the same concoction you brewed for the last two wives, to make her and her child waste away. Perhaps the King will recognize your love for him now and take you to wife. 

The snow beneath your feet vibrates, each crystal forming a note of a discordant voice. It says, “This is the virtue of **Cruelty**. Compassion makes you vulnerable. Let cruelty be the knife that keeps your enemies at bay.”

 

You are the shaman of the Elk tribe. The tribe trudges through a horrible blizzard. Your fingers have frozen, and with them your magic. You slaughter one of your sled dogs and warm your finger in its entrails. This is surely a punishment by the Frostmaiden. It cannot be undone. It can only be endured. 

The snow beneath your feet vibrates, each crystal forming a note of a discordant voice. It says, “This is the virtue of **Endurance**. Exist as long as you can, by whatever means you can. Only by enduring can you outlast your enemies.”

You are the Queen of the Tiger Tribe. You saw your husband impaled on a mammoth’s tusk, and did not save him. His child is born to you months later. You toss her into the Sea of Moving Ice as a sacrifice to Auril. With the Frostmaiden’s blessing, you will live forever, without need of any other.

The snow beneath your feet vibrates, each crystal forming a note of a discordant voice. It says, “This is the virtue of **Isolation**. In solitude you can understand and harness your full potential. Depending on others makes you weak.”

You are a hunter of the Wolf Tribe. You struggle to raise your yurt in the dark. It’s just a few of you left now. Everyone says the Wolf Tribe will not survive even another year of the endless winter. You shield your child from the cold. You will teach her the ways of the wolf tribe. She will teach it to her children. The Tribe will remain. It must.

The snow beneath your feet vibrates, each crystal forming a note of a discordant voice. It says, “This is the virtue of **Preservation**. Every flake of snow is unique, and that which is unique must be preserved.”

You wake in a sweat, the howling of the wind loud in your ears. You return to sleep to escape the cold.

I also write up a unique dream at this stage for ht fifth player in the group, who was playing a frost druid worshiper of Auril. The bit in bold is specific to my campaign, and you should replace it with details of your own. 

You stand amid an endless sea of snowy dunes under a black sky. You are not alone. You sit beside a cross-legged figure, cloven-footed, wolf-furred, with the head of an owl with curling horns. Her cloak is a frozen waterfall that moves like fabric. 

She looms over a miniature city, perfect in every detail. With inhuman care, she paints and polishes over every scratch and imperfection, places figures of scrimshaw and carved ice to her fancy. She mutters a rhyme to herself as her talons work with impossible precision.

*The cold earth slept below; Above the cold sky shone; And all around; With a chilling sound; From caves of ice and fields of snow; The breath of night like death did flow; Beneath the sinking moon.*

Over her shoulder, you spy some of the figures. A red-mawed hyena. A skull. A black dwarf. A white dragon. Four wizards, one already tossed aside. Another dragon, black and half-constructed from crystal. You, and the other Giantslayers. The prize of her collection, a slug with a vicious maw of teeth, preserved inside a glass bauble at the heart of the city.

Her tune stops as she notices you looking over her shoulder. He pushes a talon between your eyes and you fly back, fly up with impossible force. You hang above the world, standing still yet furiously accelerating.

No sun, no moon, no stars. Only the luminous shape of Toril. The coastlines you know only from maps are there before your eyes. All the land is white with snow, and all the seas gleam frozen. 

She catches you in her talon, now large enough to hold the world in her grasp. Her head rears back and a cry echoes forever.

EMPTY NIGHT!

This round of dreams came early in the campaign, around level 3 I think. The players got another set of dreams, these showing relevant characters who also embodied those ideals. 

You are the Cub*. Your parents gave you another name, but you no longer remember it. It has been ripped from your mind. You are the Cub. It is what they called you. The monsters that slew your parents and gave you up to the abominations from beyond the stars. They have you sedated, half-awake. Your scalp has been cut away, and they prod at your brain, tearing out the memories they don’t need. You are conscious, but unmoving as one of their machines plucks out your eye, nerves and all. Then they replace it with cold metal. You’ve never known something so cold, even in the Dale. Your body rejects the implant, and they take notes. There is one thought left, and it is what you focus on, every moment of every day. The faces of your abductors, and what they would look like strangled, purple and bloated, begging for your mercy.

The vision folds and refracts, as if seen through many layers of ice, and a discordant voice radiates from within you. “This one has passed the Test of Cruelty.”

You are Dzaan, Red Wizard of Thay. You recline in an upside-down laboratory, amid the wreckage of alchemical equipment and magic runes on the walls and ceiling. You bounce a ball of light against the wall idly. Eight hundred thousand and one. Eight hundred thousand and two. Or was it three? Your servant, the wight, stands in the door outside, glaring at you. Eight hundred thousand and four. Eight hundred thousand and five. Moment by moment, you’re putting together the pieces. It all makes sense. It’d be very impressive if you could ever tell anyone about it. Maybe someone will come by and rescue you? Unlikely. Eight hundred thousand and six. Eight hundred thousand and seven. 

The vision folds and refracts, as if seen through many layers of ice, and a discordant voice radiates from within you. “This one has passed the Test of Isolation.”

You are Roderick**. You rest fitfully, adjusting back to soft beds and a warm fire after four years of prison life. The mead in your blood dulls the adjustment. You don’t know what’s going to happen next. For all you know you may have been safer in prison. Will you leave the Dale? Can you? Is it really possible, as Stughok and his friends claim, to end it? You don’t know. Right now, it’s just a matter of staying alive. The vision folds and refracts, as if seen through many layers of ice, and a discordant voice radiates from within you. “This one has passed the Test of Preservation.”

You are a survivor of Dougan’s Hole. You shamble through the snow, surrounded by less than two dozen of your fellows. Good Mead rejected you, and so you pass on to Bryn Shander, where you all beg and cry outside their gates for hours before their mercy is roused and they allow you in. Now they force you to sign on to their lottery, to forfeit yourselves to blind chance. And after great protest, you do. It can only take one of you this moon. You wonder what mighty force could have brought the dragon’s destruction on your people. The vision folds and refracts, as if seen through many layers of ice, and a discordant voice radiates from within you. “This one has passed the Test of Endurance.”

*The Cub is the yeti cub from Kelvin's Cairn, which the party 'adopted' and held captive after killing its parents (evil party!), before eventually selling it to their squidling allies after the Id Ascendant was repaired and returned to the Far Realms. 

**Roderick is an NPC created from the rogue PC Stughok's custom secret I made, reproduced below. This dream occurred after the party rescued him from prison and put him in Bryn Shander. 

New Secret

Jailbreaker: A friend took the fall for a crime I committed. A bad one. They were sent to Revel’s End, a high-security prison in the Dale controlled by the Lords of Waterdeep. I’m getting them out if it's the last thing I do.

---

And that's about it! Most of the remix was written months ago, but the addenda came about in about a day (during which I really ought to be doing other things), and it was a blitz. All said, it's nice to have it posted. 

If this post interested you, comment below, share it around, and subscribe to the blog. Until next time, have an excellent week. 

Icewind Dale Remix Notes (Chapters 1-5)

Almost three years ago, I ran an online campaign of Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, WOTC's published campaign. I documented the first few sessions here, but didn't keep up with it (just like I haven't kept up with the documentation on any of my campaigns since Castle Xyntillan... sigh [EDIT: my AD&D campaign is being very well documented!]), though it ended well enough after a little under a year of play. 

Just now I got an itch to revisit it. While I've used published material before (the Ptolus sourcebook for 5e, Castle Xyntillan, various published adventures for Legend of the 5 Rings), that remains the only time I've run one of these big, campaign-spanning adventures. It also existed in this very productive space where it was good enough to care about and flawed enough to critique. 

So I've decided to go through and 'remix' it. I'm taking inspiration here from both Justin Alexander's Remixes, especially his treatment of Descent into Avernus (which also finished three years after the release of the original!) and Joseph Manola's Condensations of Paizo adventure paths. This is going to be somewhere in the middle between the two, offering both my opinions on the design of the adventure as well as modifying and condensing it, without being nearly so thorough or detailed as Alexander. 

Character Creation and Reaching Ten Towns

Icewind Dale starts out with character creation options: expansions on the standard backgrounds, the goliath PC race, and secrets. The latter is neat: every PC gets a secret from a list (possibly randomly assigned, possibly chosen from a selection). Now, some of these aren't really what I would call 'secrets' like the one that infects a character with slaad eggs, but a bunch of them are quite neat, add some campaign-specific flavor, and work to make the characters just a bit suspicious of each other. That last objective doesn't seem to stick around, as the rest of the campaign is not especially oriented toward intra-party intrigue, but it's a nice touch. It's a progression from the 'secret' mechanic in Descent into Avernus, published the previous year, in which the whole party is bound by a particular secret, and which by all accounts doesn't work very well. 

Kill it with fire!

Cold Open

After character creation, the game advises starting out with a two-paragraph narration about the state of the Dale, after which the PCs arrive in one of the towns and get either Cold-Hearted Killer, or Nature Spirits, or the local quest. The adventure punnily calls this the 'Cold Open.'

Punny, and wrong, and a waste, since an actual cold open would work quite well here.

Ten Towns Overview

The first section of the campaign is expected to take place in Ten Towns: a collection of settlements nestled among a few lakes in the middle of the Dale. Each town has its own quest, and there's a default assumption that the early campaign is going to involve traveling from town to town and picking up each quest until characters get to high-enough level that they can journey out into the far wilderness. 

The adventure nods toward the possibility of starting the campaign in any one of the towns, but this is, to put it delicately, less than fully supported. Several of the town quests, such as that for Easthaven, are probably TPKs for a first level party, assuming the mindset of 'fight everything and never run away.' More to the point, this sort of campaign makes the most sense if at least some of the player characters are foreign to the Dale, entering for the first time during the long winter. Following that, it also makes the most sense to simply start the campaign with characters entering the Dale, in which case it is natural for the first town they enter to be Bryn Shander, the gateway to Ten Towns and, apparently, the only town with a road leading to it from the outside. It also helps that Bryn Shander's quest is supposed to introduce the party to the blizzard mechanics and features a fight against a crew of goblins, as opposed to, say, a hag and giant skeletons. 

It wouldn't surprise me if at some point in development, Bryn Shander and its quest was the default introduction, but got folded in out of some desire to be more sandboxy. As much as I like sandboxes, and as much as it's a good thing that WOTC tried to move in that direction (we'll see how it broke down later), I think this was the wrong call: sandbox does not mean 'no guidance', nor does it mean 'lack of a strong introduction.'

What I did

I replaced the not-so-cold open from before with something of my own: the PCs (some locals returning to the Dale, some foreigners coming for the first time) journey into the benighted land. 

Two days ago, your wagon crested the Spine of the World. That was the last time you saw the sun. For just a few hours around noon, the sky turns to twilight. After that, there’s just the stars and the waxing crescent moon bearing down on you. 

Caravans in and out of the Dale are rare nowadays, and you ended up sharing the trip with a wizard and his bodyguard. He introduced himself as Dzaan, and his bodyguard as Vetala. Luckily, his magic has kept the covered wagon warm and cozy despite the deadly cold outside. 

With little to do on the trip through the mountains, he explained to the party how he was chasing rare elemental spirits called chwingas, and offered the party a deal. 25gp and a magical lantern in exchange for a live chwinga.

Dzaan is an NPC that shows up later, and I decided to give him some relevancy early on, both to consolidate a few questgivers into one, make it more impactful when the PCs find his clone, and give the Arcane Brotherhood a bit more presence and weight. 

Then the sled stops: there's another sled blocking the road, headed in the other direction: a pack of 4 wolves is gnawing on the bones of the driver and sled dogs. The party may fight off the wolves (as mine did) but they can just as easily scare them off with some fire, loud noises, and offering some rations. This is not supposed to just be a combat encounter, but one which sets expectations: Icewind Dale is characterized in large part by hunger. 

The driver is a man from Bryn Shander named Jericho, and he was killed with a spike through the heart, not by the wolves. His sled is too lightly supplied to be making a trip over the Spine, but there's nothing else for him to be doing headed in this direction. It looks like he was making a run for it. There are prints nearby, fresh in the snow, but they're quite far apart, as if the person making them could jump clear across thirty feet of snow and land soft as a feather. They lead straight to the gates of Bryn Shander, both ways.

As much as I whinge, gotta love the art

Intro Quests

The other wrong call here surrounds the wandering quests: there are two quests which the PCs can get right out of the gate which explicitly exist to encourage them to move from town to town, Cold-Hearted Killer and Nature Spirits. This is a good decision, and can help initiate players into a sandbox attitude; this was one of the much touted gimmicks of the campaign for a reason. 

Which makes it very difficult to understand why the campaign explicitly recommends using only one quest, not both. One is a lighthearted quest about searching for whimsical snow fairies, and the other is the search for a serial killer, so maybe this can be justified as a dial for GMs to set their campaign's tone, but it doesn't land for me: a lot of the campaign's best bits juxtapose the apocalyptic winterland with the absurd and whimsical. Every commentary on the campaign I've read has called this out, and recommended using both. This has benefits with juxtaposing two tones productively, and also makes sure the party has a reason to check out more towns. 

That said, there are some weaknesses here. In both cases, the introductions to the quests are pretty weak; both start with the party being approached by an NPC who hires them for the job. This makes some sense for Nature Spirits, but not for Cold-Hearted Killer. In the latter case, here's how it gets introduced:

Out of boredom and a sense of moral decency, Hlin has taken it upon herself to investigate the recent murders because no one else-not even the Council of Speakers-can be bothered. Hlin is studying the characters closely, trying to decide if they're worth her time. Ultimately, she takes the chance and draws them into conversation, asking them to help her take down her only suspect: a man named Sephek Kaltro.

Yawn-o-rama. 

There's a seed of something good here, in the subtext. An upright but desperate citizen who has failed to get the local authorities to move turns to the newcomers. It implies that Icewind Dale is a place where justice has fallen to pragmatism, possibly even one where the authorities conspire with the serial killer. But none of this is borne out by the quest as written. There's no sense that the fearful citizenry might try to stop the PCs from investigating, or that the authorities might apply any pressure. 

Instead there's just...apathy, 'no one else can be bothered.' The read aloud mentions how much gossip there is about the killings, but not mention of anyone else looking into it, measures people are taking to defend themselves. 

Not to mention that the boxed text sets up a faceless serial killer, but the questgiver comes out and correctly identifies him before the PCs have a chance to do any investigating (yes, the book says explicitly that this is a hunt, not a murder mystery: I still think it's the wrong call)! This is doubly silly because one of the major complaints about the campaign's first chapter is that Sephek is a tough combatant who stands a good chance of slaughtering a first or second level party, even alone and against freshly rested PCs. Laying out an investigation with each town providing, or having a chance to provide, some clue, going to the towns where the serial killer has struck and investigating there, asking after the friends and family of the victims, all of this would have the benefit of both building tension, engaging the players with an actual investigation, letting them think for themselves, and letting them level up a bit before facing him down. 

Nope. I know who the serial killer is, but somehow nobody else in this extremely paranoid and fearful tavern obsessed with the killings will believe me. Really? I would expect the townspeople to be organizing witch hunts and forming posses, not meekly sitting by. Tomfoolery. 

What I did

I used both, and also made modifications to each. The party met the serial killer, Sephek Kaltro, in Bryn Shander as soon as they got in: he thought the body they were carrying was a bounty, and offered to buy it off them and take it the rest of the way. I replaced Hlin with the sheriff of Bryn Shander, someone in a much more plausible position to offer a 100gp bounty on a serial killer. The party never took a proactive stance towards hunting the serial killer, so he showed up to bite them in the ass during the White Moose quest instead. Good times. 

In my version, Sephek could hop bodies, and Velynne Harpell helped them put him down permanently. In reality, she imprisoned the spirit and put it toher own ends. This didn't really come up again in my campaign, but it might come up in yours!

I also consolidated some NPCs: instead of getting the Nature Spirits quest from Dannika Graysteel, they get it from Dzaan. Instead of just being approached out of nowhere, he gives it to them on the sled coming in to the Dale. Also, I made it a bit more sinister: when delivered, the chwinga was upset by Dxaan, who put it to sleep in order to 'study' it. The PCs didn't like that one bit, and this cemented Dzaan in their minds. 

Ten Towns

After the starting quests, the various Ten Towns quests take up the rest of the first chapter. I'll go through the ones that have something of interest. 

Bryn Shander: Foaming Mugs

I wrote about this quest intro in Stop Writing Lazy Quest Intros, which just about tells you what I think of it. I'll recap briefly: if a bunch of pathologically trusting NPCs approach the party out of the blue and offer a bunch of money in an easily concealed form in exchange for a dangerous job, they're either doppelgangers or they can't complain when the PCs mug them. 

Also, this quest involves journeying out into the tundra to retrieve a shipment of iron ingots, but the reward is worth more than the ingots are. Now, that's not strictly bad, but you need to set up why that is: maybe iron is in short supply, and it's worth overpaying to get it back both so it can be turned into merchandise and actually make a profit, and/or because the reputation loss for losing the iron and the subsequent debt to the miners/smelters would be more damaging than losing gold. 

What I Did

In Bryn Shander, I moved the three questgiving dwarves to the House of the Morninglord, the temple/hospital, where they were recovering from injuries and frostbite after escaping the yeti. Since the party was bringing the body of Jericho here for proper rites, they encountered the dwarves quickly. It's more natural, and also builds up the environment as a threat. 

Bremen: Lake Monster

Pretend the fishing table doesn't exist and it's fine. I folded the questgiver Tali into Dzaan, who gave this to the PCs right after they gave him the chwinga.

Hey guys! Room for me in there?

Easthaven: Toil and Trouble

Another underwhelming quest hook I complained about before. The captain of the guard sidling up to the PCs while a wizard is getting burned at the stake and hiring them out of the blue will never stop being funny. My players never visited this town, but the quest looks serviceable and having one of these relate to the problems of food is good. 

Good Mead: The Mead Must Flow

The quest itself is fine, but the 'election' afterwards is bare-bones and pretty heavily railroaded. I addressed this in more detail here. 

Lonelywood: The White Moose

Good overall, the Elven Temple is a standout adventuring location among these early quests. The presence of the mummy, which my players freed but never really used, makes me wish 5e had proper henchman rules. 

Targos: Mountain Climb

I have to rant about this one. The premise of Mountain Climb is that a group of adventurers seeking a nigh-mythical werebear climbed the nearby mountain of Kelvin's Cairn with a guide, but got ambushed by yetis. So far so good. The guide is barely hanging on to life, and the only escapee is his dog, who goes to get help for its master. Okay, I'm interested, players tend to love loyal animals like that too. 

Now, put yourself in this dog's position. Your master is likely to die soon, and you need reliable help fast. Where do you go? Maybe down the mountain to the town of Caer Konig, which is the location of Frozenfar Expeditions, the company with which your master is contracted and from which the exploratory group set out? You know, the place which is nearby, inhabited, known, and which has people that will understand what has happened and have the expertise to mount a mountain rescue?

Or do you instead run across fifteen miles of dark, open tundra to get to the town of Targos, where your master's house and husband are, only to run to the first group of heavily armed strangers you come across and drag them to that house so that they can mount a rescue... maybe. 

Yeah, this hook just doesn't work if you have the map open. I moved this quest to Caer Konig and replaced it with an investigation into an underground Targos fightclub modeled on the WWE where the PCs were promised stardom by halfling Ron Jeremy and the druid developed a crush on the headliner, a goliath brawler named the Monolith, who beat him up. Good times. 

What I did

On Kelvin's Cairn, I added another room to the yeti cave, a control room for an ancient anti-spelljammer laser cannon hidden in the peak of the mountain. It has three shots left, can target anything above the horizon (like, say, a flying dragon), and can be controlled manually, though it still has functional targeting systems that strike at spelljammers that come in range. This comes up later. 

Chapter 2: Icewind Dale

After the party hits level 4 (which, given milestone leveling, is equivalent to doing five of the ten town quests), they are supposed to stop advancing by doing town quests (though they can still gain reputation) and should instead be turned toward the quests out in the wilderness of the dale. 

This division between the more-or-less civilized region around Ten Towns and the dangerous wilderness beyond is a good one, though the hard boundary here is less desirable. I'm informed that many parties chose to stick around and do all the town quests out of a sense of completionism. 

The big offender here is how these new wilderness quests are acquired. The book offers two options. The first is 'Tall Tales.'

By the time the characters reach 3rd level, they have garnered enough of a reputation that NPCs in Ten­ Towns will share tall tales with them. When the player characters are ready to explore more of Icewind Dale, use the Tall Tales in Ten-Towns table to entice them.

You can either choose which tales to share with the players, or you can ask each player to roll once on the ta­ble. Let the players decide which tales (if any) they want to investigate.

I recognize that the writers wanted to add some flavor to the hooks, but it doesn't work. First, all the information in these 'Tall Tales' is completely accurate. Second, the above level requirement ensures that the PCs won't hear about these quests/locations until they're almost ready to go out and do them. To the contrary, you'd want the PCs to hear about this stuff early, before they're ready, so they can look forward to it, so they can wonder, maybe get in over their heads a bit. 

The other option is for an NPC to hire them to go to each of these locations and either run an errand or kill everything there. Mind you, the setups for these are much better than the ones before: the PCs have built up some name recognition by this point, it makes sense for people to come to them with problems. Even better, some of these 'errands' make a good deal of sense: given that the wilderness is dangerous, getting the PCs to bring supplies to a remote location and check up on someone (Black Cabin) or supervise the delivery of valuable and scarce whale oil (Angajuk's Bell), actually fits. These aren't revolutionary hooks, but they don't have to be, they're just effective and make sense for the setting. 

The other notable aspect of the wilderness setting is a random encounter table: the gimmick here is that you roll both for encounter and blizzard, and the chance of a given encounter changes depending on whether there's a blizzard. It's a neat idea, one I may steal. 

So why, when I go onto forums discussing the adventure, do I find the prevailing opinion to be against the random encounter table?

There's a pat answer in here, something something 5e play culture, but I'd rather not descend into self parody. Frankly, I think it's just because the wilderness encounters are not very well integrated with the other mechanics. 

To be sure, there's a lot to like about it: at least a third of encounters aren't straightforward combat, and many others are unlikely to attack immediately; a few lean instead towards negotiation or other interactions, and a couple really deliver a nice moment at the table (mammoth-riding giants outlined against the rising moon? Hell yeah!). 

Hell yeah!

The issue is twofold. First, the encounters are pretty frequent. The adventure recommends rolling 1/day, with half of days having one encounter, a quarter having two, and the remaining quarter having none. That variance does get us some distance away from players blowing all their resources on the encounter because they know there will only be one (the Vaarsuvius Problem), but they still don't tend to have much of an impact on the journey. 

This is rooted in the short-term focus of 5e, with very little room for mid-long term resource management. So long as the players survive the 1 or 2 wilderness encounters, they'll get basically everything back with a long rest. There really isn't room for a wilderness expedition during which player resources experience attrition on a scale longer than a single day. As a result, these encounters don't successfully add time pressure to travel, nor do they incentivize the players to seek out shelter to recuperate, nor do they meaningfully limit how far and how long the players can journey away from civilization. They're speed bumps, and if you roll them as expected, you will have a lot of them: even leaving aside the shorter non-combat encounters, and assuming the DM ignores some of the weaker encounters which wouldn't meaningfully challenge the players, you'll still be playing through a lot of combats which will be forgotten the next in-game day. Maybe you've gotten your players to the point where combat moves fast in that system, but my campaign was online, and my players dithered. Moreover, I had a limited number of sessions in which to actually complete this campaign. I dropped the wilderness encounters after the first few times they showed up. 

All that said, the bulk of this chapter is a bunch of keyed locations, basically small, 5-15 room dungeons. I'll note down the ones about which I have something to say. 

Angajuk's Bell

Didn't get too much play in my campaign, but still one of my favorite locations. The presence of an awakened sperm whale that can guide the party across the Sea of Moving Ice is a great addition. If I were to run this again, I'd add more things to do in that area. 

Black Cabin

Another standout, frequently discussed on forums owing to the many near and complete TPKs that occur here. The implementation and metaphysics is a bit wonky, but worth remixing, which is an exercise left to the reader. 

Cackling Chasm

Didn't use it, straightforward hack and slash. Also the town quest leading here is far too twee for my tastes. 

Cave of the Berserkers

Never ran this. Out of all the wilderness locations, the only one that I read and think 'ugh, that would be a pain to run.' Doesn't help that the whole 'chardalyn' element of the campaign doesn't appeal to me at all. 

Dark Duchess

Standout: a wrecked merchant ship used as a secondary hoard by an ancient dragon. Likely to put the players face to face with something they absolutely can't take on in combat. 

Id Ascendant

One of my favorites, though I changed the exact setup: the illithids wound up becoming player allies after some misunderstandings. In my version, the Id Ascendant only appeared after the players got to the top of Kelvin's Cairn and accidentally activated the Ostorian anti-spelljammer laser cannon secreted inside the peak, in a secret passage beyond the yeti caves. The ship got shot down and the players had a very good reason to investigate. Good times. 

Jarlmoot

Boring as written, and an uninspiring hook (pro tip: getting an NPC to lure the players out to a remote location to murder them doesn't really work if the PCs have only just met this person). I modified it by putting a stoner frost giant sage there who served as a mid-campaign lore dump and smoked with the players. 

Karkolohk

Interesting by virtue of leaving room for negotiation and also being willing to throw a large number of weak enemies at the PCs. Solid overall, though the premise is just a bit too cute. 

Lost Spire

Has the potential to meaningfully change the direction of the campaign, but Dzaan needs to be set up ahead of time. 

Skytower Shelter and Wyrmdoom Crag

These should be great, but don't really come together for me. I think it's because the goliaths don't show up elsewhere, giving them a strong presence earlier in the campaign could make these stand out. I think it's also because the more lighthearted elements of these locations clash unproductively with the apocalyptic horror of much of the rest (unlike some other lighthearted elements of the campaign, which highlight the horror). 

My Changes

I worked up a list of 20 rumors cobbled together from the existing 'tall tales' table, obfuscated the hooks, added in some entries pointing at the Ten-Towns quests, plus a couple of red herrings, and let the party roll on that table from level 1. No reason to prevent the PCs from actually hearing rumors until they get to higher level: you want to build some anticipation, let them know about possible adventure out in the wilderness they aren't ready for. 

Chapter 3: Sunblight

I've mentioned before that Icewind Dale starts out as a sandbox, and then stops. This is the turning point. 

Sunblight is a multi-level dungeon with thirty-odd keyed rooms, the hidden fortress of a duergar warlord set on taking over the Dale. 

Duergar have showed up in the adventure before, spying on Ten Towns and causing trouble. Now they are revealed to be massing in force, on the cusp of wiping out the towns entirely, and they are constructing a superweapon: a robot dragon! The PCs must go and... take on a whole fortress by themselves? The adventure states that they might want to launch a preemptive strike before the weapon is ready, which would be quite reasonable, but it's already finished, and it gets unleashed right as the PCs arrive.

The book thinks this will be an 'agonizing decision' between storming the fortress (the whole point of 4-6 homidical maniacs assaulting a literal fortress was that they can make the difference by sabotaging a superweapon) and chasing down the dragon before it can destroy Ten Towns. It's the sort of thing that would probably work at the table, but players would start questioning this series of events at the fridge later. The in-world assumption represented by the initial hook (a party isn't enough to take on the fortress, but you can stop the superweapon) runs up against the mechanical assumptions, which is that a party in the 4+ level range is going to be entirely capable of fighting the fortress by going room-to-room. Also, given the transportation options available, there's really no way for the PCs to get back to the towns before the dragon has torched a few of them, and assaulting the fortress just doesn't take that long in this system of 6-second combat rounds. 

There are a few other problems here, like the overly-cute plot about which dark god exactly is pulling the strings here and the rather unsatisfying inclusion of a faction within the duergar that... don't really do too much... but Justin Alexander has the details on those, and I don't want to just repeat his points. 

My Changes

I foreshadowed the duergar plot more, and reworked Sunblight's plot. In my continuity, the duergar king realized that this group of 4-6 nutcases were the single biggest obstacle in the way of his plans, and they could probably take down the dragon once it attacked the town they were in. So he sends some disposable agents to leak information about the dragon (they think it's still under development, but it's actually been complete for a while), thus luring the PCs, along with a large part of the overall Ten-Towns militia, out into the wilderness. The dragon gets released then, so that it can torch the towns while they are most vulnerable, and the majority of the fortress' people are already out near Ten-Towns, lying in wait for the dragon's arrival. I played Xardorok Sunblight basically as a Bond villain who waited for the players to arrive in his chamber to unleash the dragon, gloat, and reveal the dozen crossbowmen waiting in ambush. Good times. 

Jim, what's the CR on that thing?

Chapter 4: Destruction's Light

This chapter also features one of the more confusing elements of the campaign, which has earned a lot of criticism. 

As the PCs are leaving Sunblight (either because they decided to chase the dragon or because they're done with the fortress), they're approached by Velynne, a wizard on a dogsled who offers them a list back to Ten Towns to deal with the dragon. 

The catch is that the sled dogs are undead, and the wizard is accompanied by kobold corpses as well. She's a necromancer. 

As written, this is a jarring introduction to an NPC whom many players will want to kill on sight, doubly so when they find out she's a member of the Arcane Brotherhood, the faction of wizards who have been repeatedly set up as treacherous antagonists. Even worse, this NPC is plot critical and basically exists to hold the PCs' hands now that the campaign has turned into a railroad. 

I already added Velynne into the campaign earlier (in my campaign she warned the PCs about Dzaan's treachery and helped them deal with Sephek), so this problem is nullified. 

As written, this chapter kills at least a sizable portion of the Dale's remaining population and torches at least a couple towns, even if the players are otherwise maximally efficient. I have no problem with that, but this needs to be set up tonally beforehand. This ought to feel like the sort of place that's on the brink of destruction before the dragon shows up. 

Chapter 5: Auril's Abode

We come now to perhaps my least favorite part of the campaign. 

The Island of Solstice is a huge, snowflake-shaped iceberg floating in the sea, in the center of which is an ancient giant fortress shaped like a huge skull, named Grimskalle. Love it, sign me up to adventure there any day!

But, why is the party actually coming here?

Well, because the railroad says so. 

In-game, it's because Velynne wants to enter Ythryn, the ancient floating city which fell to ground and was covered by the glacier. She knows where is it, but needs a special spell to break open the glacier at the right spot, and needs a sentient magic item that contains information about the city. Both of these are on the Island of Solstice: the spell is in a book called the Codicil of White made by Auril's worshipers, and the item, called Professor Skant, was stolen by another wizard who made her way to the island and died there. How Velynne knows this is unclear, but it doesn't matter for our purposes. 

What's more relevant is that Auril lives in Grimskalle, physically, and will be there unless the party sneaks in while she's away casting her spell to shroud the Dale in night. The players can end the Rime here by killing Auril (very difficult) or by killing her pet roc, without whom she cannot fly into the air to perform the nightly ritual that maintains the endless night. Please note that we are two large dungeoncrawls away from the end of the campaign. 

Unless she has left the fortress to cast her nightly spell over Icewind Dale, the Frostmaiden lurks here in her first form, living in fear that her divine enemies will find and destroy her. She normally occupies the room to the west but lurches toward the larger room to greet the characters as they arrive. The characters have no chance of surprising her.

I actually forgot about this bit. I replaced this with my own headcanon so early in the campaign planning that I didn't realize it wasn't the canon approach, much to my surprise when I was rereading the book for this post. 

This is all very, very silly, but it gets sillier.

Recall, the PCs aren't here specifically to kill Auril, but to recover some items. The professor orb is next to the other wizard's frozen corpse in a random spot on the opposite side of the island. Not impossible to find, but a bit dubious. The Codicil of White is in the basement, behind the world's silliest security system. To get into the chamber of the Codicil, the PCs must pass various tests representing the ideals of the Frostmaiden: Cruelty, Endurance, Isolation, and Preservation. This is a neat idea. 

Here's how it works in practice. There are four doors in the basement. You can go through each one, and you get teleported to a nomad tribe on the glacier which is presently experiencing a crisis related to one of the ideals. A couple are short (one is just a fight against a werewolf), while the others take a day and a week respectively. This is, apparently, actually happening in that moment, contrived as it is, and the adventure doesn't address how this is happening or how it is possible for multiple PCs to take the test asynchronously, as the book explicitly states can be done. The scenarios themselves are equally contrived, and if there aren't enough PCs who have passed enough tests, some NPCs come by to try to take it, opening the door in the process. Making all of this irrelevant. Now that's what I call a fragile scenario!

This section demonstrates that the campaign doesn't have a solid through line. Based on all the marketing, you'd expect the major conflict here to be the Rime. It's a situation which threatens everyone and makes the whole area almost unlivable but doesn't just kill everything immediately. 

But then the duergar show up, and they have no special connection to Auril besides opportunism, wanting to take over the now-dark surface. Then a dragon destroys between a little and a lot of Ten Towns, and you'd expect there to be some focus on repairing the communities or helping them survive, but no. In the last stretch it becomes a treasure hunt without any special connection to the Rime. 

This would be fine if RotF stuck to a sandbox structure past Chapter 2 and treated the Dale as a big situation that the party can't defeat with combat (until they realize that killing Auril ends it, but that ought to be really difficult). That situation can give rise to other symptoms, like a duergar invasion. Sandbox elements like allying with the goliaths and nomads can be pursued proactively to present a united front against these threats, and treasure hunts like the search for Ythryn can be attempts at finding solutions, or finding magical power to more effectively combat these problems. 

But since the campaign drops the sandbox structure after a while, that stuff is located in new school time rather than old school space, and the PCs are shuttled from one to the other without an obvious purpose. 

My Changes

In my campaign, I just removed the Frostmaiden from this location (her presence here no longer made sense in my continuity) and replaced the 'tests' with tests of my own. The players received dreams about the various ideals much earlier on in the campaign, and I tracked particular acts of cruelty, isolation, endurance and preservation they committed across the prior sessions. They had at least one person who had done each by the time they got to Grimskalle and made their way in without difficulty. 

If I were doing a more thorough remix, this is a section I would change up in the following way:

This is only Auril's Abode metaphorically. She doesn't physically live here. Rather, this is her temple, the headquarters of her frost druid worshipers, where she sometimes makes (or made) appearances to her most devoted followers. Most of the rooms can stay. The tests are more like my version than that in the book, ritual initiations which allowed worshipers to enter the inner circle of the cult. Each requires only that a person has committed some major act of cruelty, preservation, endurance or isolation, such that players who have done these things earlier in the campaign can come together to enter the secret chamber of the Codicil, which is not 'a primer on her worship' but a record of the revelations granted to the high priests of past generations. 

"This is where the plot goes."

Next up

The next post will cover chapters 6-7 and discuss the all-important question at the heart of the campaign: what does Auril want?

If this post interested you, comment below, share it around, and subscribe to the blog. Until next time, have an excellent week.