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SUNBLIGHT

The biggest problem with Sunblight (and you’re going to be hearing me say this a lot) is that the lore just doesn’t hold together.

To start with, there are a couple weird conspiracies in the fortress.

The first is that Xardorok thinks he’s worshiping and following the commands of Deep Duerra (a duergar goddess), but in reality Asmodeus has punked him and is only pretending to be Deep Duerra!

This doesn’t really make a lot of sense and doesn’t really go anywhere. Further research suggests that 4^th Edition killed Deep Duerra, but Sword Coast Adventurers Guide for 5^th Edition just listed her as an active god again. So maybe this was an attempt to clean that continuity up (Duerra is dead, but Asmodeus has been impersonating her)? But mostly my take-away is that Wizards of the Coast really, really, really, really, really, really likes Asmodeus and needs him to be in every single adventure.

In any case, the conspiracy goes hilariously dumb when we get to this bit:

Infernal Tablets. The barbed devil [pretending to be a priest of Deep Duerra] spends its time chiseling on granite tablets to inscribe them with Infernal runes. Characters who can read Infernal script can learn about the devil’s manifesto, in which Klondorn reveals that Asmodeus, in the guise of Deep Duerra, is using the duergar to further his interests.

There are ninety-two granite tablets stacked about his room. Each tablet weighs 50 pounds and is 1 foot wide, ½ feet long, and 2 ½ inches thick.

“I have infiltrated Xardorok’s fortress. As an infernal spy, I will spend my days carving large stone tablets that say I AM A SPY and stacking them in large, clearly visible piles.”

The other conspiracy involves Grandolpha, a rival duergar despot that Xardorok wants to seduce and marry.

She’s not interested. But rather than marrying Xardorok, slitting his throat, and taking over the joint, Grandolpha has concocted a scheme where she suborns the guards one by one, then slits his throat, and takes over the joint.

Eh. Maybe she just enjoys suborning people.

But where I’m really left scratching my head is that Grandolpha orders her guards to unlock the doors of the fortress and let the PCs in.

The “plan” seems to be a vague hope that the PCs will politely kill Xardorok, but leave Grandolpha and her conspirators alone. But Grandolpha has no way of knowing that the PCs are coming. So is it just a standing order to the guard on the front door? “If anybody shows up, let them in on the off-chance they’re here to kill Xardorok! Boy, that sure would be great!”

This central silliness aside, Sunblight is a well-designed set piece. It has a good map with a lot of strategic interest and a good key with a lot of exploratory rewards. It would probably benefit from an adversary roster, but it would be relatively easy to throw one together.

AURIL’S ABODE

This chapter leaves me scratching my head.

It starts off by saying that the characters “might come to this island on their own, hoping to put an end to Icewind Dale’s everlasting winter.” But there’s no meaningful mechanism for that: Other than one random rumor, the only way for the PCs to discover where Auril lives is for Vellynne the Necromancer Ex Machina to tell them.

When I first heard that Auril was going to have three different forms (which was a major element in the pre-release publicity for the campaign), I girded my loins for an epic confrontation of mythological proportions: You can’t defeat a goddess just once! You’ll have to face her three separate times!

But… no. She’s just a video game boss shouting:

Even the setting of the fight isn’t inspiring. It’s Area G8 below, which is a frost giant’s ruined bedroom:

The way it’s scripted is that the PCs walk into the bedroom and Auril “staggers” out of the side chamber. FIGHT!

It’s a strategically boring space lacking in all gravitas.

(If the PCs don’t defeat Auril here, there’s a kind of half-assed bit later where she shows up at the end of the adventure and is like, “HOW DARE YOU SKIP MY FIGHT SCENE? RAWR!”)

The PCs don’t need to defeat Auril to end her winter curse on Icewind Dale, though: If they kill her roc (which is roosting on the roof), she can no longer fly into the sky to perform the ritual each night and the curse ends.

But… uh… Auril can fly.

And it’s D&D, so there’s like a zajillion work-arounds.

Meanwhile, killing her to end the curse doesn’t really make a lot of sense, either: The book is quite clear that if the PCs kill her, she’ll just re-manifest at the next Winter’s Solstice, restored to her full power. We’re later told that she’ll just decide to give up on the whole plan – so no worries! – but there’s no meaningful reason given for her making that decision.

Okay, but what about what brought the PCs to the island in the first place?

First: They’re looking for Nass Lantomir. They will, as far as I can tell, never find her.

The ship Nass took to the island sunk. She swam to the island and then died of frostbite (despite having multiple spells that would have prevented that from happening). The PCs:

• Have no way of knowing she came to the island.
• Have no reason to search the island.

They will, therefore, never find her corpse, which is in the middle of nowhere and mostly buried in snow.

… it’s a pity she’s carrying a magic item that’s fairly integral (albeit not strictly necessary) to the rest of the adventure.

The second reason the PCs have come to the island is to retrieve the Codicil of White, which is a religious primer for Auril’s worshipers. This mostly calls attention to the fact that the worship of Auril is a big ??? in the book and doesn’t make a lot of sense. But, regardless, the Codicil is locked in Auril’s basement and the security system is…

… well.

It’s triply dumb.

Dumb #1: The authors really want you to play through the security system, so we get some amateur hour railroading.

The door is otherwise unopenable, indestructible, and impassable. Any spell cast with the intent of bypassing the door fails and is wasted.

Cool story, bro.

Dumb #2: “This is a very important vault! Only authorized people should be let in! What’s our security system?”

“Only people who pass four tests can enter.”

Uh huh. Where are the tests located?

“Right outside the door of the vault.”

… uh huh.

Dumb #3: These fucking tests.

Here’s how they work: The PCs walk through a magic door and are teleported to a Raghed tribe which is very conveniently facing a crisis perfectly themed to the test (Cruelty, Endurance, Isolation, Preservation) at the very moment that the PCs arrive.

This is not an illusion or fake-out. The book is VERY INSISTENT that this is REALLY HAPPENING.

So, like, the Preservation test has them arrive in a Raghed camp where everyone has been killed except a nine-year-old kid. The PCs have to save him.

Wow.

Lucky thing that literally happened JUST as the PCs opened the magic door, right?

It gets dumber, though, because the PCs explicitly don’t have to all take the test at the same time. So after the first group goes through the test… what happens when the second group opens the same door?

In multiple places the adventure talks about the logistics of taking tests at different times on the VAULT side of the door, but never once explains what the second or third or fourth pass on a given test will look like for the characters actually taking it.

By the way, if you don’t get the Codicil out of the vault, the entire campaign breaks and you can’t play any more. So if the PCs fail the tests, some NPCs stop by and let them in.

…

All in all, Auril’s Abode is the only part of the adventure that I think is actually straight up crap. (Except for the art, which continues to be fabulous.)

This is a pity because this is THE adventure promised by the cover and title of the book.

When I got to this chapter I was literally rubbing my hands together with glee. HERE WE GO!

And then… Meh.

THE LOST CITY OF YTHRYN

Eighteen hundred years ago, Ythryn was a flying city and part of the Netherese Empire. A strange artifact caused the city’s mythallar to malfunction and it crashed into the Great Glacier. It has remained completely sealed off from the outside world ever since.

On that note, I’ve noticed a weird design tic in WotC adventures: Ancient ruins that have supposedly remained undiscovered and unknown for centuries, but which the PCs nevertheless reach by journeying through cosmopolitan caves filled to the brim with people.

Brief segue while we’re in these caves. This room is one of the funniest things I have ever read in a D&D adventure:

H21. FROZEN FROST GIANT

Entombed in the icy floor of this twenty-foot-high cave is the frozen, well-preserved corpse of a frost giant. Scratch marks in the ice suggest a half-hearted attempt to excavate the remains.

Really fantastic imagery here! Frozen ice cave. The creepy giant corpse. It’s super atmospheric. Memorable. Very cool. (Pun intended.) And enigmatic! How did he get here?

A city fell on him.

…

Not making this up. He was crushed to death when the flying city fell on top of him.

And, as we all know, when a city(!) falls on top of you, what happens is that your perfectly preserved corpse ends up flawlessly preserved in ice.

The best part is that if you look at the map, the city actually ended up directly BELOW him. So the city fell on him, crushed him to death (without mangling his body in any way), and then… phased through him to its final resting place?

In any case, the PCs eventually make their way through the caves and end up in the buried city of Ythryn. The book is a little vague on this, but the intention seems to be for the PCs to enter a huge cavern and be able to look down at the ruined city below them.

At which point you show them the Players’ Map of the whole thing:

Then they can explore the city by basically just pointing at cool stuff and saying, “Let’s go check that out!”

This isn’t the only way to run a ruined city scenario, but it’s a pretty great way to do it.

I do have a couple of quibbles here.

First, the scale of the city is such that you can walk across the whole thing in ten minutes, which seems to sap some of the epic scope. To be fair, this in itself is an attempt to compromise with the harsh realities of the 5^th edition core rules: Slow travel pace is 200 feet per minute in the core rules; here the writers invent a “cautious rate” of 200 feet every 5 minutes. On the other hand, the scale also doesn’t seem to sync up well with the individual building maps, so you could probably double the size of the city to no ill effect.

Second, one of my personal pet peeves is when building floorplans don’t match the picture of the building. But this becomes particularly egregious when the intended interaction of the game is literally “point at picture, then go to that place.” For example, the Spire of Iriolarthas:

The inset on this map actually hides the full extent of the problem here. If you look at the Players’ Map above, you can see that this is just the tippy-top of the central structure in the city. Where the heck is the rest of the building?!

But even just looking at the inset is rife with problems: Where are the missing floors that are clearly depicted between the three floors shown on the map? And did you notice the strut clearly connected to the High Court that leads to the other half of the spire?

THE END OF THE CAMPAIGN

In any case, here in Ythryn we have reached the end of the campaign… and it all just falls apart.

There are three options given in the book for how Rime of the Frostmaiden can end.

ENDING OPTION #1: Activate the Reset Obelisk (a powerful artifact in the city) and save Ythryn.

Here’s how that works:

1. The PCs take Iriolarthus’ staff of power.
2. The PCs use it to activate the Obelisk.

Why is this a problem?

Well, Iriolarthas is actually a Netherse wizard who has spent 1,800+ years trying to solve this problem. Despite his “best efforts” he’s been unable to do so, despite having trivial access to everything he needs. (The staff is literally sitting in his office.)

Now, Iriolarthas is currently a demi-lich and that would probably prevent him from doing this himself. But there are other people in the city who would gladly help (and do). Also, he didn’t become a demi-lich for a long, long time. (Which is why there was time for his “best efforts.”)

Also: He’s only a demi-lich because his phyalactery was buried in the ice when the city crashed, so he wasn’t able to physically access it to feed souls into it. (This is not how phylacteries work. As the Monster Manual says, “The phylactery must be on the same plane as the lich for the [soul-feeding] spell to work.”)

But the BIG problem is that:

• The city is stuck because X needs to be done.
• X could have been done at any time.

And it doesn’t make any sense. Nor is it made to make sense for the players.

Maybe the players don’t realize it and it’s fine. But I still think it’s a problem.

And the solution would be easy: The fix to the Obelisk just needs to be an out-of-context element. This would force the PCs to leave the city, get the thing they need (and which the people trapped in the city lacked), and then come back.

This would also help explain some of the timeline issues the finale struggles with, which brings us to…

ENDING OPTION #2: Use the Ythryn mythallar to cast control weather and end Auril’s winter!

The problem here is that this doesn’t actually work:

You can use the Ythryn mythallar to cast the control weather spell without requiring any components and without the need for you to be outdoors. This casting of the spell has a 50-mile radius. For the duration of the spell’s casting time, you must be within 30 feet of the Ythryn mythallar or the spell fails.

This is actually the second time the book has asserted that a magic item that casts control weather will solve the problem. But it doesn’t really hold up, because the spell only lasts for 8 hours and requires the user’s concentration. So unless the PCs want to spend the rest of their lives in Ythryn perpetually casting the spell three times a day, it won’t help.

Also, the 50 mile radius of the spell isn’t far enough to reach all of Ten-Towns.

On the other hand, it’s nice to have an alternative resolution to the Auril’s Winter plot than just killing Auril…

…except not really, because the adventure says that using the mythallar immediately causes Auril to show up and fight them to the death.

So it’s all pointless.

ENDING OPTION #3: Twenty-four hours after the PCs enter Ythryn, Auril shows up with a loudspeaker and says, “YOU HAVE TAKEN TOO LONG! LET’S FIGHT!”

And then she fights to the death. Or whatever.

Mostly I don’t understand the design decision behind the timeline here:

• The PCs reach Ythryn.
• 12 hours later, competing archaeological teams arrive in the city.
• 12 hours after that, Auril shows up, summarily executes the competing archaeological teams, and triggers the endgame.

This seems like an interesting, dynamic situation for the PCs to interact with. (Think about the cat-and-mouse game between Indiana Jones and Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark.) But it seems as if the timeline has been set up just to punish PCs who take long rests in the city by giving the “bad ending.”

The other problem here is that Auril’s appearance feels arbitrary. You could trigger this, “THE TIME HAS COME FOR THE END OF THIS CAMPAIGN!” encounter at literally any point in the campaign and it would make as much sense as it does here. It doesn’t really proceed from everything the PCs have been doing, so it doesn’t feel like a culmination or a conclusion. It doesn’t resolve the story, because the PCs’ story hasn’t been about Auril.

You might also note that both Ending Option #2 and Ending Option #3 become null and void if the PCs killed Auril back at Auril’s Abode. This is a problem that often blights adventures in which a pseudo-sandbox gets welded onto the side of a railroad: The author (or GM) basically says, “Look at how much freedom you have! You even have the freedom to screw up the plot I’ve prepared!”

But then, if the players do that, the story doesn’t actually move in a new direction, it just continues shambling through the now empty and meaningless scaffolding of the prepared plot.

THE MISCELLANEOUS MISSES

Now that we’ve reached the end, let’s talk about a handful of other problems I had with the book — the smaller details that haven’t really fit into the discussion so far.

For example, three hundred page adventures need indexes. And if you don’t have an index, you’d better make really, really, really sure that the table of contents doesn’t have errors in it.

On a similar note, there’s a lot of basic continuity errors in the book. In one of the most egregious examples, a key piece of information the players need to finish the campaign is given in two contradictory forms on the same page.

REPUTATION SYSTEM: Given the nature of the Icewind Dale sandbox, the designers clearly realized that it would be really cool to have a reputation system. For example, they write:

Once the characters reach 4^th level, they no long [sic] gain levels by completing the quests in this chapter. Even so, completing more than the required number of quests can improve their standing in Ten-Towns (see “Reputation in Ten-Towns” below)…

Unfortunately, two paragraphs later they say, “Eh. Fuck it.”

The adventuring party’s reputation in Ten-Towns improves as the characters gain levels, with the following results:

When the characters reach 3rd level, they [list of stuff].

When the characters reach 4th level, they [list of stuff].

So you keep gaining reputation even when you’re not gaining levels, but the only way reputation is tracked is by what level you are?

C’mon, man.

Furthermore, the only function of “reputation” is to unlock the Chapter 2 rumor table.

So why not just… do that? As written, it would be best to just drop the reputation “system” entirely.

Which is unfortunate, because a solid reputation system could really heighten the story of Icewind Dale and make it viscerally meaningful: The players would really be able to feel themselves becoming heroes of the Dale, and those mechanics would feed back into the narrative of rising up, overthrowing the Frostmaiden, and leading Icewind Dale out of her horrible winter.

IGNORE THE RULES! There are a lot of places in Icewind Dale where the book says, “The rules say this doesn’t work, so the rules don’t apply.”

For example, the chardalyn dragon is allowed to ignore environmental effects so that it doesn’t fall out of the sky. In another place, the authors want to have a very specific haunted house story, so they just arbitrarily declare that the ghost can’t be turned.

This is often just gratuitous. For example, the dragon would fall out of the sky because it doesn’t have a hover speed. But it’s a completely artificial dragon… why not just give it a hover speed? (Given that it’s kind of a steampunk creation made from evil crystals, I argue that giving it VTOL steam jets would just make it more badass.)

You probably won’t be surprised to discover that I’m not a big fan of this. It’s just not that hard to design stuff that works right with the rules.

BREAKING THE FOURTH WALL: I’ve mentioned this briefly above, but there are actually multiple points in the book where an NPC basically says, “Thou art not yet experienced enough! Return when thou hast attained a higher level!”

It’s kind of gauche. Frankly, I find this sort of, “You need to gain 500 XP before you can access this content!” stuff pretty off-putting even in a video game. In a tabletop RPG? It’s completely unacceptable.

BOXED TEXT: Quite a bit of boxed text in Rime of the Frostmaiden is very bad. Take this example from the caves around Yrkyth:

Frost-covered blocks of stone jut from the floor of this ten-foot-high cave of ice. Perched atop the largest stone is an emaciated kobold with glowing red eyes. It bares elongated fangs as it hisses at you, then scampers away.

First, there are too many places where the action (or inaction) of the PCs are assumed. That’s a big no-no.

But the really odd thing I found here was how often the boxed text wasn’t actually describing the thing it was purportedly describing.

It was here in the caves that I finally figured out why, because the boxed text in the caves is constantly telling you the height of the ceiling but absolutely nothing else about the shape or dimensions of the area.

…

Did you figure it out?

The adventure is written exclusively for GMs using virtual tabletops. The assumption is that the GM won’t bother describing the room because the players can just see the map displayed on their computer screens.

Here’s a more egregious example from earlier in the book:

The room is clearly designed for the PCs to investigate the tool-covered table and the bookcase, but the description of the room doesn’t mention that they exist. And, yes, the answer is that you can see the table and the bookcase on the map.

THE STANDOUT MOMENTS

Remember at the beginning of all this that I said I liked the book quite a bit? But I’ve been analyzing its shortcomings for a few thousand words now, and that can leave a somewhat lop-sided impression. So I’d like to close things out by calling out some of the really nice stuff that the book does.

For example, the book introduces domesticated axe beaks which are used as mounts and pack beasts in Icewind Dale. And they’re awesome:

CUSTOMIZED CHARACTER CREATION: Icewind Dale also does a fantastic job of customizing character creation:

• It personalizes the scenario hooks by tying them to specific Backgrounds.
• It includes customized starting equipment appropriate for the setting.
• It includes a new option for a PC race in the Goliaths. (Even if no one picks the option, its availability still sets a tone.)
• It has a cool set of Character Secrets, most of which are tangibly tied to various elements of the sandbox.

There are all fairly minor things, but that’s kind of what makes them great. It really shows how just a few light touches can make character creation feel unique and special; investing the players in the feel and color of the campaign before play ever begins.

Playtest Tip: I’ve found that the Character Secrets tend to be the definitional aspect of character concept/background. So if you’re using them, you’ll probably want to deal them out up front so that people can build their characters around their secret. You can ameliorate this to some extent by dealing two or three secrets to each player and letting them choose.

WEATHER CONDITIONS: The designers use extreme weather conditions (particularly blizzards) to attempt to reintroduce some of the difficulties (or, more accurately, the interesting complications) of overland travel that 5^th Edition’s core design generally stripped out of the game.

Icewind Dale isn’t really exploration-based, so getting lost in a blizzard, for example, doesn’t contribute to the navigational puzzle which would be found in such games. But it DOES create a dramatic tone: it brings Auril’s curse into the narrative at a fundamental level.

NON-COMBAT SUPPORT: Icewind Dale also does a great job of supporting non-combat resolutions and goals.

In Caer-Dineval, for example, the Knights of the Black Sword push hard for an alliance with the PCs, in a way that feels like it could reasonably happen (at least for awhile).

The Caer-Konig quest that takes you to a duergar outpost is primarily framed around “get our stolen stuff back,” which is a sharp contrast to the usual “clear the dungeon” goal found in a lot of published modules. (This pairs well with the xandered entrance to the outpost, which allows the PCs to either assault the main door or attempt to breach the complex through a bunker.)

The book also generally provides this support while avoiding contingency planning (which is the other typical pit trap scenarios can fall into with this).

For similar reasons, I like the Good Mead quest in which the PCs clear the dungeon… but then, after they’ve done so, a different bad guy shows up while they’re still there, likely inverting their relationship with the dungeon (so that they need to defend what they just invaded).

GREAT GRAPHICAL DESIGN: It’s unsurprising to discover that Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden continues Wizards of the Coast’s fantastic graphical design (samples of which you’ve seen throughout this review.)

I’ve already mentioned the fantastic art illustrating even the weaker parts of the adventure, like Auril’s Abode. But this also extends to even the smallest details. For example, I simply adore this magic ring:

I want to own one in real life.

The advantages of Wizard’s graphical design extend beyond the book itself. For example, consider the stunningly beautiful (and incredibly massive!) chardalyn dragon miniature from Wizkids:

These rich graphical resources and other enhancements are a huge value add to your campaign that can be difficult or impossible to replicate otherwise.

These strong graphics are frequently paired to some fantastically flavorful material.

For example, I love the random encounter with Arveiaturace the White Wyrm: “…the dragon is buried under heavy snow. Her [dead rider who she once served and is still strapped to her back] is visible above the surface, looking like a frozen corpse in the snow. If the characters are close enough to touch the corpse, they’re already standing on the dragon’s back.”

That’s so unique, cool, and totally terrifying.

Gotta love it. Can’t wait to run it.

Style: 5
Substance: 3

Story Creator & Lead Writer: Christopher Perkins
Writing Team: Stacey Allan, Bill Benham, H.H. Carlan, Celese Conowitch, Dan Dillon, Will Doyle, Mikayla Ebel, Anne Gregersen, Chad Quandt, Morrigan Robbins, Ashley Warren
Rules Development: Jeremy Crawford, Dan Dillon, Ben Petrisor, Taymoor Rehman
World Building: John Francis Daley, Crystal Frasier, Jonathan Goldstein, Ed Greenwood, Amanda Hamon, Adam Lee, Ari Levitch, Mike Mearls, Christopher Perkins, Jessica Price, R.A. Salvatore, Kate Welch, Shawn Wood

Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $49.95
Page Count: 320

Go to Icewind Dale Index

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

Go to Part 1

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:

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.

The concept of an RPG sandbox campaign often gets mixed up with a lot of other things. Some of these are common structures used for sandboxes (like hexcrawls). Others are just misnomers (like sandboxes being the opposite of a railroad).

(Quick definition: A sandbox campaign is one in which the players are empowered to either choose or define what their next scenario is going to be. Hexcrawls are a common sandbox structure because geographical navigation becomes a default method for choosing scenarios, which are keyed to the hexes you’re navigating between.)

Other conflations are subtler. A particularly common one is to conflate simulationism with the sandbox structure. One major appeal of the sandbox can be that it allows players to feel as if they’re “living in the world” because they’re free to do “anything,” which has a fairly large overlap with what people enjoy about simulationism.

But simulationism is not required for sandbox play.

A good example of this is the chardalyn dragon from Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden.

SPOILER WARNING!

When the PCs approach a particular location on the map (Xardorok’s fortress), this triggers an event in which the dragon flies away to cause some havoc. In discussing this as part of a sandbox scenario, I was challenged: How could it be a sandbox if it was dramatically triggered by the PCs’ approach?

(Note: I’m just talking about triggering the dragon flight here. Shortly thereafter Rime of the Frostmaiden ALSO has an NPC show up to trigger a linear plot that ends the sandbox. I’m not talking about her. Just the dragon.)

The confusion here is due to the conflation of the sandbox structure and simulationism. A simulationist wouldn’t trigger the dragon based on the PCs’ approach. They’d probably do something like have Xardorok’s construction of the dragon be on a schedule with the dragon being released when Xardorok completes it, regardless of whether or not the PCs have found Xardorok’s fortress yet. (There are also other simulationist techniques that could be used here.)

But a sandbox isn’t dependent on simulationism. There’s nothing about dramatically triggering an event which is incompatible with the players remaining empowered to choose and define their scenario.

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Travel times in Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden are somewhat confusing and difficult to reference. Due to the harsh winter conditions of the Dale, the normal rules for overland travel in 5^th Edition don’t apply. Instead:

The speed that characters can travel across Icewind Dale’s rough, snowy terrain is given in the Overland Travel table. Travel is less time-consuming on the snowy roads and trails that connect the settlements of Ten-Towns, as discussed in Chapter 1.

If you look up the equipment entry for dogsleds, there’s also this rule:

Sled dogs must take a short rest after pulling a sled for 1 hour; otherwise, they gain one level of exhaustion.

It’s unclear whether this rule is already calculated into the distance per hour for dogsleds given on the Method of Travel table.

The guidelines for road/trail travel in Chapter 1 are not generalized, but are instead presented in sections like this one (for the town of Bremen):

Heavy snow has obliterated the trail that once guided travelers to Targos. Adventurers determined to make the journey on foot can reach Targos in 2 hours. Using mounts or dogsleds can reduce this travel time by as much as 50 percent.

No specific speed for road travel is given, but if you run the numbers they tend to land somewhere between 1.25 and 2.25 miles per hour.

The book also includes incredibly awesome axe beak mounts… but neglects to give a speed for them.

RECOMMENDED TRAVEL RULES

Dogsleds: These rules assume that dogsleds increase their speed in the same ratio as humans do on the roads. These travel times include 1 hour of rest for every hour of travel. Double the speed if the dogs are not being given rest, but they suffer 1 level of exhaustion per hour (which means after the second hour of being pushed their speed will be halved).

Axe Beaks: I’ve arbitrarily decided they move very well through snow or across trackless tundra, but perform like a normal mount on roads (traveling at the same speed as a humanoid). On roads, this means axe beak mounts can gallop at 6 miles per hour, but at the cost of suffering 2 levels of exhaustion per hour. (This means that after the first hour of a gallop, their speed will be halved.)

On Foot: Snowshoes don’t help on roads.

OPTIONAL: TRAVEL PACE

In modifying the rules for overland travel, Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden doesn’t specify how travel pace should be handled. If you assume the table above lists a Normal pace of travel, you can use the table below to calculate Fast and Slow paces.

Fast Pace: -5 penalty to passive Wisdom (Perception) scores

Slow Pace: Able to use Stealth

Design Note: The comparison between dogsleds under snowy conditions and horses under normal conditions gets wonky. This is because Icewind Dale reduces human speed by two-thirds, but then has dogsleds moving at twice that speed. The net result is that you end up with dogs in snow being faster than horses on open ground. However, my research indicates these values are broadly accurate for how dogsleds perform in the real world, so I’m going to let the book values stand.

OPTIONAL RULE: DETERIORATING ROADS

Although the roads between the settlements of Ten-Towns are still kept open and trade is mostly uninterrupted, the Frostmaiden’s eternal winter has pushed the region’s infrastructure to the breaking point. Drifting snow and frequent blizzards can effectively obliterate the road between two towns.

There is a 1 in 6 chance of encountering an obliterated road (check for each section of the road).

It is still possible to follow the track of an obliterated road (due to tall waymarker posts that still manage to rise above the ever-growing snowpack), but characters on an obliterated road cannot travel faster than Slow Pace. Furthermore, the group’s navigator must make a DC 12 Wisdom (Survival) check each hour or veer off the road.

If the check fails, the party wanders off course and gets no closer to their destination in that hour. It takes an additional check to find the road again, with each failure costing the group an additional hour.

REFERENCE TOOLS

I also thought it would be useful to compile the travel data into some easy-to-use references, which you’ll find below.

MAP: TRAVEL TIME

(click for large map)

This map compiles the travel times given in each town’s entry in the Rime of the Frostmaiden. It turns out, however, that these values are inconsistent with each other along the Eastway. They’ve been adjusted for consistency here (which, of course, means that some of these values will be slightly out of sync with the book).

Note: The path between Bremen and Targos has been “obliterated,” which appears to roughly double what would otherwise be the travel time between these towns. If you’re using the optional rules for deteriorating roads, you’ll want to take this into account.

MAP: TRAVEL DISTANCE

This map lists the distance in miles between each settlement. These distances are calculated directly from the poster map that comes with the book, using the included scale and following the precise path of the trail/road indicated.

(Technically I used the D&D Beyond version of the map, and then used Adobe Illustrator to trace each path and then precisely calculate its length.)

If you calculate the travel times from the distances given here, you will not end up with the travel times given Travel Time Map. This is because the travel times given in the book are all radically inconsistent: Routes are referred to indiscriminately as roads, trails, or paths. Some routes are referred to as being blocked or obliterated. But none of these descriptions have any relation, as far as I can tell, to the variances in travel time given.

ICEWIND DALE TRAVEL SPREADSHEET

You can download an Excel spreadsheet with Icewind Dale travel information here. It contains the following sheets:

• Rounded Distance: As noted above, I calculated precise distances from the original map. This sheet rounds those distances to the nearest half mile.
• Travel Time (Foot): This sheet has the travel time in hours between all ten towns. These values are calculated using the values on the Rounded Distance sheet and the recommended travel rules above (not the time values given in the book).
• Travel Time (Dogsled): Same thing, but for dogsleds.
• Travel Time (Dogsled – No Rest): Same thing, but this assumes the party is pushing their mush team to the limits without any rest. These values have been manually adjusted where necessary to reflect that the speed of the dogs’ becomes halved after two hours due to exhaustion. Some journeys will kill the dogs if they are not allowed to rest, and this is also indicated.
• Raw Distance Data: This is the original, raw distance data as directly measured from the original map. It’s included mainly as a curiosity here.

All of these tables include an entry for “Intersection,” which is the intersection between the Eastway and the north-south road running from Dougan’s Hole to Caer-Konig.

Icons by Delapouite. Used under CC BY 3.0 license.

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