D&D 5E Running Rime of the Frost Maiden

[Paul Farquhar]

So, scanning the 1st level, 1-session introductory adventure Cold-Hearted Killer, I've come to the conclusion it's a TPK.

I've seen this claim before, so I tested it with four 1st level pregens downloaded from the official site. It was tight, but the party won without any fatalities.

But as pointed out, the quest is an excuse for players to search the Ten Towns doing quests along the way. It's not meant to be completed at first level. My players where second level when they found him, and ended up fighting most of Torga's camp at the same time, but still won quite handily.

If anything, I have found the difficulty bar in RotFM is set too low.

The mission is to kill the bad guy - no other option is given and killing him is the sole success criterion. Even capturing him alive (which is impossible BTW; see below) will result in the PCs not receiving their reward./

Players can try and take him alive (mine did), but since he is already dead, they won't be able to.

 

[Anthony Winter]

just curious of overall reviews now that people have been running it for a while

Also what are the best parts of the adventure if one were to streamline it

there are more great parts of chapter 1 and 2 that can be played in a single level through unless you significantly slow down advancement:
standouts for me were:
<get to level 4>

• dark duchess
• black cabin
• id ascendant, althorugh Id get swap the ceremorphs for real mind flayers
• lost tower of netheril
• Xardaroks fortress
• Aurils island

 

[jayoungr]

Here are a couple of threads addressing problems that a board member ran across in running this adventure:

D&D 5E - Do You Tinker with Adventures to Make Them "Winnable"?

So I'm running an official 5e campaign adventure, which shall remain unnamed so we don't get into spoiler territory. I'm primarily looking for general advice and the points of view of other GMs and players more than specific fixes to the adventure. Here are a few recent situations: 1) Party...

www.enworld.org

D&D General - How Do You Fix a Campaign? (Rime of the Frostmaiden spoilers)

One of my current campaigns is feeling a little subpar. I've started a thread (linked below) that addresses one of the problems (as I see it) should you want some more context, but I'll provide the nuts and bolts here in this thread...

www.enworld.org

 

[jayoungr]

Also parking a list to the Lunch Break Heroes video series here, for anyone who's interested:

 

[Yora]

Hehehe, Bremen. Never ceases to amuse me.

laughs in German

 

[Burnside]

I'm several sessions in to running this now and we're having a great time.

The adventure's virtues are a ton of great locations, characters, ideas, and set pieces.

Its weakness is that the overarching plot is full of holes and doesn't feel cohesive.

The DM's toughest job will be basically adjusting or even re-writing the main storyline to create a satisfying narrative for the players. Or just using all of the cool stuff in the book to tell a completely different story.

My biggest problems with it are:

• Auril's lack of a goal
• The razor-thin narrative links between Auril, Sunblight, and Ythryn
• The adventure describes apocalyptic climate conditions that have been going on for two years and then proceeds to basically hand-wave them because, as written, said conditions are way too extreme to realistically deal with while still telling the stories the writers want to tell. (Friendly dwarven merchants want to hire you to get their stolen ingots back? No. By this point, friendly dwarven merchants have degenerated into cannibalism, died, or fled the region. Nobody cares about ingots during the apocalypse.)
• The adventure kinda sorta wants to have some kind of Shirley Jackson/mass hysteria/social control allegory with the sacrifices in the Ten Towns, but chickens out and doesn't really develop it

All of the above are quite fixable by a DM willing to deal with the challenge. And once you've dealt with that stuff, there is a LOT of good content in the book.

It helps if you don't care overmuch about adhering to Forgotten Realms lore and continuity.

For example, I solved issues 1 and 2 above by having Ythryn be the place where Auril the Netherese wizard became a god using Netherese magic many centuries ago - an event which also destroyed the city. Now the Arcane Brotherhood has discovered Ythryn's location, and Auril has taken a "nuke it from orbit" approach to the entre region to prevent others from learning Ythryn's secrets and prevent anyone from duplicating her apotheosis. Several of the factions in the region are racing to do exactly that.

 

[jayoungr]

Hehehe, Bremen. Never ceases to amuse me.

laughs in German

The story is known in English too. (I remember having an LP of Danny Kaye reading the story when I was a kid.) I wouldn't be surprised if it was a deliberate reference.

 

[Yora]

It's an actual city, and a pretty big one.

 

[tetrasodium]

I'm several sessions in to running this now and we're having a great time.

The adventure's virtues are a ton of great locations, characters, ideas, and set pieces.

It's weakness is that the overarching plot is full of holes and doesn't feel cohesive.

The DM's toughest job will be basically adjusting or even re-writing the main storyline to create a satisfying narrative for the players. Or just using all of the cool stuff in the book to tell a completely different story.

My biggest problems with it are:

• Auril's lack of a goal
• The razor-thin narrative links between Auril, Sunblight, and Ythryn
• The adventure describes apocalyptic climate conditions that have been going on for two years and then proceeds to basically hand-wave them because, as written, said conditions are way too extreme to realistically deal with while still telling the stories the writers want to tell. (Friendly dwarven merchants want to hire you to get their stolen ingots back? No. By this point, friendly dwarven merchants have degenerated into cannibalism, died, or fled the region. Nobody cares about ingots during the apocalypse.)
• The adventure kinda sorta wants to have some kind of Shirley Jackson/mass hysteria/social control allegory with the sacrifices in the Ten Towns, but chickens out and doesn't really develop it

All of the above are quite fixable by a DM willing to deal with the challenge. And once you've dealt with that stuff, there is a LOT of good content in the book.

It helps if you don't care overmuch about adhering to Forgotten Realms lore and continuity.

For example, I solved issues 1 and 2 above by having Ythryn be the place where Auril the Netherese wizard became a god using Netherese magic many centuries ago - an event which also destroyed the city. Now the Arcane Brotherhood has discovered Ythryn's location, and Auril has taken a "nuke it from orbit" approach to the entre region to prevent others from learning Ythryn's secrets and prevent anyone from duplicating her apotheosis. Several of the factions in the region are racing to do exactly that.

I agree with a lot of this. They might have been able to smooth it over a bit by setting it in one town so that the players kept interacting with a few repeating nova who could relay information and such or details about how specific player activities impact tbings... but pointlessly spread across ten different towns with different isolated & barely related to any overarching plot just makes the whole thing that much more confusing. Setting it up as an apparent sandbox with rails made of little more than tenuous wisps of hinted plot all over the place to ensure it's not sandboxed certainly doesn't help either.

I've never seen an adventure module or HD thst goes to such lengths to push players into reading it to figure out wtf is going on

Edit : yea good gm could fix it... but a good gm could make something whole cloth with equal or (more likely) less effort

 

[MarkB]

I agree with a lot of this. They might have been able to smooth it over a bit by setting it in one town so that the players kept interacting with a few repeating nova who could relay information and such or details about how specific player activities impact tbings... but pointlessly spread across ten different towns with different isolated & barely related to any overarching plot just makes the whole thing that much more confusing. Setting it up as an apparent sandbox with rails made of little more than tenuous wisps of hinted plot all over the place to ensure it's not sandboxed certainly doesn't help either.

I've never seen an adventure module or HD thst goes to such lengths to push players into reading it to figure out wtf is going on

I did find it tricky in the initial Ten Towns sections to limit the players' exposure to plot hooks. The tricky part is that they're only really supposed to follow up the quests at a few of these locations before they level out of these quests and are supposed to move on to the wider world, but in a lot of cases the quickest way to get to the next quest objective from town A is to follow the road through towns B, C and D, and then it's "do I drop the plot hooks for these towns and see what they nibble, or do I make this the one town where mysteriously nothing interesting is going on and then they'll obsess about it?"