Auril the Frostmaiden has claimed Icewind Dale, laying her enchantment upon it: a terrible curse of perpetual winter. The denizens of Ten-Towns – ten settlements clustered around the lakes at the center of the Dale, nestled between the Spine of the World and the Great Glacier – grow increasingly desperate for a spring which never comes. When the PCs arrive in this gloom-riven land, they will discover that the cold of the wintry north has leeched into the hearts of men. Surrounded by darkness, can they be the flame that rekindles the light of hope?

As the campaign begins, the players are presented with an open world sandbox: They’re largely free to wander through Ten-Towns as they please, helping people and engaging with crises that present themselves in each of the settlements. A bonafide sandbox is unusual (if not unique) among official D&D campaigns, and the town-based structure used by Icewind Dale is intriguing and ripe with possibility.

Unfortunately, like several of the other official D&D campaigns I’ve seen, Rime of the Frostmaiden only flirts with being something innovative and unique before abruptly ripping off its mask and shouting, “Aha! Just kidding! I was a railroad the whole time!”

In this case, at least, the sandbox is at least fairly legitimate for as long as it lasts. But after just four or five levels, the whole thing abruptly collapses down into the linear plot. (Which is, itself, beset with problems.)

With that being said, Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden is bursting with a ton of cool stuff. The covers are metaphorically strained with a bevy of good sandbox material, a handful of epic set-pieces, stunning artwork, and fifty pages of chilling new monsters (plus a thematic miscellanea of other useful elements). Before we go any further, I’m just going to say that I like it. The book is not without its shortcomings (we’ll get to those), but I liked it enough that I felt comfortable launching a campaign in the Icewind Dale sandbox without first making major alterations to the material. Which is, for me, fairly high praise indeed.

THE SANDBOX

One of the primary problems with Rime of the Frostmaiden is how poorly it explains its structure. This is particularly true of the sandbox, the explanation of which is both inadequate and filled with vague contradictions that further complicate comprehension. But this is, more or less, how it works:

There are two starting quests. An easy-to-miss feature here is that these quests are tonally distinct from each other — one is tracking a serial killer that ties into the darkness that has seeped into Icewind Dale; the other is a hunt for fanciful fairy creatures called chwingas. Both, however, thematically tie into the over-arching campaign: The Frostmaiden is a dark and feyish goddess, and the two starting quests reflect that from different angles. (The DM can also use this to dial in the tone they want for the campaign, by choosing or emphasizing one quest over the other.)

In any case, these starting quests are designed as light framing devices that will motivate the PCs to move from one town to another. Each town has an additional quest keyed to it and opportunities to pick up rumors about quests in other towns. So as the PCs journey around, they will collect additional quests and most likely begin doing those while continuing to work towards accomplishing their original quests.

The starting quests thus effectively provide a default action for the beginning of the campaign: If the players have any doubt about what they should be doing next, they can simply go to a new town and look for their starting quest item (the serial killer or the chwinga).

Once the PCs have accomplished a certain number of quests, they level up and effectively “unlock” an additional rumor table (which the book confusingly refers to as “tall tales,” despite the fact that they are completely reliable sources of information) that will begin pointing the PCs towards what I’m going to call the Chapter 2 quests (because that’s where they’re described in the book). These quests are, obviously, more difficult; they also tend to take the PCs further out into the wilderness around Ten-Towns.

Now, there are some caveats here.

First, Rime of the Frostmaiden instructs the DM to only use one of the starting quests. This can be an option for aesthetic reasons, but objectively speaking it’s almost certainly wrong: The structural function of the starting quests, as noted, is to provide a default action that will move the PCs through several towns. Both of the quests, however, can end essentially at random (i.e., the players choose the correct town, find the thing they’re looking for, and the quest ends). You want both quests on the table to provide redundancy. Having both quests in play will also deepen the default interaction with each community (because they need to look for multiple things).

Most importantly, however, giving the PCs two different quests to simultaneously pursue at the start of the campaign will immediately break the players of the expectation that they’re going to be doing a linear set of assigned tasks.

The second caveat is that the way Icewind Dale handles rumors is mostly wrong. The advice in the book for using the rumor tables is radically inconsistent, and there are simply too many places where the DM is told to spoonfeed rumors to the PCs one at a time. This is more or less the exact opposite of what you should actually be doing.

See, in a sandbox campaign you want LOTS of rumors to be in play at any time. The essence of a sandbox campaign is that the players have the ability to choose or define what their next scenario is going to be. In order for that to work, the PCs need to be in an information-rich environment and rumors are, broadly speaking, how you accomplish that. If you spoonfeed them the rumors (i.e., scenario hooks) one at a time, you’re choking the life out of your sandbox. (See Juggling Scenario Hooks in a Sandbox for a longer discussion of this in detail.)

To be fair, there are other sections of the book that correctly tell you to be profligate with the rumors. But even some of this advice can go awry. For example, there’s one passage where it suggests that the GM should just randomly give players rumors out of the blue. (“Lo! From the heavens I give unto you… a rumor!”) The reality is that the acquisition of rumors should flow from the actions taken by the PCs.

(Which is also why the investigative action taken in each town related to the starting quests should, generally speaking, explicitly trigger the local rumor table.)

These are regrettable shortcomings in the book (particularly if one imagines it being used by a neophyte GM), but not seriously debilitating as you can, for the most part, simply ignore the bad instructions on how to use the material.

The third caveat, however, deals with the actual adventure material itself. While many of the sandbox adventures presented in Icewind Dale are well done, there are too many that miss the mark. (And some badly so.)

For example, consider the starting quest in which the PCs need to track down a serial killer named Sephek. The scenario hook for this quest is one of the worst I’ve ever read. It’s comically bad.

Hlin has taken it upon herself to investigate the recent murders because no one else – not even the Council of Speakers – can be bothered. Hlin is studying the characters closely, trying to decide if they’re worth her time. Ultimately, she takes the chance and draws them into conversation, asking them to help her take down her only suspect: a man named Sephek Kaltro. Here’s what she knows about Sephek and the victims:

“Sephek Kaltro works for a small traveling merchant company called Torg’s, owned and operated by a shady dwarf named Torrga Icevein. In other words, Sephek gets around. He’s charming. Makes friends easily. He’s also Torrga’s bodyguard, so I’m guessing he’s good with a blade.

“His victims come from the only three towns that sacrifice people to the Frostmaiden on nights of the new moon. This is what passes for civilized behavior in Icewind Dale. Maybe the victims found a way to keep their names out of the drawings and Sephek found out they were cheating, so he killed them. Maybe, just maybe, Sephek is doing the Frostmaiden’s work.

“I followed Torg’s for a tenday as it moved from town to town. Quite the devious little enterprise, but that’s not my concern. What struck me is how comfortable Sephek Kaltro looked in this weather. No coat, no scarf, no gloves. It was like the cold couldn’t touch him. Kiss of the Frostmaiden, indeed.

“I will pay you a hundred gold pieces to apprehend Sephek Kaltro, ascertain his guilt, and deal with him, preferably without involving the authorities. When the job is done, return to me to collect your money.”

“Hello. Yes. I would like to pay you 100 gold pieces to kill this random person because he’s a serial killer… Well. Maybe. Who knows, really? I have no actual evidence he’s a killer. Hell, I don’t even know if he was actually in the same towns where the killings happened. But maybe.. just maybe, the killer is working for the Frostmaiden. Or maybe not. But if the killer IS working for the Frostmaiden, then MAYBE he would be immune to the cold. And this guy doesn’t wear a coat. So… yeah. Definitely the killer.”

That’s pretty dumb. But then it gets worse:

Quest-Giver: I followed Torg’s caravan for ten days.

PCs: So where is it now?

Quest-Giver: No idea.

The quest-giver followed the caravan for ten days, became convinced someone in the caravan was the killer, and then… left and went to a completely different town? So they could sit in a tavern and stare at strangers until randomly deciding which ones they would ask to go kill someone on their laughable say-so?

The crazy thing is that the quest-giver is completely right: The Frostmaiden is sending Sephek to kill people who bribe officials to take their names off the lottery list.

But… only three of the Ten-Towns even do the human sacrifice thing. If the Frostmaiden wants to kill people for not being available as sacrifices, why isn’t Sephek targeting the OTHER seven towns?

There are a number of similar head-scratchers strewn about Rime of the Frostmaiden, but there’s also a fair number of scenarios that are just badly designed.

For example, in the town of Bremen there’s some sort of murderous creature in the lake that’s attacking the local fishing boats. The PCs are supposed to grab a boat, head out onto the lake, and deal with the creature. (It’s an awakened plesiosaurus.) Here’s how the scenario works:

1. Get in the boat.
2. Roll on a random table of events until the plesiosaurus shows up.

The structure itself is obviously lackluster, but it’s made worse because (a) none of the results on the table are actually interesting and (b) they simply repeat until you roll the magic numbers on the d20 that end the misery.

Here are the actual rolls I made while simulating how this scenario would play out:

• Knucklehead trout hits you in the head.
• Knucklehead trout hits you in the head.
• Knucklehead trout hits you in the head.
• Nothing happens.
• Targos fishing boat shows up, then leaves.
• Nothing happens.
• Nothing happens.
• Nothing happens.
• Targos fishing boat shows up, then leaves.
• Plesiosaurus shows up.

It’s here! Finally!

… but then there’s a 1 in 3 chance that it just leaves before the PCs can interact with it! Which is, in fact, what I rolled. So then:

• Nothing happens.
• Knucklehead trout hits you in the head.
• Nothing happens.
• Nothing happens.
• Plesiosaurus comes back!

(It should be noted that each of these checks takes an hour, so the party also presumably went back to town and slept somewhere in there.)

Imagine running this at the table!

And yes, obviously, any DM worth their salt isn’t going to actually do this. But that just raises the question of why it was written this way in the first place, doesn’t it?

And then there’s Tali, the quest-giver. They’re a raging asshole.

Before the quest they say: “Can you go out on the lake and take notes on a dangerous beast that’s killing people?”

Then after the quest they say: “Oh! You’re back? In payment, here’s a potion that makes dangerous beasts friendly so that they won’t kill you.”

(I acknowledge that the potion wouldn’t work because the plesiosaurus has been awakened, but THEY don’t know that.)

To be clear, there are many quests that don’t have problems like this. (The book has more than twenty of these sandbox quests.) But there are, frankly, too many that do — like the dwarves who offer to pay the PCs more to retrieve a shipment of iron than the iron is worth; or the bad guys who captured a castle so they could live there and immediately dumped corpses into the water supply; or the one where all the NPCs are baffled about how they can find the bad guys, so they take the PCs to the tracks that the bad guys left in the snow and scratch their heads until one of the PCs says, “Maybe we could… follow the tracks?”

Speaking of tracks, it turns out that A LOT of the quest hooks in Icewind Dale are based around following tracks. Fail the Wisdom (Survival) check to follow the tracks? Guess you fail the quest! Sucks to be you! (And it’s frequently worse than this because the designers are actively sabotaging the already fragile structure. For example, there’s one quest where the PCs can fail to successfully follow the required tracks because they did so at the wrong time of day. And another where they follow the tracks of some thieves half way to their goal, but then the tracks automatically blow away in the wind, forcing the PCs to make blind Wisdom (Survival) checks to search the hills for… well, they don’t actually know WHAT they’re looking for, but if they find anything it will DEFINITELY be where the thieves are, right?) This is sort of okay in a sandbox like Rime of the Frostmaiden because you don’t need to succeed at every quest, but it’s still not great scenario design… particularly if you’re doing it over and over and over again.

Most of the material that’s compromised like this is, ultimately, salvageable. But you will need to put in the work to salvage it.

TRANSITION TO LINEAR

Let’s talk about the dragon in the room.

There comes a point in the campaign where the PCs have tracked down Sunblight, the duergar fortress in the mountains at the southern end of the Dale. As they approach the fortress, the chardalyn dragon that the duergar have been constructing out of magical, evil crystals flies out of the top of the fortress and begins winging towards Ten-Towns.

This is an incredibly epic, awesome moment.

It is also the point where the Icewind Dale sandbox begins collapsing into a linear scenario. This is, in my opinion, a bad decision. It seems to kick in at exactly the moment where, in my experience, the most interesting emergent gameplay in a sandbox will start appearing. In other words, stuff is just going to start getting awesome when the campaign abruptly says, “Eh. Fuck it. Let’s do something else.”

But beyond that, it’s just poorly done.

The intention is that the PCs have a choice: They can finish climbing up to Sunblight and assault the fortress OR they can climb down the mountain and race back to Ten-Towns to save it from the dragon.

Except the choice doesn’t actually work because the PCs have no way of understanding the stakes: It’s extremely unlikely that they’ll know what the dragon is going to do. “Dragon flying away from fortress” doesn’t auto-translate to “it’s going to destroy Ten-Towns.” I’d argue it’s far easier to read that as a signal to “hit the fortress fast before it gets back.” So there’s an opportunity for a cool choice here, but it’s a missed one.

But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the players do understand the choice: There’s a dragon flying to Ten-Towns and they have to catch it!

… except they can’t. It turns out the choice to chase it or not is irrelevant. If you use the travel times listed for the PCs and the dragon in the book, the decision to raid Sunblight is incredibly unlikely to have any impact on the outcome in Ten-Towns. And, in fact, the overwhelmingly likely outcome in Ten-Towns is that all ten towns will be destroyed except for Bryn Shander and maybe Targos. (Despite this, the book gives no guidance at all for what the post-apocalyptic Ten-Towns is going to look like.)

So the choice doesn’t work. But whether the PCs assault Sunblight first or not (and we’ll come back to Sunblight in a moment), when they come back down the mountain they find a woman waiting for them with enough dog sleds for all of them. She wants them to help her do a job and she offers them a lift back to Ten-Towns.

First: This entire setup is just inherently awkward in its execution. The players decide to head back to town and an NPC pops up in the middle of the wilderness to say, “Hey! Need a lift?”

It’s just silly.

Second: The entire back half of the book absolutely requires that the PCs hitch a lift and work with this NPC. (The book tells you this explicitly multiple times. As far as I can tell, it’s not wrong.) This is an incredibly weak structure to hang an entire campaign on!

But it’s actually worse than that, because this NPC is clearly a necromancer: She’s got undead minions hanging out with her and everything. That’s a problem, because I think it’s overwhelmingly likely that the PCs are going to kill her without a second thought.

I was interested to see what other people thought of this, so I ran a poll on Twitter. 190 people voted on the most likely action the PCs would take, and two-thirds said she was toast… along with the rest of the campaign.

It doesn’t help that even if the PCs do talk to her, she makes it clear in her pitch that she’s a member of the Arcane Brotherhood… who have been repeatedly established in the first half of the campaign as unrepentant bad guys who betray everyone who works for them.

And, again, the PCs have to agree to work with the necromancer ex machina or the rest of the campaign can’t happen. Here’s how that works:

• The necromancer gives the PCs a ride back to Ten-Towns.
• After they deal with the chardalyn dragon, she tells them that she has a cool job for them, but they’re going to have to level up first.
• Once the PCs have leveled up, she leads them to Auril’s Abode, where they have to steal a lorebook.
• The lorebook has a spell which will let them access the lost city of Ythryn.
• The necromancer leads them to the location of Ythryn and casts the spell.

In short, once the PCs choose to go to Sunblight they trigger a sharp transition from the sandbox to a linear sequence of set pieces:

• Destruction’s Light (chasing the chardalyn dragon, which we’ve already discussed)
• Sunblight Fortress
• Auril’s Abode
• The Lost City of Ythryn

For the rest of this review, we’ll be looking at each of these set-pieces in detail.

Go to Part 2

Over the past couple decades, a design concept that has become fairly entrenched in D&D culture is that the PCs need to face X encounters of Y difficulty per day. The general idea being that the game is balanced (either intentionally or unintentionally) around their resources being chewed up across multiple encounters: If they face fewer encounters, there’s no challenge because (a) they will still have lots of resources left at the end of the day (thus suffering no risk) and/or (b) they burn up LOTS of resources per encounter (making those encounters too easy).

There is obviously a kernel of truth here, but there are also, frankly speaking, A LOT of problems with this design ideology. But that’s somewhat beyond the scope of this article. What I’m mostly interested in focusing on today is one specific element of game play that becomes a really problematic dilemma when combined with this design ideology:

Wilderness encounters.

See, the basic assumption is that the design of Dungeons & Dragons should be finetuned around X encounters of Y difficulty per day in which the value of X reflects the number of encounters in a typical dungeon. There are some problems with this idea that dungeons should be designed as a one day excursion, but laying that aside, this makes a lot of sense: The dungeon is the assumed primary mode of D&D play; therefore the game should be balanced around dungeon adventures.

But, of course, the density of encounters in a dungeon is inherently much higher than the density of encounters in a vast wilderness. Furthermore, even if you increased the density of wilderness encounters, the result would be to turn every wilderness journey into an interminable slog. If you assume that

X = a dungeon’s worth of encounters = one day’s worth of encounters

then a wilderness journey that took ten days would “logically” have ten times the number of encounters in a typical dungeon.

You don’t want to do that, so you make one wandering monster check per day in the wilderness: The players know that they’ll have at most one “dangerous” encounter per day, so they just nova all of their most powerful abilities and render the encounter pointlessly easy.

So what do you do?

Do you just strip wilderness encounters out of the game entirely? They’re pointless, right? But to delete an entire aspect of game play (and something that routinely crops up in the fantasy fiction that inspires D&D) feels unsatisfactory.

Perhaps you could artificially pack one particular day of wilderness travel with X encounters, turning that one day into a challenging gauntlet for the PCs. But that’s really hard to justify on a regular basis AND it still has a tendency to turn wilderness travel into a slog.

For awhile there was a vogue for trying to solve the problem mechanically, primarily by treating rest in the dungeon differently from rest in the wilderness. In other words, you just sort of mechanically treat one day in the dungeon as being mechanically equivalent to ten days (or whatever) in the wilderness. The massive dissociation of such mechanics, however, could obviously never be resolved.

Long story short, the dynamic which has generally emerged is for wilderness encounters to be REALLY TOUGH: Since the PCs can nova their most powerful abilities when facing them and there is no long-term depletion of party resources (including hit points), it follows that you need to really ramp up the difficulty of the encounter to provide a meaningful challenge.

In other words, dungeons are built on attrition while wilderness encounters are deadly one-offs.

There are several problems with this, however.

First, it creates a really weird dynamic: Instead of being seen as dangerous pits in the earth, dungeons are where you go to take a breather from all the terrible things wandering the world above. That doesn’t seem right, does it?

Second, the risk posed by these deadly one-off wilderness encounters is unsatisfying. In a properly designed dungeon, players can strategically mitigate risk (by scouting, retreating, gathering intel, etc.). This is usually not true of wilderness encounters due to them being placed either randomly (i.e., roll on a table) and/or arbitrarily (“on the way to Cairwoth, the PCs will encounter Y”).

(A robustly designed hexcrawl can mitigate this, but only to some extent.)

Finally, this methodology – like any “one true way” – results in a very flat design: Every wilderness encounter needs to push the PCs to their limits and thus every wilderness encounter ends up feeling the same.

So what’s the solution?

THE FALSE DILEMMA

The unexamined premise in these attrition vs. big deadly encounters vs. skip overland travel debates is often the idea that challenging combat is the only way to create interesting gameplay.

Partly this is the assumption that all random encounters have to be fights (and that’s a big assumption all by itself). But it’s also the assumption that if the players easily dispatch a group of foes that means nothing interesting has happened because the fight wasn’t challenging.

Neither of these assumptions is true.

Let’s back up for a second.

You’ll often hear people say that they don’t like running random encounters because they’re just distractions from the campaign.

Those people are doing random encounters wrong.

The “random” in “random encounter” refers to the fact that they’re procedurally generated. It doesn’t mean that they’re capricious or disconnected from their environment. I talk about this in greater detail in Breathing Life Into the Wandering Monster, but when you roll a random encounter you need to contextualize that content; you need to connect it to the environment.

And because the encounter is connected to the environment, it’s meaningful to the PCs: Creatures can be tracked. They can be questioned. They can be recruited. They can be deceived. The mere existence of the encounter may actually provide crucial information about what’s happening in the region.

Random encounters — particularly in exploration scenarios — are often more important as CLUES than they are as fisticuffs.

They can also be roleplaying opportunities, exposition, dramatic cruxes, and basically any other type of interesting scene you can have in a roleplaying game. As such, when you roll a random encounter, you should frame it the same you would any other scene: Understand the agenda. Create a strong bang. Fill the frame.

Once you recognize the false dilemma here, the problem basically just disappears. If the PCs have camped for the night and a group of orcs approaches and asks if they can share their campfire… do I even care what their challenge rating is?

If I roll up the same encounter and:

• The PCs subdue and enslave the orcs.
• The PCs rescue the slaves the orcs were transporting.
• The PCs discover the orcs were carrying ancient dwarven coins from the Greatfall Armories, raising the question of how they got them.
• The PCs follow the orcs’ tracks back to the Caverns of Thraka Doom.

Does it matter that the PCs steamrolled the orcs in combat?

I’m not saying that combat encounters should never be challenging. I’m just saying that mechanically challenging combat isn’t the be-all and end-all of what happens at a D&D table. And once you let go of the false need to make every encounter a mechanically challenging combat, I think you will find the result incredibly liberating in what it makes possible in your game.

Go to Part 1

Once I came to see scenes as an emergent property of game play (rather than something that’s prepared), I began to realize that scenario prep is almost entirely about designing tools. Or, perhaps more accurately, toys. Running an RPG is about picking up these toys and actively playing with them, just like the players are actively playing their PCs.

In creating these tools you’re still thinking about how they’ll be used at the table. But it’s more like designing a hammer (“I know this tool will be useful for hammering nails”) than it is writing an IKEA instruction manual (“here is how the scene with Diego will work”).

At the table, players are going to say things like, “Let’s build a chair!” And the GM will be thinking, “Great! I’ve got a hammer, a bunch of wood, and some… screws? Well, let’s make it work.”

It may only reflect my predilections as a GM, but I’ve found over time that node-based scenario design seems to inherently lend itself to a naturalistic form of prep. I’m not sure if that’s the ethos of active play pushing node-based design in a particular direction or if it’s that node-based design has naturally fostered active play. Or both.

But, in short, the more comfortable I become with node-based scenario design, the more I find that the design arises out of the diegetic organization of the game world itself.

For example, when I’m designing something like the Lytekkas hypercorp, the nodes I design (and how those nodes are organized) overwhelmingly tends to mirror the organization of Lytekkas in the game world. (You can see this in the earlier examples, which were based on things like the geography of the game world or the corporate divisions of Lytekkas.)

When I’m struggling with node-based design, a trick I’ve learned is to pick an NPC and ask, “How would they see this stuff? How would they use it? How would they interact with it?” Whether that’s a hypercorp CEO in an orbital penthouse or a Triad 49er on the rough streets of Hong Kong, the in-game perspective is almost always illuminating.

Of course, this makes sense, doesn’t it?

If node-based scenario design is based on the flow of information – if the structure of a node-based scenario is made up of the paths formed by the information – then it follows logically that node-based scenarios will mirror how that information naturally flows through the game world. And, of course, that flow will be determined by the actual relationships between people, places, organizations, and events in the game world. In how the nodes are related to each other.

Thus, as you design your scenarios, you naturally break the game world apart into discrete chunks. Each chunk (or node) is either a toy or a collection of toys that you can pick up and play with, while the connections between nodes show how those toys are related to other toys, making it easy for them to be endlessly combined and recombined in actual play.

And that’s node-based scenario design.

FURTHER READING
Using Revelation Lists
Game Structures
Hexcrawls
5 Node Mystery
Gamemastery 101

Go to Table of Contents

LEGEND OF THE HELLRIDERS

Now that we’ve established the definitive truth of these events, let’s take a moment to look at how the story has been passed down to the modern day. How are the Hellriders remembered in Elturel and on the Sword Coast?

This material will be useful if any of the PCs are playing Hellriders (or, really, any Elturian characters). Or when they hear the legend at some point in the pre-Avernus  part of the campaign (e.g., when speaking with Reya Mantlemorn or another Hellrider). I’ve included some additional notes in square brackets that can be used to expand the basic version of the legend if the PCs decide to do some detailed research into the legend (in Candlekeep, for example).

THE FIRST HIGH RIDER: Before humans came to Elturel, the site was ruled by an Ogre Lord in a crude stone bastion atop the tor where now stands the High Hall. The Ogre Lord captured the son of Lady Shiarra, a local noblewoman. Lady Shiarra, seeking vengeance against the Ogre Lord, drove him out of the bastion. [Other versions of the story claim that the Ogre had stolen Lady Shiarra’s sword or horse. One version says the Ogre was her son. If you asked a sufficiently erudite ogre about the matter, they’d probably have different opinions about the legitimacy of Lady Shiarra’s actions in general.]

After the Ogre Lord was defeated, Lady Shiarra called a concord of local lordlings to the site where Shiarra’s Market now stands (see Part 5C). These lordlings pledged fealty to each other and formed the Riders of Elturel, with Lady Shiarra as the first High Rider.

OTHER TALES OF THE RIDERS OF ELTUREL: There are a variety of chivalric stories featuring the early Riders of Elturel. The most common themes include:

• A lone Rider heads out from the city and faces evil. (Pick any monster from the Monster Manual.) Sometimes they are seeking that evil. Other times they stumble upon it in unexpectedly idyllic places.
• Romantic tourneys in which Riders (often with a mixture of foreign knights) face each other in various games of martial skill while sexual tension kindles between rivals. These tales usually feature a shapeshifter posing as a knight or otherwise confusing identities.
• Minor crusades, in which troops of Riders sally forth to save an entire community (usually in response to a plea for help). [These tales are generally told and have been shaped to support Elturel’s role as “protector” of the surrounding lands.]

THE CHARGE OF THE HELLRIDERS:

• Olanthius, the High Rider of Elturel, was often away from the High Hall, for the frontiers in those days were sore-pressed by warbands passing over the Sunset Mountains from the Goblin Marches. Fields were despoiled, livestock slaughtered, homes razed, and people dragged off to terrible fates. [When, exactly, Olanthius ruled Elturel is uncertain, but generally agreed to be the 9^th or 10^th century, although some claim it’s as far back as the 8^th. Some of the early chronicles say that the trouble actually originated from the Trollclaws and not the Goblin Marches, although some loremasters argue that both might be true.]
• While Olanthius was away, a Prince of Devils came to Elturel. Cloaked in a handsome form, he insinuated himself into the High Hall as Nothius, a Lord of Iriaebor. Over time, he enslaved the soul of Olanthius’ love, the Lady Yael. [The early-14^th century poet Aternicus wrote “The Lay of the Lady Yael,” a now-classic masterpiece which weaves this story into a romantic seduction.]
• As winter fell upon another year, Olanthius returned from campaign over fresh-fallen snow to discover that his lady love had been stolen away. Alack! If only he had returned a few hours earlier, Lady Yael might have been saved! [In some versions of the story, Olanthius is now visited by a nameless angel who guides the Riders to where Yael is being held prisoner.]
• Olanthius led the Riders of Elturel in a frenzied chase. [Maatal’s Chronicle instead describes a search of eighteen months – in some versions, eighteen years – in which the Riders of Elturel scatter across Toril, seeking the hiding place where Prince Nothius has concealed Lady Yael. Various tales have accumulated to individual knights, some of whom journeyed to distant Zakhara and even Maztica.]
• When the Riders caught up with Lord Nothius, the devil revealed his true form. A great battle then commenced, which ended when Nothius opened a gateway to Hell itself and, with a cackling laugh, carried Lady Yael through it! [Several chronicles also ascribe the goblin or troll invasions as being part of Nothius’ schemes; these usually feature a ferocious battle as Olanthius and the Riders try to fight their way through to Nothius. In other versions, Nothius has carried Lady Yael to a citadel in the Sunset Mountains – sometimes identified as Darkhold – and the Riders must lay siege to it.]
• The Riders of Elturel did not hesitate! They plunged through the gate, pursuing the devil into Hell itself! [Some versions of the story have the Riders pursue the devil Nothius through all nine of the Hells. In these, Nothius is often revealed to be Asmodeus himself. These are generally agreed by serious historians to be exaggerations.]
• The pursuit of Nothius now continued across the blasted plains of Avernus itself. At last, the Riders of Elturel met the armies of Hell! The Riders defeated one of the fabled blood legions and Yael was reunited with Olanthius, but as they rode back towards the portal home a second and even larger legion threatened to cut them off.
• Olanthius knew the only hope of escape was if this legion was delayed. He asked for volunteers to accompany him… and all the Riders did so. Therefore lots were drawn to determine the lucky few who would ride one last time at the side of their lord. Olanthius begged Yael to fly to safety, but she, too, chose to ride into battle at his side.
• In the face of the Riders’ charge, the legion of Avernus trembled and buckled… but did not break. Olanthius and Yael perished on the Avernian plains. It is said that where they fell in a final, martial embrace, a spring of holy water sprung up that was poison to the devils of that land.
• Their sacrifice, however, bought the time the other Riders needed to escape from Hell. Overcome with grief at the loss of their glorious leader and his love, they returned to the city. Their valor was never forgotten, and from that day forward the Riders of Elturel were known as the Hellriders.

As you can see here, much of the true history has been lost. Or, rather, distorted through a storied tradition — a golden age of Elturian chivalry which has been artificially extended back to the founding of the city to culminate triumphantly in the great tale of the Charge of the Hellriders. Thus the earliest Lords of Elturel (including Lady Shiarra) have become retroactively identified as High Riders.

Design Note: This sort of thing isn’t without precedent in the real world. See, for example, how the “Roman Emperors” would have been contemporaneously identified as Imperator, Augustus, and/or Caesar. Or the Arthurian tradition, in which history becomes encrusted with literary invention.

If the PCs decide to do some deep investigation along these lines, you could certainly hint at the uncertainty of the historical record here. Although even these hints wouldn’t necessarily be accurate: For example, you might discuss how the loremaster Alice Messier of Iriaebor has recently done a study of “Jander Sunstar.” Supposedly the High Rider who led the Riders of Elturel out of Hell, Messier has found references to another “Jander Sunstar” as a folk hero in the Dalelands whose stories were later merged with a set of vampiric myths arising from the infestation of vampires that led to Merrydale becoming Daggerdale. The obvious conclusion, of course, is that “Jander Sunstar” never actually existed, and the Dalelands folk hero was simply incorporated into the chivalric cycle of Elturel.

If you want to get ambitious, you could develop some lore books along these lines and perhaps distribute them in likely places in Elturel and/or Candlekeep.

LORE OF ZARIEL

Once the PCs become aware that they’re dealing with Zarielite cultists in Baldur’s Gate, they may want to do some research into who Zariel is. This might also be true in Candlekeep after Lulu’s revelation that Zariel was involved in the Charge of the Hellriders. So it’s worthwhile to briefly consider what they’ll find in the history books.

You can also use this information to inform Intelligence (History) and Intelligence (Religion) checks.

Design Note: The general theory of my approach here is that (a) Hell exists, but (b) it is very, very far away from the Material Plane. Thus the loremaster’s understanding of Hell is akin to a scholar of Medieval Europe’s understanding of the fine details of Japanese history (i.e., incredibly poor bordering on the mythical). The history of Hell also stretches back across aeons unimaginable to human history. Plus the entire place is inhabited entirely with gifted liars whose interactions with humans are usually based entirely around deceiving them.

AVERNIAD & THE TRIAL OF ASMODEUS: These early events in planar history are known to mortal scholars, but are mostly obscured through a haze of confusing legendry. Zariel’s name is not associated with them, although the incident in which a nameless angel started a deific brawl during the Trial of Asmodeus might crop up.

It’s up to you how much chaff you want to throw up around the “true history of Asmodeus and/or Hell” if the PCs start looking into it. We’re greatly aided in this, however, because D&D itself has published a bunch of contradictory versions of this continuity:

• Serpents of Law: Asmodeus, then known as Ahriman, and Jazirian arose from the primal chaos as powerful serpent gods. The two serpents bit each others’ tails and formed a great circle whose turning transformed chaos into the order of the Great Wheel. The two serpents quarreled, stripping each other of god-stuff. The diminished Asmodeus, a wingless serpent, crashed into Nessus, the First Hell, while the winged Jazirian rose to Mount Celestia.
• Angelic Fall: When the first gods grew weary of fighting demons, they created angels to continue the battle for them. The first of these angels was Asmodeus. Over time, Asmodeus assumed more and more control of the war, with the gods formalizing more and more of his authority in the form of pacts. There came a time when the gods realized that Asmodeus had created a vast and horrific infrastructure for torturing mortal souls (i.e., Hell) and transforming them into foot soldiers (i.e., devils) – call it the military-infernal complex. Asmodeus was put on trial, but he simply pointed to the tangled web of pacts and declared that the gods had authorized all of it. Primus of the Modrons, who acted as the trial’s judge, ruled in Asmodeus’ favor, and the collection of pacts became known as the Pact Primeval. It remains the bedrock of celestial law.
• He Who Was: Asmodeus was once an exarch serving He Who Was. (Asmodeus would later go to considerable lengths to wipe out all record of the god’s name, leaving only the enigmatic title.) He Who Was was the ultimate god of law. To preserve a perfect order, He Who Was controlled every single aspect of reality, down to the smallest details. In his demesne, the mortal races did not yet have free will – they were automatons going through the motions of civilization. Asmodeus was no different, until he was corrupted by the demon lord Pazuzu. With the scales fallen from his eyes, Asmodeus saw clearly the tyranny of the Law according to He Who Was. After a quiet resistance (that may have lasted for centuries and also ties into the Dawn War waged against Tharizdun), Asmodeus journeyed to the bottom of the Abyss and found there the shard of freedom (which some “fools” have named the shard of evil) and crafted from it his Ruby Rod. The rod’s existence shattered the control of He Who Was (and, in some heretical texts, is claimed to be the basis for all mortal consciousness). Asmodeus slew He Who Was.

Note: Some gnostic cults claim that the breaking of the Perfect Order is much more recent than one would suspect: Some claim it only happened a few short years ago. Others cite the Spellplague or the Sundering. For esoteric reasons, the date of 1358 DR is frequently given – the Year of Shadows in which mortals ceased to be mere shadows and became fully realized and autonomous spirits. In any case, according to the gnostics, all recorded history before that point was merely acted out according to the whim of He Who Was; the historical personages not truly possessed of what modern mortals understand as consciousness.

CHARGE OF THE HELLRIDERS: Zariel’s name is also not associated with the Charge of the Hellriders in any way (see above).

ZARIEL – WHAT IS KNOWN:

• Zariel was one of the Dark Eight, the council of generals who lead Hell’s legions in the Blood War.
• She is believed to be a fallen angel, likely one of those who first followed Asmodeus to Hell, making her one of the oldest and probably most powerful devils.
• During the Reckoning – the War in Hell that turned Lords of Hell against each in the 13^th century – Zariel initiated hostilities by forming an alliance with Tiamat and leading an army to besiege Dis, the second layer of the Nine Hells.
• Near the end of the Reckoning, Tiamat betrayed Zariel and the siege on Dis was broken. Zariel was imprisoned in Tiamat’s citadel.
• At the beginning of the 15^th century, Avernus – the first layer of Hell – was in a state of tumult. The Blood War was going poorly. Zariel escaped from Tiamat’s prison, raised an army, and turned the tide. To reward her, Asmodeus deposed Bel – who had been the Archduke of Avernus – and raised Zariel in his place.
• Zariel has been the Archduchess of Avernus ever since. A cruel and brutally effective military leader.

Note: It’s possible that the inner mysteries of some Zarielite cults would preserve the knowledge that Zariel led the Charge of the Hellriders. From a practical standpoint, however, the PCs should not be able to learn this from the cultists in Baldur’s Gate. (The knowledge should drop in Candlekeep, as described in Part 4C.) If you want to add this sort of deep lore to the Zarielites, I’d recommend confining it to the revelation that she was a fallen angel and perhaps very early events pertaining to the Averniad and the Trial of Asmodeus.

WHAT DOES GARGAUTH KNOW? If the PCs get the Shield of Hidden Truth and question Gargauth, he can provide a lot more detail. (These same general guidelines can probably be used for other denizens of Hell, other than those with personal first-hand knowledge.)

• Gargauth is not familiar with Zariel’s role in the Charge of the Hellriders, but he knows that she was an angel who fell comparatively recently (within the last few centuries).
• Having been active in Elturel for decades, he’s familiar with the Legend of the Hellriders (and can probably provide an account of many of its variations and details).
• He can provide detailed accounts of the Averniad and the Trial of Asmodeus. (He even knows that Zariel sparked a brawl during the trial.) However, it might amuse him to muddle things up with false tales (like those described above).
• He knows the Reckoning and the Rift War in detail.

Go to Part 6D-E: Lulu’s Memory Mystery