D&D 5E Who got their Rime today?

[Retreater]

Not sounding like a good one for me based on what I'm reading here.

 

[Azzy]

I've got my copy. I've only done a light perusing, but I like what I see so far. I need to do a deeper dive, but not today.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I got it yesterday!

 

[mach1.9pants]

edited to add: I am mostly interested in folks who got the hardcopy; but feel free to share your dndbeyond impressions too...

Soooo, why is a DNDB version not as good for impressions? That's very weird! Obviously I can't give you impression on it's heft or smell, but apart from that (ie the important part, the contents) they are the same...

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The rough bit on the back felt extra rough...

 

[Burnside]

They do have magic.

It actually explicitly says that the Ten Towns have about one caster for every hundred people, 3rd level spells and lower. That wouldn’t save them.

 

[Flamestrike]

It actually explicitly says that the Ten Towns have about one caster for every hundred people, 3rd level spells and lower. That wouldn’t save them.

Create food and water is 3rd level. It creates enough food for 15 people. Anyone capable of casting 3rd level spells gets at least 2 of them per day, which is enough on its own to feed 1/3 the population at a rate of 1/100.

Create bonfire is a cantrip, can be cast at will and requires no fuel at all.

 

[CubicsRube]

A druid with goodberry

Create food and water is 3rd level. It creates enough food for 15 people. Anyone capable of casting 3rd level spells gets at least 2 of them per day, which is enough on its own to feed 1/3 the population at a rate of 1/100.

Create bonfire is a cantrip, can be cast at will and requires no fuel at all.

And a 5th level druid with goodberry could sustain 90 people a day if they used all their spell slots.

Still keeping the animals warm and the crops running would be difficult. Although ome can always assume perhaps some level of divine intervention to save the plot/day.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Create food and water is 3rd level. It creates enough food for 15 people. Anyone capable of casting 3rd level spells gets at least 2 of them per day, which is enough on its own to feed 1/3 the population at a rate of 1/100.

Create bonfire is a cantrip, can be cast at will and requires no fuel at all.

It doesn't say they can all cast 3rd level spells, just that no one who isn't a PC or named NPC can cast anything higher. Nor does it say they are all clerics.

As for druids, the vast majority of them are on the other side.

Casting Create Bonfire would be a sure-fire way to piss off Auril, and would probably get the caster lynched.

 

[pukunui]

6. The weather is too extreme. I realize it's not a documentary, but we're told it's been winter for two years at the start of the campaign, average temps at 49 below but dropping another 80 degrees below that (basically the coldest temps ever recorded on earth), and the days have 4 hours of twilight followed by 20 hours of darkness. Also, travel in and out of the region is basically impossible except via magical teleportation, so no real imports/exports are happening. Under those conditions, life would not be possible. The ecology should have totally collapsed, the Ten Towns would have been starved out. What they are describing is basically Antartica, but somehow people and animals are still living there as if it's more like Alaska or Iceland or northern Canada. Someone should have considered this a little more. Even saying it's been winter for a year would be better. After two years of this, the situation would be WAY worse than what's depicted.

The implausibility of this premise was one of my main criticisms of the draft version of this adventure. I'm rather disappointed to see they didn't change it. Oh well. Whenever I get around to running it, I intend to shorten the length of time to maybe just a few months. Like spring was all wintry and then summer never really eventuated and now it's autumn and people are starting to go hungry and dying from the cold and whatnot.

Two years is not only ridiculous from a survival standpoint but also from a "why hasn't anyone done anything about this yet?" standpoint as well.


My other main criticism was the fact that, while the adventure acknowledges that the events of the Legacy of the Crystal Shard occurred, the people of Ten-Towns seem to have very short memories. The people of Easthaven, for instance, were terrorized by pirates with a ship that had a distinctive prow made from black ice, yet no one (least of all the town speaker) seems to recognize the prow when it's dredged up out of the lake.