Rime of the Frostmaiden blog-along part one: A snowbox?

I mentioned in my last blog (*looks at calendar*… oops. I’ve been busy ok. I’ll tell you why at the end). Anyway, I mentioned in my last blog that I was about to start running Rime of the Frostmaiden. Well, I’ve run two sessions since then, and found the experience to be really interesting. I thought it would be fun to do a blog-along with the campaign, so please be aware that there will be spoilers for Rime in these posts, although I will try to keep things relatively vague. The point is to talk about what I’ve learned from running an official module, not to talk about the story, but inevitably I will have to contextualise sometimes.

Rime is designed, at least at early levels, to be a sandbox game. Snowbox, maybe, given that it’s set in the icy north? You can, in theory, start the game in any of the Ten Towns. Each one has a quest, and there are also two starting quests which can be run from any of the towns. Even beyond the Ten Towns, there are a whole load of other quests and adventures, which do not fit neatly together into a linear story, but can be peppered into the game as and when they fit the narrative, or the players either stumble into them, or follow plot hooks given by the DM.

I generally think this is handled by the game. The adventures are diverse and most of them are pretty interesting. They are not just a series of small dungeon crawls, where players need to go to a place, kill the monsters and come back for rewards. Some are like that, others require players to do a little more linear problem solving, roleplay or exploration. These early adventures serve to introduce players to the area of Icewild Dale and hint at some of the other stories that are going on in the background to these adventures, which players are supposed to engage with more fully later in the campaign.

Here is where I found the book most challenging to understand when I first read through, and where I think the most work was required on my part to get my head around how to run the campaign. There are broadly three through-line stories at play in Rime. The first is the story of the Frostmaiden herself, who is the cause of the strife besetting the Ten Towns. Then there is the actions of a group of Dwarves who are up to something in the mountains. And finally, there is a group of mid-level wizards who are in the Dale searching for something. These three stories help to drive the events of the campaign, and it is reasonably expected that players will engage with each of these stories as the campaign unfolds.

However, I think the book does a pretty poor job of explaining this. The above three plots are described briefly at the start of the book, but then not explicitly mentioned for the rest of the first two chapters, which describe the mini-adventures discussed above. Once I had a better understanding of these three plots, I realised that these mini-adventures were intended to set up the rest of the campaign, and I was able to map most of the early part of the book onto at least one of these plots. This was a bit of a lightbulb moment for me, as I realised that the intent of the early chapters was to introduce these different conflicting story elements organically.

The book just doesn’t tell you that. The adventures are presented in alphabetical order by town, with only the barest indication in most of them as to their relevance to the wider story. I think the intent here is to have the game start as ‘sandboxy’ as possible with players able to go where they like, and do what they want, without the ‘story’ of the campaign getting in the way. Unfortunately, this just means that after a couple of chapters of cool but seemingly random adventures, the book abruptly puts the campaign on rails, with players led, sometimes quite ham-handedly through a series of locations in which the three story elements noted above resolve in turn.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. While the ‘end-game’ content is locked away so that players cannot access it until they have obtained a certain item, the rest of the material in the book is accessible effectively from level one if players know where to look. The point of the early adventures is to draw players in and gradually give them information organically, so that they are motivated to engage with the underlying stories. How they get that information is dependent on which plot hooks they are interested in, and what they do about the events ongoing in Icewind Dale is up to them. The book doesn’t explain this, so it’s on the DM to read between the lines and figure it out for themselves.

I think the reason for this design is to avoid what people often mistakenly call ‘railroading’. That is, leading the players in a certain direction towards where the story is. This isn’t railroading as far as I’m concerned. It’s totally ok for the DM to direct the players attention to certain pieces of information and certain plots, while still being in a sandbox game where the players can go anywhere and do anything. You’re not taking away player agency by offering plot hooks. If you don’t give hints at the wider story, you end up with events blindsiding players as they’ve not been foreshadowed, and having to ham-fistedly lead players by the nose towards the story, as they have no incentive to go there themselves.

I think the early part of the game in particular tries a little too hard to hammer home the ‘sandbox’ element. I think there is probably a whole blog post on starting a campaign, and how I started my Rime game. The long and short of it is that I totally threw out what the book said, because the book told you to just throw players into any of the Ten Towns, tell them they already live there, give them one of the starting plots, and just go from there. This seems like an utterly bizarre way to start a campaign, as it does nothing to draw players into the mystery of the setting. Beginnings are important.

Another reason why this is an utterly terrible way to start is that not all of the Ten Towns are created equally. I think they’re generally really well designed. Each town feels very different, and there are a good number of NPCs to make the place feel alive, but some, such as the larger towns, are much more suitable starting locations than others. Each town comes with a quest, however, again these are very varied. Chapter one is supposed to take players from level 1 to level 4, and the standard party size is between 4 and 6.

This means that each town adventure could be attempted by either 4 level one characters or 6 level 4 characters. It does not take an experienced DM to know that the difference between those two parties in terms of what they could reasonably handle is very different. What would completely annihilate a level 1 party would be easy fodder by level 4. However, the book makes no allowances for this. There is no suggestion that an adventure might be adjusted for party size and level. As written, you could just let your players walk into either a cake-walk or a death-trap, depending on what level they are.

I have seen advice going around online to this effect, that as a DM you shouldn’t adjust your encounters for party strength, and that it is effectively on the players to judge when they are out of their depth. While I don’t see a problem with letting players get out of their depth, I think it is still part of the role of the DM to cater the game being played to the players at the table. The book makes no allowance for this, and I think it is its biggest failing.

I think there are reasons why this is the case, not least because of the very design of DnD 5e, particularly the CR system, which patently does not work. However, that is the subject of another blog post, which I will try to write in the next few weeks.

I make no promises, however, as I am rather busy at the moment. This is because I am a player, and most importantly for my free time, the editor of a brand new DnD actual play Podcast called The Chronicles of Stiripos.

The point of the podcast is that we will tell a series of short stories, each set at different times and places in the homebrew world of Stiripos. Each series will stand alone, so new listeners can jump in at any point, but there will be a wider story playing out in the background, which will become more clear the more you listen.

Series one is a Sapphic, Shakespearean-inspired story of love and tragedy.

The first episode of the podcast can be found by following the link below, to wherever podcasts are found, by searching ‘The Chronicles of Stiripos’.

https://thechroniclesofstiripos.podbean.com/e/series-1-the-ballad-of-bavrim-and-kayleth-episode-1/