Recent content by lluewhyn

Ok, so I went back and read the section on page 21 and you're right, it's left somewhat ambiguous, so it's my interpretation of the text that the Speakers came up with it on their own since nowhere else does it specify minions of Auril have told them to do this. I could swear I read somewhere in...

I'm not certain we're disagreeing? When I said a "good portion of the adventure", I meant a majority of the adventure, not that that part was "good".

If the PCs talk to the people in charge, they find out that no one told them to do this, they just decided to start murdering their own townsfolk on a hunch, and despite absolutely no beneficial change in weather they're still murdering their own people 12 months later. The PCs are not going to...

That's why I decided to go with 2 months, because 2 years means everything is dead or left. I don't care how isolationist these people are, no one is sticking around in these kinds of weather conditions without even getting into the sacrifice issues. Not that it matters for the PCs since they...

Your choices and luck will determine whether you "Fail, or fail harder". That was a good portion of the adventure for me in a nutshell.

The other issue for me is that having the PCs walk into this has a huge likelihood of alienating them from wanting to help the townsfolk. The PCs are supposed to be heroes, but here they're immediately put in the path of not wanting to help people who are so willing to screw themselves over...

I think there are also a couple of definitions of railroad to use here, and only Chapter 2 doesn't qualify. Chapter 1 is a light kind of railroad, where there's a specific sequence of events that has to occur in order, and although there's nothing really stopping the PCs from trying alternate...

I hate, hate, hated running Dragon Heist and severely cut it short. Icewind Dale has some major problems, but for the most party they're easily fixable ones. Change a couple of story elements, ignore the quests you have the most issues with, and use the quests/encounters you like pretty much as...

I think there are just times when the writer (Chris Perkins?) just gets all hyped up about doing some ultra-dramatic thing with consequences for the PCs (oftentimes with railroading) that they're more concerned with pulling off the edgy moment that good storytelling drops by the wayside...

That would make logical sense and is basically how I'm intending to run it, but I think that answer is technically wrong as far as how it's written since the adventure really tries to sell it as you can do Option A OR Option B, because the "PCs have to see that their choices have consequences"...

I feel your pain on this. Virtually every module I've read by WotC tends to have poor writing in one way or another which requires the DM to have to put in extra work. Oddly enough, Lost Mines of Phandelver, the very first module released for 5E, is the best written one where a DM can pretty...

Most of my first session was done in a loose role-play that leads up to "How did you find yourselves up in Icewind Dale?". Interestingly, the Orc Fighter and Elven Ranger had suggested they met up fighting an undead in the south in the previous Session Zero, so we role-played that battle through...

I didn't know where the prison was from, but me reading through that section got a strong "Nope, not going to include this one when I run the adventure." It has almost nothing to do with anything, and actually undercuts the rest of the adventure because despite the rest of the towns being at the...

Sorry to hear that your campaign went so poorly. I think having the start of a near-TPK probably put a damper on things that made it hard to recover from. I've ran three sessions so far, and the PCs are having a blast. However, it's because I read a number of reviews, scrolled through the...

I wish I had read some of this background before running the module. The big issue is that there's not enough of a foreword explaining the out of game purpose of the dungeon, essentially being that it's meant for competitive play and you get scored for how well you do. I ran my players through...