D&D 5E A brief rant about Rime of the Frost Maiden, farming, logistics, and ecology

[TheSword]

But aren't they all followers of Auril?

I’d imagine a fair few townsfolk would turn to Auril... either in secret or openly...

... almost as if that was her point?

 

[Bedrockgames]

Just a preface to the following essay/screed/rant: I really like the adventure and I'm planning on running it and looking forward to a good time! But there is this one glaring thing...

Something that annoys me about the adventure is how blase people are about the situation. "Just another gruesome day in Icewind Dale" says the opening "read this to the players". No it's not! "The tavern is abuzz with talk of"... How can the taverns be abuzz? And how can it be on any topic other than "How are we going to survive the next week". The rest of the adventure reads like this is just a normal, if severe, winter, rather than the apocalypse ( and it IS the apocalypse, albeit a very local one). The locals seem to have an attitude of "Oho! Cold enough for you? Ah you weak southerner". But buddy, you're not surviving this either. I can see how the villages with pop of 100-200 might survive by hunting or ice fishing, but even then: After a year of winter, there should be no more fish: Not because the humans have eaten them all, but because the fish themselves have no food. Hunting and ice fishing is how they weather a normal winter.

I was listening to the Dragon Talk podcast and the question of how the bees of Goodmead have survived. This was answered by saying they live in the mead house which is kept heated. And I can see this is how the bees survive a normal winter, but what are they eating? There are no flowers and have not been for 2 years, and yet the bees are not only surviving, they are still producing enough honey to make enough mead to supply the entire region.

Even assuming the people of 10 towns are getting food shipped in ( And they're not, more of that later ) or have magical means of food production ( cauldrons of plenty, create food and water, goodberry, which requires a level of casual magic 10 town's doesn't have and I'm not willing to give it ), we're looking at total ecological collapse last year. No more reindeer, fish, moose, crag cats, yetis, gnolls, etc etc.

Ice fishing isn't supplying a big town like Bryn Shander. Bryn Shander suffers, like most D&D / Fantasy cities and towns, of being a town in the middle of wilderness, when it should be surrounded by farms ( A town of 1,200 will need an agricultural hinterland of 12,000 or so ). To supply it with food in exchange for the raw materials and goods it produces: Would require 1 cart load of food per person per year, but this food is also feeding the dwarves, and a good chunk of the larger towns like Easthaven. So that's about 4 thousand cart loads. Another problem is that you can't ship that food up until it's harvested, and it's harvested in September or thereabouts: So by the time you get that food up to the pass through the Spine of the World, the pass could well be closed by snow. I was entertaining the notion of using Hundlestone as a sort of depot, the carts from Luskan move the grain to there, and then teams of dog sleds from Bryn Shander move it in relays through the pass ( and what are the dogs eating? What are the axebeaks eating? etc etc ).This BTW is Icewind Dale AS NORMAL, not during the current crisis. I would probably have moved Bryn Shander to the coast, and had supplies come in by sea, which is so much less effort than by caravan over a mountain pass. Bryn Shander seems to be influenced by boom towns like in the Klondike gold rush ( but it's in a steady state, it's been here centuries, not here for 2-3 years and then gone again ). In the Klondike, almost everything was shipped by boat, and when it had to be done overland ( like over the white pass ) this was just a section separating river, lake, or sea routes.

My solution

OK so I'm going to base MY icewind dale on the Norse settlements in Greenland, including it's climate. These had agriculture, and that wasn't just because it might have been warmer then: Farming is done in greenland today. In particular sheep and goats will do a lot better than the cows the Norse used ( musk ox live there year round, even on the northern coast! I'm thinking if you can domesticate an axe beak, you can domesticate a musk ox) Food shipments can still be a thing, but they're shipping in supplemental material, trade goods not staples, like spices, wine, dried fruits etc. Some grain and spuds ( and rhubarb, from articles on Alaskan agriculture I'm reading ) can be grown locally, and in particular meadows mown for hay or silage to feed animals during the winter ( wild musk ox would roam in search of winter forage, domestic ones would be fed by hay / silage over the winter ).

The other change I will make for my own sanity is remove "It's been winter for 2 years" and slot in "All this started on the Winter Solstice, and it's now 2 or 3 or 4 months later and the days have not been getting any longer" and there is real worry about how folks are going to survive with no spring on the way. AFAICT there is still contact with the outside world, so someone is going to break the news that the days are getting longer around Luskan etc, so there will be talk and perhaps preparations made to leave, at least some people are. And maybe there is a lot of friction between "I'm staying the course" and "I'm heading south" folks, but that's all the more drama. The community is facing mass famine, that's the sort of thing that produces refugees. Having it be 2 years of winter means all the yetis, crag cats, polar bears, etc etc etc, all went extinct last year. This time line means that if the PCs are successful, they can save the community and ecology, rather than a pyrhic victory 2 years too late.

These are elements I'm going to add to my own game, again if nothing else for my own sanity and to have an answer to my players who WILL bring up these questions.

Lol. You've gone full Fernand Braudel on this module. You should pay HARN instead

I haven't played or read this module, but my expectations with a setting like Forgotten Realms is that these kinds of gritty real world agricultural and economic issues will generally be hand waved. If two players in your group are going to take issue, it is probably worth fixing.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Lol. You've gone full Fernand Braudel on this module. You should pay HARN instead

I haven't played or read this module, but my expectations with a setting like Forgotten Realms is that these kinds of gritty real world agricultural and economic issues will generally be hand waved. If two players in your group are going to take issue, it is probably worth fixing.

I agree that you have to accept that the writers of FR are at operating at a very low level, but when you make a feature (the winter described) a central factor of an adventure, you can't just 'hand wave' it away. That's just not acceptable, even by the low FR standards.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I wonder if the argument here is dependant on two different ways to see these adventure books.

Some people are reading the books as-is and concluding that the story they recite makes no sense and is not logical and at the end of the day faulty and stupid. It appears as though they are treating this book as its own contained story in of itself.

Other people see what is written in all these books and are finding all manner of reasons why the things written either don't matter, are easily worked around, will influence what occurs but not necessarily be played out as-is, or can be completely ignored. If I had to guess... I would say that these people might believe the story isn't actually what is in the book, but is what actually ends up occuring at the table.

Those are two very different ways of looking at the book and this game.

If the only story that matters is what actually occurs while playing the adventure... then the DM has full capability of giving out "truth". Thus anything in the book that is never actually mentioned to the players... is never commented on... is never placed down as part of the fiction the entire table is building... then any of the "issues" with the story in the book itself do not actually exist. If it isn't mentioned or doesn't happen, it's not true.

This conundrum is something that has been argued about for literally years. Is something true in this game because the rules allow it to potentially be true... or is only true if it actually occurs? Case in point... the idea that Rogues make for the best Arcanists. They have the potential to take Expertise in Arcana and have a 20 INT at Level 20... and thus they will always potentially be better at Arcana than Wizards (which runs counter to how people think the game should be.) The only issue is... if you never once SEE a 20th Level Rogue player actually take Expertise in Arcana and max out INT and is in a party next to a Wizard character with proficiency in Arcana and also 20 INT (thus having the two standing next to each other with the Rogue demonstrably better at Arcana)... then does the potential actually matter? Does it matter that the book could allow a Rogue like this to exist... even if none ever actually do? And thus is it worth getting up in arms about it?

If the problems with farming and husbandry and two years of winter never actually come up in the game as run by a specific DM... do those problems actually exist just because someone wrote them down in the book? Some will say 'yes, absolutely', others will say 'no, of course not'. Because every DM is different. And that's why the authors of all these adventures do not seem to worry about these potential logical inconsistencies... they care more about making compelling scenarios and potential narratives. Because they know full well that every DM who runs this game is going to take what they like, toss out the rest, and not a single story that comes out of it will be the same. So they don't need to present an airtight written narrative package, because that's not what this book is for. It's not meant to be a story read unto itself, it's merely a depository of ideas that every DM can draw from to create their own story at the table.

 

[Jd Smith1]

I wonder if the argument here is dependant on two different ways to see these adventure books.

Some people are reading the books as-is and concluding that the story they recite makes no sense and is not logical and at the end of the day faulty and stupid. It appears as though they are treating this book as its own contained story in of itself.

Other people see what is written in all these books and are finding all manner of reasons why the things written either don't matter, are easily worked around, will influence what occurs but not necessarily be played out as-is, or can be completely ignored. If I had to guess... I would say that these people might believe the story isn't actually what is in the book, but is what actually ends up occuring at the table.

Those are two very different ways of looking at the book and this game.

If the only story that matters is what actually occurs while playing the adventure... then the DM has full capability of giving out "truth". Thus anything in the book that is never actually mentioned to the players... is never commented on... is never placed down as part of the fiction the entire table is building... then any of the "issues" with the story in the book itself do not actually exist. If it isn't mentioned or doesn't happen, it's not true.

This conundrum is something that has been argued about for literally years. Is something true in this game because the rules allow it to potentially be true... or is only true if it actually occurs? Case in point... the idea that Rogues make for the best Arcanists. They have the potential to take Expertise in Arcana and have a 20 INT at Level 20... and thus they will always potentially be better at Arcana than Wizards (which runs counter to how people think the game should be.) The only issue is... if you never once SEE a 20th Level Rogue player actually take Expertise in Arcana and max out INT and is in a party next to a Wizard character with proficiency in Arcana and also 20 INT (thus having the two standing next to each other with the Rogue demonstrably better at Arcana)... then does the potential actually matter?

If the problems with farming and husbandry and two years of winter never actually come up in the game as run by a specific DM... do those problems actually exist just because someone wrote them down in the book? Some will say 'yes, absolutely', others will say 'no, of course not'. Because every DM is different. And that's why the authors of all these adventures do not seem to worry about these potential logical inconsistencies... they care more about making compelling scenarios and potential narratives. Knowing full well that every DM who runs this game is going to take what they like, toss out the rest, and not a single story that comes out of it will be the same.

Well-written, but you've skipped over a very important issue: the fact that most GMs will have shelled out $30, only to get a product whose writers couldn't be bothered to fact-check at all. If I shell out $30, I would expect that my work would be minimal to field the scenario.

THe entire point of commercial scenarios is time for money: the GM spends a little cash so he can field a scenario with only a little prep work. If you have to pay and still log in time to make things work, just cut out the middle man.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Well-written, but you've skipped over a very important issue: the fact that most GMs will have shelled out $30, only to get a product whose writers couldn't be bothered to fact-check at all. If I shell out $30, I would expect that my work would be minimal to field the scenario.

THe entire point of commercial scenarios is time for money: the GM spends a little cash so he can field a scenario with only a little prep work. If you have to pay and still log in time to make things work, just cut out the middle man.

Caveat Emptor.

If you need a product to be airtight and require no work on your part to run it... you probably should read it or check the reviews or do whatever you need to before buying it. If that actually matters of course.

Cause what I expect happens is that people come into places like this and complain that they shouldn't have to make changes and edits to these books cause they spent their money on it... but at the end of the day will run the adventure anyway. So I get it. It's annoying and people want to just bitch... but WotC knows as well as we do that if you still buy the product and run the product even if it isn't exactly what you wanted the product to be, then they succeeded in what they were trying to accomplish with its production. If everyone begrudgingly buys it and runs it... was what WotC made actually a failure? I think they'll take what they can get.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I agree that you have to accept that the writers of FR are at operating at a very low level, but when you make a feature (the winter described) a central factor of an adventure, you can't just 'hand wave' it away. That's just not acceptable, even by the low FR standards.

I see it more as FR existing in a cinematic reality rather than a gritty historical one. If it were a HARN adventure, this sort of detail would seem off to me. But in FR, it would just seem like the kind of logic you might encounter in an old movie set in historical period (where the weather is mostly about atmosphere, and there is anachronistic projection onto the period). FR just never seemed informed by real world history to me.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Caveat Emptor.

If you need a product to be airtight and require no work on your part to run it... you probably should read it or check the reviews or do whatever you need to before buying it. If that actually matters of course.

Cause what I expect happens is that people come into places like this and complain that they shouldn't have to make changes and edits to these books cause they spent their money on it... but at the end of the day will run the adventure anyway. So I get it. It's annoying and people want to just bitch... but WotC knows as well as we do that if you still buy the product and run the product even if it isn't exactly what you wanted the product to be, then they succeeded in what they were trying to accomplish with its production. If everyone begrudgingly buys it and runs it... was what WotC made actually a failure? I think they'll take what they can get.

I don't buy WOTC products, for exactly the reason noted here. But that doesn't stop me from bad-mouthing them.

I rarely buy RPG products at all. I just read the reviews of likely ones, which inevitably reveal the salient plot, and go from there. If you want things done right, as you know...

 

[Jd Smith1]

I see it more as FR existing in a cinematic reality rather than a gritty historical one. If it were a HARN adventure, this sort of detail would seem off to me. But in FR, it would just seem like the kind of logic you might encounter in an old movie set in historical period (where the weather is mostly about atmosphere, and there is anachronistic projection onto the period). FR just never seemed informed by real world history to me.

For $30 you should expect more than a low-budget B movie plot.Particularly on things such as in this case which are so easily checked. We're not talking space travel, after all.

WOTC seems to think that art and their name is all that is required.

 

[Bedrockgames]

For $30 you should expect more than a low-budget B movie plot.Particularly on things such as in this case which are so easily checked. We're not talking space travel, after all.

WOTC seems to think that art and their name is all that is required.

If that isn't what you want from 30 bucks in an RPG, that is totally fair. But I am not saying it is B movie. I am saying it is cinematic in the sense of films that loosely draw on history but don't heed details like the ones pointed out as important (and gloss over them to focus on other things like atmosphere, etc). Now, I am not saying it couldn't also be interesting to take more of a realistic and gritty approach (my initial comment about going full Braudel was intended as a compliment as I love books like The Wheels of Commerce (also why I mentioned HARN). I don't see that as WOTC's forte though. I think there is a spectrum of material here. I don't really play WOTC D&D anymore, so for me this is a distant concern. But when I did still run WOTC back in the 3E days, my experience as a GM was most players and groups weren't really concerned with these kinds of historically based details or with this kind of fact checking in a module. I am assuming it is written for that type of player and group.