Rime of the Frostmaiden blog-along part two: A hot start to a cold Campaign

Three adventurers make their way along the snowy road to Bryn Shander. A few days ago they passed through a blizzard into another world. A world where the sun doesn’t rise and winter never gives way to spring. The snow doesn’t melt, and the temperature never rises. Every morning, shortly after midnight, the sky is lit up by a spectacular light show that paints its way across the night sky, sealing all who dwell in Icewind Dale into an eternal winter.

With barely a stirring of the wind to warn them, a blizzard whips up across the icy plane. Exposed to the howling winds and biting cold, the adventurers improvise. Using a mixture of magic and ingenuity, they fashion for themselves a snow cave to wait out the blizzard. A few hours into their dark vigil, a group of Goblins, tired from battling their own way through the hostile conditions, scavenging desperately off the land, stumble across the snow-cave and challenge the adventurers, insisting that this was their cave and that the adventurers better clear off.

A confusing fight ensues, with Goblins and adventurers alike struggling to see each other through the blizzard as they battle for control of the only shelter for miles around. The tide is turned by a spell cast out of the darkness. Goblins drop as magical missiles strike them from an unseen assailant.

The adventurers are thankful but cautious of the middle aged woman who appears out of the snow, riding a sleigh driven by sled dogs and piloted by Kobolds. Their unease deepens when they realise that at least some of the Kobolds are reanimated zombies. This rising unease battles against a desire to be out of this frozen wasteland and back to what can generously be called civilisation, as the newcomer offers them a ride on her sleigh to Bryn Shander.

As they journey through the blizzard, conversation is tricky, but as conditions ease, the woman warns the adventurers of strange goings on in the Ten Towns, particularly something she has not yet been able to discern going on in the mountains with a group of dwarves. She asks the adventurers to do what they can to help the people of Icewind Dale, cryptically hinting that she has an important mission to do and cannot spare the time to help out herself.

She leaves the players at the gates of Bryn Shander, and rides off into the blizzard.

This is how the first hour or so of my Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign went down. As far as beginnings go, I thought it went pretty well. It introduced players both to the weirdness of the setting with the everlasting winter, and the hostility of it with the blizzard. I had no idea what they would do about the blizzard, and their decision to make a snow cave took me by surprise. It made for an interesting location for the fight with the Goblins.

Goblins are a good monster to throw at low level parties. I could have used Kobolds, or roving groups of bandits, but there is a subplot involving a nearby goblin fortress, so Goblins made sense. They would have encountered, and almost certainly fought Goblins in the blizzard whatever they had done, because I wanted the necromancer character to come in a save them (although as usual, I underestimated what even 3 level 1 characters can do, and they had the goblins pretty well handled by the time she showed up!).

This character becomes relatively important to the story later on, and per the book, she just comes out of nowhere at a crucial moment many levels into the campaign. This is unsatisfying and feels like a deus ex machina, so I thought I’d throw her in early so that when or if she does come back, she won’t come out of the blue (white?). Her appearance also gave me a chance to sow a few seeds about the wider storyline of the campaign, and give the players a call to adventure, albeit a vague one.

It should be obvious by now that this is not how the book tells you to start the campaign. In fact, the book, by its own admission, has a cold opening. Basically, the players are already in one of the Ten Towns that you chose (or roll for). You tell them about the everlasting winter and how much living in the Dale sucks, then you throw one of the starting adventures at them.

That’s it. That’s all the book has about the start of the campaign.

Beginnings are important. The first session you play of a campaign, be it in a homebrew world that you’re making up from scratch, or one of the official modules, is the most important. It sets the tone for the adventure. Those first impressions a player gets of the world they’re playing in will stick with them for the entire campaign.

Beginnings matter.

I think the beginning of this campaign was another thing sacrificed at the altar of the snowbox. The book wants you to be able to use any of the Ten Towns as a starting point, but having an opening sequence like the one I used locks you into one of the starting towns, and removes some of that open-world feel.

Except that it doesn’t. My game was no less of a sandbox once the players reached Bryn Shander. The game wouldn’t run if the DM didn’t give players plot hooks to start them off, and the starting adventures can be run from wherever, so why not Bryn Shander. It, along with a couple of others, have the most ‘starting town’ feel to them. Some of the Ten Towns would be terrible places to start an adventure, because the level one players would all die when they tried to do the mission starting in that town.

If the book really wanted to leave options open, they could easily have written a handful of different ways into the module that a DM could chose (or roll for *sigh*), which might land them in different towns depending on where and how the DM wanted to start. Just not writing an opening to the campaign at all was not a good option.

This has been part two of my Frostmaiden blogalong. Next time, I think I’ll share some of my experiences of running the sandbox. There have been some really interesting turns of events so far, with the players making some choice that I didn’t expect and that I have had to adapt the story to react to, which is definitely how this should work! I want to get another couple of sessions under my belt first though, to allow some of these story elements to progress a little further, and I have some other interesting things I want to write about in the next few weeks.