The Valley of Frozen Tears

[Leopold]

“The Valley of the Frozen Tears” is a brand new product by the company Ancient Awakenings. It is a self-contained plug and play valley setting in a forest/polar region that is populated by polar elves called eldalar, black orcs, strong and odd fey creatures such as the Faerie Host and River Maiden, around the entire valley druids and rangers help hold together the peace between the elves and the humans and keep the orcs in check, and of course humans settlers. All of this is wrapped up in a gorgeously illustrated front cover and 64 pages that is chock full of useful material for those seeking a useful artic type locale for their game.


The beginning gives a nice long and accountable detail on how the Valley came to be, how the clashes between the elves and orcs occurred, and the eventual rise of humanity to establish a city on the mountain near the edge of the valley. The history includes the names of the kings and some good background information that can be changed if needed to suit your campaign world. It is purposely kept very vanilla and very simple to allow for easy compatibility with any campaign world.

The Valley itself is comprised of many small villages and one big city called Icewall. The villages provide trade and commerce for the city and the city provides protection for the villages. Each village and city has information that tells what the village is about, some important NPC’s, what trade and commerce goes on as well as a nice full page map that shows the location of all the important locations in the villages and city. Furthermore, Ancient Awakenings has provided several pages with how much each product from the SRD costs based on the village location, population, and wealth of the village. In this way each village can offer something different at a different price and there is a simple and easy formula to use to figure it out. Brings out the feel that you are playing through a wilderness frontier and can expect prices and goods to change based upon where you are. One thing of note is that the locations are not in alphabetical order but are instead based on going out from the city from the closest to the farthest away.


There is a section devoted to the relationship between the eldalar elves and the humans, how the compact between the elves and humans is kept in check by the rangers and druids. It provides some useful information for your campaign in case the PC’s who, like all PC’s end up doing, decides to trek out into the wilderness to go hunting and exploring as they may. It shows the consequence of the actions and viable plot hooks to use for the DM in the cases where the PC’s do end up romping around the countryside. There are a few new magical items that are useful to this region and as this area is mostly woodsy they are for druids and rangers only to help stem the tide of the fey advancement.

There are nine new critters in this section. All have the SRD typical monster layout as one would expect to see in the Monster Manual and all have pictures that can be showed to the PC’s when and if they meet them. They are mostly fey/fairy type creatures which can easily be removed from this setting and applied elsewhere and all contain a full layout of the special abilities and uses for each one. The monsters appear too balanced for CR and usefulness to the locale. One big feature that I noticed was that each creature had one or several plot hooks for the DM to use in case they needed an idea on how to use them. Simple additions like this help out someone who may not be too keen on using one of these monsters in their game but instead can now have some thought on how best to use them. One of my dislikes of this area is that the monsters are not in alphabetical order and that there is no Level Adjustments (LA) for the monsters that could be considered playable races. All the monsters sans the wyld water are races that could be used as PC’s but there is no accompanying LA or ECL to take advantage of the fact. Also, they are not in alphabetical order, although there is only nine new monsters, makes it a bit annoying to flip between each one to find the monster you are looking for.

Near the end we come to the end where we have a random encounter table and NPC stat blocks. The encounter table includes all the monsters one would find in the area and the stat blocks from the SRD to help use them. So one would not need to flip between two or three products to pull up an encounter it is all provided for you. The NPC’s are all laid out from the EN Publishing product “Everyone Else”. It provides stat blocks for woodcutters, thugs, merchants, wandering soldiers, etc. A DM can simply flip through the pages to come up with a NPC for whatever situation and not have to randomly create one. All are shown with a readout of skills and feats appropriate to the NPC.

Finally we have the maps of the villages in the product and the city of Icewall. All are laid out in full color with points of interest located next to each building numbered on the map and down below shown with the name. These maps look like maps that would be provided by a 1st or 2nd tier publisher and it is great to see that PDF products are finally coming out with very well done maps that provide not only quantity for each location but quality as well.

In conclusion, I have very little negative comments to say about this product. I noticed only a few spelling mistakes but on something this big there is bound to be one or two but nothing noticeable that would cause this product to be unusable. The art is very good and fits with the theme of the product, nothing too outlandish or poor about it. The maps are well drawn and useful, and can easily be taken out of this product and used somewhere else. The villages and city have enough points of interest and places to keep the DM busy for sometime without drawing out every single place and going overboard with information. “The Valley of the Frozen Tears” is a setting that can be used anywhere on any world without any real work to do to apply it and the whole feel of the setting flows together nicely. I will be making use of this in my own world if my PC’s ever plan on going to the colder regions of my world.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

Come, and enter the Valley, where nigh-impassible mountains surround a primeval land of both magic and survival. From the gateway city of Icewall to the scattered human villages of the forests and hills, mankind struggles to survive against the valley's deadly winters and vicious predators. Worse still, the hated blackblood orcs also dwell in the valley. These terrible monsters raid village after village, only to fade into the mountains when opposed.

But mankind has allies as well. The druids and rangers of the Compact have promised to protect the people of this land as best they can. But what is the Compact, and what dark secret does it hold?

The Valley of Frozen Tears is not an adventure in itself, but a region that can be dropped into any 'standard' fantasy gaming world. Certain things are expected: a generally human-centric world and a standard spread of races, classes and environments.

Added content has been included beyond the basic setting. Nine new creatures and three new magic items have been added, complete with histories and adventure hooks for easy play value.

 

[Crothian]

The Valley of Frozen Tears

It is like fighting on the grid iron in the frozen tundra. Ok, possible it is not like playing football on Lambo Field, the famous stadium of the Green Bay Packers, but this product just oozes cold. It has a nice exploration feel to it although not as mysterious as I would have thought. Still, it makes a good location that can be used in any standard fantasy campaign.

The Valley of Frozen Tears is a pdf by Ancient Awakenings Publication. It is their first product and it shows promise for them. It comes a in a zip file a little over 7 megs and in side it contains the one meg cover, the print version which is just under two megs, and the screen version which is a bit over four and a half megs. Pretty standard sizes for pdfs and they should bode no problem for people on slower machines and slower connections. The book has pretty standard format, nothing exceptional but also nothing overcrowding like some new publishers try. The book has no bookmarks, and that is a not so good. It is nice to be able to quickly move from page to page, topic to topic with book marks especially at the gaming table. Still, as a setting book it is not as needed to quickly move from page to page as other types of books may be.

The book is a setting book, describing a valley in an artic region of a world. They have it set it a southern region, but it can easily be used anywhere one has need for such a place. The valley has a rich history with different peoples like the Eldalar, a race of artic elves, orcs, humans and fey creatures mostly. There are some new creatures suitable for the artic including in the book most of them new types of few. I am not sure new creatures were needed; perhaps current ones could have been adapted. As always that is the choice of the writers though.

The history of the place gives a nice overview of what has happened. It is pretty complete with a few interesting little nuggets that can be used for a few adventures alone. The Valley has many settlements, all of them defined and built together. The trade from town to town is just one of the details the book includes for this frigid place. But it seems like the Valley is both populated and abandoned as one reads through it. There are many reasons why people would have a hard time settling in this place, but few reasons on why they do.

Since the Valley of Frozen Tears is a place of cold, there are new rules to help simulate the dangerous cold that can occur here. There are some random table to determine the weather of a particular day with some modifiers for night and other things. There are equipment list of the standard things in the Players Handbook found here. The prices are the same though. It would have been nice to have prices altered depending on the availability of certain items in the Valley. There is a n availability mechanic so certain items might be hard to find. I would have thought that these rare items would be more expensive since they are hard to find.

The art is okay as are the maps. Nothing here is really flashy, just nice and functional. The maps of all the different towns are designed to be printed out. Each map is on its own page with room devoted at the bottom for notes. There are a few buildings defined in each town. There is also a bunch of commoner type NPCs written up. These are very simplistic, but do a good job of differentiating between people of different jobs. This section reminded me of Everyone Else, a pdf on just these sorts of people put out by another company.

Overall, it is a good first product. They have a well described area with a good history. It has many different entertaining adventure hooks as one reads through it all. It is designed to be dropped into almost any world with ease, and they did succeeded on that.

 

[d20Dwarf]

[No message]

 

[d20Dwarf]

Did he mention it's been pirated?

 

[mroberon1972]

The spelling/grammer errors he mentioned have been corrected in both the PDF and print versions. Thanks to Leo for his help in finding such problems.

 

[mroberon1972]

As a note, the use of NPC classes really are from 'Everyone Else'. I obtained their permission to use it, and was happy to see such a wonderful product out on the market. Think of it like a monster manual for commoners.

 

[JoeBlank]

The Valley of Frozen Tears


The Valley of Frozen Tears is a 68-page PDF supplement for d20 Dungeons & Dragons, produced by Ancient Awakenings. It is written by John Bowden and edited by Rebecca Bowden, and is available for $6.95 from RPG Now. The cover art is by Philip D. Kearney, with interior art by Sheldon Dawson. I received the book for free as a review copy.

This setting book consists of an overview and history of a cold climate region, followed by detailed descriptions of the major locations and important people, nine new creatures and three new magic items, as well as an index of other creatures common to the area. Additionally, there is an NPC index, making excellent use of Everyone Else, the book of NPCs from E.N. Publishing. Finally, there are nine pages of very nice maps. The zipped file comes with a separate cover image (one of the most beautiful covers I have seen on a PDF-only product), a final version of the book and a suitable-for-printing version. This is a courtesy that I am surprised to not find in every PDF I buy, as I like to print books for leisurely reading or use at the gaming table but hate to waste valuable ink.

The Valley of Frozen Tears details a cold-weather region consisting of a main city, several smaller villages, and the wilderness surrounding them. There is little in the way of new rules, which is welcomed. As noted by the author in the friendly introduction, "The only rules added were those that were specifically needed for the setting, such as expanded rules on environmental cold and protective clothing." No extraneous prestige classes, new feats or skills are included. It is nice to see a product that makes use of existing rules, and shows how much can be done with what we already have.

The setting is suitable for use as a campaign world, or as a region added to an existing world. The author notes that the valley is designed to be located in the far south, but could just as easily be shifted to the north if this suits your needs. This premise allows the creator to develop a setting that is different enough from the average but still similar enough to the traditional game that it would fit in most campaigns. The Valley is set in an environment of harsh, nearly artic cold. The short, three-page Overview gives a good summary of the setting, a map of the area and a summary of the expanded rules for survival in cold climates.

The History chapter is also three pages, which a good length to detail the short history of the region in a manner that tells an engaging story and provides background for the way things are now. The Eldalar, a race of elves, have lived in the Valley for hundreds of years. In recent history, they fought back a brutal incursion by blackblood orcs, and were introduced to humans who came to the Valley to stay. The human settlers built Icewall, a city so named because it is bounded by walls of ice, and also established several smaller villages on the southern side of the main city. The orcwars, as the period which shaped the region is called, have left behind a small, determined, mainly human population with an uneasy respect for the Eldalar and a hatred of the orcs.

The chapter entitled Places in the Valley provides more detailed descriptions of the city of Icewall and the most important of the small villages. Each location section is broken down into smaller Overview, History, People and Places of Interest, Who's in Charge, Population, and Trade sections. Herein lies one of the greatest strengths of the book, as each location is unique (without being artificially strange without reason) and yet they are all tied together. The villages rely on each other for trade, as each has some product or service to export, and they all rely upon the the city of Icewall for protection and patrons for their wares. Icewall charges a modest tax, and any village that fails to pay that tax is not allowed to trade with Icewall or the other villages. As they are all interdependent, being cut off from the others would almost certainly mean the end of a solitary village.

Further detail on the economics of the area is provided in the Trade and Equipment chapter. In only four pages, the author explains a system for determining whether any mundane item is available in any particular location in the Valley, and for determining the price of such an item. The system is simple and intuitive, assigning an Availability DC to every item listed in the SRD, with modifiers to the roll based upon a village's population and distance from Icewall. This creates a realistic feeling of being in a remote, icy wilderness where the traditional catalog can not be relied upon to be in stock.

The mundane Valley is interesting enough, but the full truth behind the uneasy peace is revealed in the Compact chapter. Each previous chapter mentions how important druids and rangers are, acting as healers, protectors and oftentimes leaders in the various communities. Here we learn that the Eldalar have been shaping and assisting in the subtle evolution of the local fey creatures, now referred to as the Circle Fey. With the coming of the orcwars, the Eldalar returned the Circle Fey to their more bestial, primordial nature, and gifted them with more brutal abilities so that they could protect their land and themselves. This flows into the New Creatures chapter, where we clearly learn that these are not the traditional, disney-fied, friendly faeries. For example, the Faerie Host begins life as a human child, until she takes her first lover and is overwhelmed with a hunger which forces her to devour her mate. She then changes into what appears to be a mildly plump female human with butterfly wings, a "being of grace and pleasant beauty", until she lures further mates and reveals her needle-like teeth and claws. She dominates her prey, lured using pheromones, mates with him and then devours him, fueling the growth of miniature faerie children.

Valley Satyrs, Valley Dryads, and other such fey are stronger, more aggressive and predatory versions of those with which we are familiar. However, they have all lost the ability to interbreed with each other, and must perpetuate their species with outside blood. They previously relied upon the Eldalar for this source, but the elves have retreated and cut off contact with much of the region. Now, the Circle Fey make use of the human newcomers. The druids and rangers, trained by and working with the Circle Fey, came to the realization that without a degree of care the human population would soon be depleted, leading to the end of the Circle Fey as well. They worked out an uneasy truce by which humans are prevented from intruding on the Fey lands, but the Fey are given almost free reign to take those humans who venture from the agreed upon areas. But common residents of the Valley are unaware of the Compact, which is managed only by the druids and rangers of the region. The book is rounded out by the aforementioned NPC descriptions for commoners of various professions and detailed, but not fancy, maps of Icewall and the major villages.

In reading to prepare this review, the book grew in my mind from an interesting and well-done supplement to a "must-use" resource. In the details, one can see that this book was a labor of love. Every aspect of the book flows from the central theme, and fits together to make an internally consistent world that has evolved from the environment and from a history that involves the unique beings of the area in a logical and believable manner. But of even more importance, to me at least, is the fact that the author doesn't go too far. A setting such as the Valley of Frozen Tears could have involved a dozen prestige classes, new feats, and fantastic but unfamiliar creatures. Instead, the setting expands on the familiar, tweaking environmental rules and altering existing creatures for the cold and the history of the region. In doing so, the versimilitude of the setting is preserved. From the platform houses built to avoid the rising river during the summer thaws in the village of Arlis, to the dwarven Chipstone clan that operates the iron mine in Harlor, to the antlers on the head of the almost feral Valley satyrs, the Valley is rich in details which make sense in their place.

I recommend "The Valley of Frozen Tears" to anyone interested in well-done, useable setting, that is internally consistent with enough original elements to make it memorable but not so many that becomes unbelievable. The fairly low-magic feel, in that there are few arcane spellcasters and limited magic items, when combined with the mysterious, aloof elves and the brutal orcs, gives the setting a Tolkienesque feel. In the mind of this reviewer, there are few, if any, "perfect" products. The criteria for a 5 rating is that the book be "truly exceptional". The Valley of Frozen Tears certainly qualifies.