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In Chapter 4 of Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, as the PCs are climbing the mountain outside his fortress, the duergar tyrant Xardorok Sunblight releases a chardalyn dragon and sends it flying to ravage the ten towns of Ten-Towns.

The PCs are faced with a difficult decision: Continue their assault on Xardorok’s fortress or race back to Ten-Towns to stop the dragon’s rampage?

After posting Icewind Dale: Travel Times, I had multiple DMs and patrons ask me if I was also planning to look at this section of the book.

DRAGON’S FLIGHT

The chardalyn dragon flies from Xardorok’s fortress, which is named Sunblight, and targets each town in turn, flying from one to the next and razing it before continuing. On p. 188-9 of the book there is both a map of the route and this table:

The table, unfortunately, is not terribly helpful because it omits the time that the dragon spends destroying each town before leaving for the next. So let’s start with a replacement table, measured in hours from when the dragon leaves Sunblight:

Town	Arrives	Departs
Dougan's Hole	2 hours	2.5 hours
Good Mead	3 hours	4 hours
Easthaven	5.5 hours	13.5 hours
Caer-Dineval	14.5 hours	15.5 hours
Caer-Konig	16.5 hours	18 hours
Termalaine	20 hours	26 hours
Lonelywood	26.5 hours	28.5 hours
Bremen	30 hours	32 hours
Targos	32.5 hours	40.5 hours
Bryn Shander	41 hours	53 hours
Sunblight	56.5 hours	n/a

BLIZZARD: A blizzard starts shortly after the dragon leaves Termalaine. (See Icewind Dale, p. 11.)

CHASING THE DRAGON

Now we’re going to look at how and how long it takes the PCs to catch up with the dragon. (An important first step in stopping it). There are a couple things to know before we jump in here.

First, no matter where you’re going, it turns out that it’s always faster to go straight from Sunblight to Dougan’s Hole and then follow the roads from there. This would be true even if you could ride in a straight line (which your usually can’t due the lakes). So we’ll be using that as our baseline assumption when looking at travel times.

Straight line measurements as the crow flies to other settlements (although most of these routes are impractical on land and, as noted, wouldn’t be faster anyway):

• Dougan’s Hole: 10.5 miles
• Good Mead: 12 miles (you need to cross Redwaters Lake and it’s not frozen over)
• Easthaven: 14 miles (you need to cross the river, but it might be frozen over)
• Caer-Dineval: 21 miles (Redwaters and Lac Dinneshere are in the way)
• Caer-Konig: 25.5 miles (Lac Dinneshere is in the way)
• Bryn Shander: 17 miles
• Targos: 20.5 miles
• Bremen: 22.5 miles
• Termalaine: 24.5 miles (you need to cross Redwaters Lake)
• Lonelywood: 25.5 miles (you need to cross the northern end of Maer Dualdon, which is not frozen over)

Although the amount of mountain travel differs slightly, in practice you can assume that each of the values above include 4.5 miles of mountain travel.

Second, even though the book features a scenario predicated on precisely timed overland travel, the travel times in the book are both inconsistent and imprecise. The first part of Icewind Dale: Travel Times sought to correct these problems, but I recognize that some people will still be using the values found in the book. So we’ll take the time to look at both scenarios.

BY THE BOOK

We’re going to assume that the PCs are traveling by dogsled, because the adventure contrives to make this true. In doing so, however, we immediately run into a problem: While the book gives a value for dogsled travel in the wilderness (1 mile per hour; ½ mile per hour in mountains), it doesn’t give a value for dogsled travel along roads. Instead, it inconsistently says “mounts and dogsleds can shorten these times by as much as 50 percent.”

For our purposes, we’re simply going to assume that dogsleds reduce these times by exactly 50 percent. And they do it along all roads.

Furthermore, for the sake of simplicity, we will also be assuming that the PCs make all necessary navigation checks (while traveling through mountains or in a blizzard).

Note: We’re still using the “by the book” times on the Travel Time Map from Part 1, which is still slightly modified to remove other inconsistencies in the book-given travel times.

ROUTE TO DOUGAN’S HOLE: If you go straight from Sunblight to Dougan’s Hole (see map above), there’s 4.5 miles of mountain travel (9 hours) followed by 6.5 miles of overland travel (6.5 hours), for a total travel time of 15.5 hours.

But if you take this route:

Then there’s 3.5 miles of mountain travel (7 hours) and 7.5 miles of overland travel (7.5 hours), for a total travel time of 14.5 hours.

Using the faster route, if the PCs immediately leave Sunblight to chase the dragon, here are the travel times to various settlements (assuming they go directly to that settlement):

• Dougan’s Hole: 14.5 hours
• Good Mead: 16.5 hours
• Easthaven: 18.5 hours
• Caer-Dineval: 20.5 hours
• Caer-Konig: 21.5 hours
• Bryn Shander: 19.5 hours
• Targos: 20.5 hours
• Bremen: 21.5 hours
• Termalaine: 22.5 hours
• Lonelywood: 23.5 hours

FORCED MARCH & EXHAUSTION: The other thing to keep in mind here is that, assuming they left from Dougan’s Hole, the PCs already traveled 14.5 hours to get to Sunblight. If you assume they traveled 8 hours yesterday, rested, and then traveled another 6.5 hours today… well, after just 1.5 hours they’ll hit their 8 hour daily limit for travel and have to start a Forced March. The dogs will need to make Constitution saving throws at the end of each hour (DC 10 + 1 per hour past 8 hours) or suffer a level of exhaustion. After just two failed saves, their speed will be halved and after five failed saves their speed will drop 0.

However, the rules state that, “Sled dogs must take a short rest after pulling a sled for 1 hour; otherwise, they gain one level of exhaustion.” We could interpret this to replace the normal rules for forced marches, representing the legendary stamina of sled dogs. (This matches real world practices on the Iditarod Trail, so it’s not a huge reach.) This rest time is already calculated into the travel times listed above, so this largely solves the problem for us.

You’ll still want to give some thought to the effects this travel has on the PCs. 5th Edition doesn’t really have mechanics for being short on sleep and the relationship between the forced march rules and traveling in a vehicle are… vague. You might simplify this down to:

• 1 level of exhaustion for each missed night of sleep.
• A DC 10 Constitution check per 8 hours of dogsled travel, with 1 level of exhaustion on a failure.

SWAPPING DOGS: Once the PCs get back to the remnants of civilization, they might be able to periodically swap their dogs out for fresh dogs. Under ideal circumstances, this would allow them to run the dogs without a rest, effectively doubling their speed. The trick is that after two hours, they’ll gain two levels of exhaustion and their speed will be halved again. After five hours, the dogs can’t go any further.

Let’s assume that they can switch to fresh dogs in every town. (This isn’t a great assumption because some of the towns they go through will have been wiped out by the dragon. Plus, negotiating for dogs probably chews up some of the time saved. But for the sake of simplicity, let’s go with it.) We can re-calculate our travel times (these all assume they swap dogs in Dougan’s Hole; if no dogs survived there or if the town has already been abandoned in your judgement the numbers will have to shift):

• Dougan’s Hole: 14.5 hours
• Good Mead: 15.5 hours
• Easthaven: 16.5 hours
• Caer-Dineval: 17.5 hours (switch in Good Mead)
• Caer-Konig: 18 hours (switch in Good Mead, Caer-Dineval)
• Bryn Shander: 17 hours (switch in Good Mead)
• Targos: 17.5 hours (switch in Good Mead, Bryn Shander)
• Bremen: 18 hours (switch in Good Mead, Bryn Shander)
• Termalaine: 18.5 hours (switch in Good Mead, Bryn Shander)
• Lonelywood: 19 hours (switch in Good Mead, Bryn Shander)

BY THE BOOK – SCENARIOS

BEST CASE SCENARIO: By comparing the PCs’ best time (with dog-swapping) to the dragon’s arrival and departure times, we can look at a few likely scenarios.

The first thing to note is that it’s impossible to save Dougan’s Hole, Good Mead, Easthaven, Caer-Dineval, or Caer-Konig. The PCs literally can’t get to any of them fast enough. So the absolute best case scenario is that they head for Termalaine and get there about ninety minutes before the dragon does.

More generally, if the PCs choose any of the other five towns and head straight there, they’ll be able to get there before the dragon.

WILD GOOSE CHASE: The problem is that the PCs don’t know that. In order to accurately calculate where they can intercept the dragon they need to know:

• its route;
• how fast it’s going; and
• how long it will spend destroying each town

Although they might be able to learn or intuit the first two, there’s no way for them to do anything but guess at the third.

This can easily lead to a disaster if they try to chase the dragon from one town to the next: Leaving Good Mead they know it was heading to Easthaven, so they head there only to find that the dragon has destroyed the town and moved on. So they race north along the road, hoping to catch it at Caer-Dineval or Caer-Konig… but they can’t. And now they’ve wasted so much time that they arrive in Termalaine too late.

WORST CASE SCENARIOS: If the PCs go to Dougan’s Hole, travel by road, and are reasonably accurate in anticipating the dragon’s flight path (by questioning survivors, etc.) most of the scenarios broadly look like the above: They catch up to it in either Termalaine or Lonelywood.

Worst case scenarios start rolling out if they deviate from this approach. Obviously, it’s possible for them to unnecessarily write off cities that could have been saved (“Let’s bunker up in Bryn Shander!”). But they might also do something like:

• Ride to Bryn Shander to warn the largest city in Ten-Towns of the devastation. (They arrive at 17 hours, then spend an hour there.)
• Having warned the leaders in Bryn Shander, they decide to ride to Easthaven to try to stop the dragon there! (They arrive at 20 hours.)
• They ride north to Caer-Dineval and then Caer-Konig hoping to catch up! (They arrive at Caer-Konig at 23 hours.)
• Oh no! Let’s go save Termalaine. (They arrive at 29.5 hours.)
• Too late! To Lonelywood! (They arrive at 30 hours.)
• Too late! They ride back to Targos (arrive at 31.5 hours), but don’t stop because the dragon must be attacking Bremen!
• But they don’t get to Bremen until 32 hours, arriving just in time to watch the dragon fly over their heads back to Targos!

Most of these worst case scenarios seem to end up with them confronting the dragon in Targos. (The dragon spends 8 hours in Targos. That soaks a large margin of error at an intersection.)

IRRELEVANT CHOICE: One interesting conclusion from running these numbers is that the decision to attack or not attack Sunblight before riding back to Ten-Towns turns out to probably be irrelevant to the outcome as long as the PCs can clear the fortress without taking a short rest (which is likely).

RECOMMENDED TRAVEL TIMES

If you’re using the recommended travel rules from Part 1, there are two key differences to account for:

• Dogsleds move at 4 miles per hour on roads (instead of 2 miles per hour).
• You can also use the rules for fast pace travel from the DMG.

These benefits are offset to some extent if you’re using the optional rules for deteriorating roads, but I won’t be attempting to factor these into the calculations below.

Perhaps the most significant advantage is that by maintaining a fast pace, the PCs can get to Dougan’s Hole six hours earlier. These numbers assume that they maintain their fast pace on the roads and do not rest their dogs:

• Dougan’s Hole: 8.5 hours
• Good Mead: 9 hours
• Easthaven: 10 hours
• Caer-Dineval: 10.5 hours
• Caer-Konig: 12 hours
• Bryn Shander: 11 hours
• Targos: 12 hours
• Bremen: 12.5 hours
• Termalaine: 14 hours
• Lonelywood: 14.5 hours

RECOMMENDED TRAVEL TIMES – SCENARIOS

BEST CASE SCENARIO: We can see that Dougan’s Hole and Good Mead are still lost no matter what the PCs do, but it’s now quite possible for them to reach Easthaven while the dragon is only halfway through its destruction of the town.

DRAGON CHASE: The book actually recommends that the dragon leaves a town after it take 30 points of damage. Because the PCs are only slightly slower than the dragon under these rules, this arguably becomes a more interesting scenario (with the PCs able to readily catch up if they can intuit where the dragon is going next).

This also gives the players a reasonable chance to pull back, recuperate, and still be able to bring the fight back to the dragon.

POTENTIAL DRAWBACKS: These travel times make it significantly more likely that the PCs will be able to spare the bulk of Ten-Towns from disaster. Whether that’s a feature or not is probably in the eye of the beholder.

Personally, I like the idea that if Ten-Towns falls the PCs will feel responsible for it, rather than feeling that it was inevitable. On the other hand, maybe you’ve got some solid ideas for what post-apocalyptic Icewind Dale looks like and you want to put your thumb on the scales a bit for that.

AXEBEAKS

Axebeaks can match dogsled speeds on the tundra, but they don’t have the dogsled stamina we invoked above. Assuming the PCs use normal pace to ride to Sunblight, they ride 8 hours the first day and then 6.5 the next day.

This leaves them with only 1.5 hours of travel left on the day when the dragon heads for Ten-Town. They can take a fast pace back to Dougan’s Hole, but the axebeaks will need a long rest on the way. This means it takes 18.5 hours to get back (the dragon is heading for Termalaine):

• Dougan’s Hole: 18.5 hours
• Good Mead: 20 hours
• Easthaven: 23 hours
• Caer-Dineval: 24 hours
• Caer-Konig: 25.5 hours
• Bryn Shander: 24.5 hours
• Targos: 25.5 hours
• Bremen: 26 hours
• Termalaine: 28.5 hours
• Lonelywood: 29 hours

WAITING UNTIL MORNING: If they wait for morning before heading for Sunblight and triggering the dragon’s release, things get better: The axebeaks can get back to Dougan’s Hole with only a manageable forced march and no long rest:

• Dougan’s Hole: 10.5 hours
• Good Mead: 12 hours
• Easthaven: 15 hours
• Caer-Dineval: 16 hours
• Caer-Konig: 17.5 hours
• Bryn Shander: 16.5 hours
• Targors: 17.5 hours
• Bremen: 18 hours
• Termalaine: 20.5 hours
• Lonelywood: 21 hours

Swapping axebeaks (galloping them hard for 6 miles before they become exhausted and their speed halves) can improve these times somewhat. Swapping to a dogsled works better.

ON FOOT

What if the PCs go Sunblight on foot and can’t get Vellynne’s dogsleds there? If you’re just using the base travel rates from Rime of the Frostmaiden:

• It takes them 29 hours to get back to Dougan’s Hole.
• By that point, the dragon has destroyed Dougan’s Hole, Good Mead, Easthaven, Caer-Dineval, Caer-Konig, Termalaine, and Lonelywood.
• It takes them a total of 41 hours to reach Targos, which is too late to save either Bremen or Targos. So those towns are also automatically destroyed.

Basically, the ONLY thing they can do is go to Bryn Shander, arriving shortly before the dragon does. If they don’t realize how bad things are and go to Easthaven and then Caer-Dineval first before backtracking to Bryn Shander, they’re entirely too late and the dragon has already flown back to Sunblight.

(Reality check, though: None of those calculations include forced march exhaustion or the need for sleep. So, basically, if they’re on foot, Ten-Towns is automatically razed. This is why the necromancer ex machina is waiting for them at the bottom of the mountain to drive them back to civilization.)

RECOMMENDED TRAVEL TIMES: Things look a little bit better if you can set a fast pace and travel roads at speed.

• Dougan’s Hole: 14.5 hours
• Gold Mead: 16 hours
• Easthaven: 19 hours
• Caer-Dineval: 20 hours
• Caer-Konig: 21.5 hours
• Bryn Shander: 20.5 hours
• Targos: 21.5 hours
• Bremen: 22 hours
• Termalaine: 24.5 hours
• Lonelywood: 25 hours

These numbers, though, still don’t factor in rest. A particular problem is that the PCs are likely to have arrived at Sunblight late in the day (having traveled 8 hours one day and then 6.5 hours the next). Let’s assume that they do a few hours of forced march the first night and a few more the next day, allowing them to arrive at Dougan’s Hole at just 22.5 hours. (At this point the dragon is already in Termalaine.)

The problem is they now need another long rest before traveling again. By the time they get up, the dragon is in Bremen (30.5 hours). With perfect information, they can reach Targos while the dragon is still there.

SWITCHING TO DOGSLEDS: But wait! What if they switch to dogsleds in Dougan’s Hole? With perfect information, they could get to Lonelywood just in time to see the dragon flying away. But in this scenario, saving Bremen becomes plausible.

Moral of the story? Walking is for chumps.