MarkB
Legend
I've previously run Rime of the Frostmaiden and had a good time with it, but there are some justified criticisms regarding its premise (please let's not get bogged down in them, though).
So I was thinking of taking a different approach to Auril's curse on the land. Rather than her holding back the sun and plunging the land into two years of darkness, she has conspired with dark powers to draw the entire region into a Domain of Dread, where it can be preserved in eternal winter.
Advantages of this approach:
So I was thinking of taking a different approach to Auril's curse on the land. Rather than her holding back the sun and plunging the land into two years of darkness, she has conspired with dark powers to draw the entire region into a Domain of Dread, where it can be preserved in eternal winter.
Advantages of this approach:
- It doesn't have to be dark all the time, the Domain can enforce its eternal winteriness.
- The timeframe since it's happened can be shorter, even if it only just occurred it's going to be an urgent problem that the region is cut off from the rest of Faerun.
- This can help with the disconnect of the final part of the adventure - the city of Ythryn could become a connection to the dark powers and the key to releasing the region from the Domain.
- I don't actually own Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. Given that I wouldn't be trying to incorporate any of the existing Domains, and the adventure already covers cold-themed horror elements pretty well, is there anything major mechanically or flavourwise that would make it worth me buying the book?
- How feasible is this lore-wise? I'm no great Forgotten Realms afficionado, but I know the gods in the setting are both active and powerful, but also that there have been incidents of regions going missing or becoming inaccessible before. What are the chances that a minor deity and some mysterious otherworldly dark powers can make off with a major region without the rest of the pantheon just immediately saying "Nope!" and either preventing or reversing it?
- The adventure is self-contained within the region, and I can't think of any of the parts of it that I ran last time which would be broken by the region being in a different dimension, but is there anything I'm missing?