D&D 5E Is Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden the New D&D Adventure?

It looks likely that the upcoming D&D adventure is indeed an Icewind Dale based storyline called Rime of the Frostmaiden! I can't vouch for the veracity of this, but I was cc'd into a Tweet by Navy DM on Twitter who says they found it on Reddit.

Feel the cold touch of death in this adventure for the world's greatest role playing game.

UPDATE -- the awesome Geek Native ran the small cover screenshot through an image enhancing application, to create the larger image below.

There's a post here on Reddit which says "The DnD Beyond YouTube channel posted a trailer for a new book, Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, then immediately deleted it." The post has been removed since. I found the above image posted by somebody called smightmight, who looks like they screen grabbed it from the video before it was removed.

The Frostmaiden is one of the names of Auril, an evil goddess in the Forgotten Realms. You can read more about her on the Forgotten Realms wiki.

Rime is ice which forms from water droplets on surfaces.

An Icewind Dale setting was the current favourite guess for the location of the new D&D adventure based on various hints from WotC, including this snowy owlbear t-shirt!

(thanks to Pixellance for pointing me at this!)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Even so, it definitely seems to be the replacement for community driven material that used to end up in the magazines.

That's how I view it. Lord knows there were plenty of times a given copy of Dragon or Dungeon had nothing I would use in it. Paying a few bucks for a robust guide to Thieves Cant and symbols or on how to run a good barroom brawl is the equivalent of me paying for an issue (or part of an issue, since some of these are very inexpensive) for specific content that I know I want.

And while the Adept stuff is very shiny, I don't think people should shy away from the other content, or the stuff on DriveThruRPG, which doesn't have WotC's semi-official pixie dust sprinkled on it. Both designations have a lot of great material at (normally) very reasonable prices.

 

[Reynard]

And perhaps the best way such products reach higher editorial standards is for said editors to step onto the field and make their DMs Guild product.

Editing and writing/design are NOT the same skills. Some people are able to do both, but it is rare, and even when someone can do both they usually can't edit their own work. I have done a fair bit of writing for the game industry and working without an editor and preferably developer is a huge pain.

Or barring that, offer their editorial services for a piece of the royalties on a DMs Guild product. One of the going rates is 20% of the 50% creatives get from Guild PDF.

I don't know what the going rate would be but I will say you generally do not get good work by offering royalties on unproven product. People that are good at what they do want to get paid for doing it, and deserve to get paid for doing it. I HATE writing an assignment only to never see it published. It's twice as bad if I agreed to do it for royalties and now not only does it not see the light of day, I don't get paid.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Editing and writing/design are NOT the same skills. Some people are able to do both, but it is rare, and even when someone can do both they usually can't edit their own work. I have done a fair bit of writing for the game industry and working without an editor and preferably developer is a huge pain.



I don't know what the going rate would be but I will say you generally do not get good work by offering royalties on unproven product. People that are good at what they do want to get paid for doing it, and deserve to get paid for doing it. I HATE writing an assignment only to never see it published. It's twice as bad if I agreed to do it for royalties and now not only does it not see the light of day, I don't get paid.

(Sidebar - what does the developer do? I feel like I should know this, but am not exactly sure in this context. Are they the person who actually writes rules stuff?)

 

[pukunui]

I've purchased (or downloaded for free thanks to the D&D remote play freebies) some Guild Adept stuff. I've also got the DDAL adventures through season 7 and have run most of Season 1 plus a few from various other seasons. I also own all of the hardcover adventures and have run quite a few of them.

In terms of quality, I would rate the hardcovers at the top, the Guild Adept stuff next, and run-of-the-mill DMs Guild stuff at various points below that.

However, I would like to point out that not even the hardcovers get it right all the time. Take the fact that FR has "tendays" instead of weeks. I've found plenty of references to weeks in the hardcovers. Despite there being an FR Style Guide for DMs Guild publishers, I still find even the Guild Adepts forget about tendays and refer to weeks instead. (I'm picking on weeks vs tendays because it's a detail that's easy for me to remember.)

That said, one of my biggest beefs with the Guild Adepts program is the idea that it's intended to be semi-official DLC to fill in the gaps of the hardcovers. I'm not a big fan of that.

Also, while the DMs Guild Adepts might get their stuff reviewed by WotC, it must only be a cursory review, because I've noticed plenty of inconsistencies between the hardcovers and the Guild Adept content that's meant to support them. Sometimes the entire premise of a DMs Guild product flies in the face of the hardcover's premise.

On top of that, we've now got Guild Adepts writing the main adventures. From what I've seen, Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus reads and plays like it was designed by a committee, because it was! It had like 16 different people working on the content IIRC, and many of them were popular DMs Guild content creators / Guild Adepts.

 

[Parmandur]

Editing and writing/design are NOT the same skills. Some people are able to do both, but it is rare, and even when someone can do both they usually can't edit their own work. I have done a fair bit of writing for the game industry and working without an editor and preferably developer is a huge pain.



I don't know what the going rate would be but I will say you generally do not get good work by offering royalties on unproven product. People that are good at what they do want to get paid for doing it, and deserve to get paid for doing it. I HATE writing an assignment only to never see it published. It's twice as bad if I agreed to do it for royalties and now not only does it not see the light of day, I don't get paid.

If you look at the full preview for any given Adepts product (say the Lost City of Mezro), there are usually designers and editors and layout people involved in any given product.

 

[Parmandur]

If the term is misused elsewhere, that does not impact the definition of it from the creators of it as cited.

It is hardly aypival in historical terms for a geographic descriptor to change over time: Europe, for instance, originally meant the southern Balkans, but most people talking about Europe now have a different idea of what that term encompass than bronze age Greeks would have meant.

The Sword Coast Adventurers Guide is a more authoritative source than a fan wiki, even a well documented ran wiki.

 

[Reynard]

(Sidebar - what does the developer do? I feel like I should know this, but am not exactly sure in this context. Are they the person who actually writes rules stuff?)

In my experience working for White Wolf/S&S Studios back in the day and more recently some minor work for Paizo, a developer is the guiding editor of the project or line. They are responsible for consistency as well as quality and establish the style and direction of the line or product. They are part editor, part designer, part writer, part comptroller and part babysitter.

 

[Parmandur]

In my experience working for White Wolf/S&S Studios back in the day and more recently some minor work for Paizo, a developer is the guiding editor of the project or line. They are responsible for consistency as well as quality and establish the style and direction of the line or product. They are part editor, part designer, part writer, part comptroller and part babysitter.

My less professional impression of what it means at WotC based on their discussions of roles for a product is that the "Designer" does most of the writing and is sort of the "architect" for the "Crunch," while the Developer is like the "structural engineer" for the Crunch to make it work properly.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I know where my money's going!

 

[Reynard]

My less professional impression of what it means at WotC based on their discussions of roles for a product is that the "Designer" does most of the writing and is sort of the "architect" for the "Crunch," while the Developer is like the "structural engineer" for the Crunch to make it work properly.

I am sure every company has their own variation, driven no doubt on resources (human, budgetary and otherwise). I like the direction provided by a developer and thrive on outlines and deadlines. Most of my recent work has been more "self developed" and that can be fun to explore ideas someone else might otherwise not assign you, but for me it comes at a cost in productivity.