Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden is a thematic masterpiece crammed with horror, chills, and risks, whereas additionally offering the DM with maneuverability to craft the journey based mostly on their on tastes and the wants of their occasion. Each yr, Dungeons & Dragons releases a single full-length marketing campaign that units the tone for a full yr of adventures in Organized Play, streaming games, and residential games. This yr’s journey is Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, an journey set within the iconic locale of Icewind Dale made well-known by R.A. Salvatore’s Drizzt novels. Rime of the Frostmaiden builds off of the missteps of earlier adventures, giving DMs loads of materials to work with whereas not forcing gamers to go down the street of a single storyline to its end.
The greatest innovation in Rime of the Frostmaiden is how the journey itself flows. Through certainly one of two opening quests, gamers study concerning the minor goddess Auril the Frostmaiden and her function in inserting Icewind Dale beneath an everlasting winter. At first, this perpetual state of snow is merely a backdrop as gamers discover the icy north, confronting killer moose, exploring deserted pirate ships, and discovering a analysis station pulled straight out of John Carpenter’s The Thing. However, the journey finally shifts to the perpetual winter enjoying a extra lively function in events- duergar invade the floor because the winter negates their pure sensitivity to daylight, unleashing an enormous and epic assault on the settlements of Ten-Towns. From there, gamers might be recruited to cease the everlasting winter, a quest that leads gamers into Auril’s wintry retreat and to an historic metropolis crammed with forgotten magic.
The key to Rime of the Frostmaiden is that most of the storylines can both be used as the main target of the entire marketing campaign, performed individually, or eliminated with out a lot consequence to the general story. For occasion, the duergar invasion acts as a catalyst for the gamers taking on the search to cease Auril’s everlasting winter, however DMs can select to disregard that storyline (as the specter of everlasting winter alone ought to be sufficient an impetus to battle Auril with out prompting) or finish the marketing campaign with the gamers standing victorious over the duergar. Save for the ultimate two components of the marketing campaign, every chapter principally stands alone, offering the DM a bit of bit of additional room to take away the weather they do not like with out destroying the integrity of the general journey. Each chapter explains the way it flows into the general story, and a DM ought to have the ability to use these parts to make modifications as vital.
Another half I loved about Rime of the Frostmaiden is its emphasis on remoted journey hooks and encounters. The first two chapters function each a marketing campaign setting information for Ten-Towns and Icewind Dale and as a compendium of quick encounters, lots of which might be pulled out of the e book and utilized in any journey. There’s additionally quite a lot of nods to numerous horror motion pictures and different popular culture cameos. In addition to a fantasy recreation of The Thing, there are homages to Alien, The Shining, and At the Mountains of Madness that gamers would possibly choose up on. There’s even a reference to the frozen corpses that dot Mount Everest that serves as grim landmarks to these making the climb.
As famous within the preliminary announcement, Rime of the Frostmaiden has dozens of recent creature statblocks, though 12 of them are humanoid NPCs. Notably, the magen (magical constructs created by wizards) make their return within the e book, as do the monstrous Tomb Tappers that guard historic Netherese ruins. My favourite new monsters are doubtless the unusual new thoughts flayers that come armed with laser pistols and the Coldlight Walker that serves as a direct homage to The Thing. The new monster statblocks aren’t precisely mindblowing, however they do add a splash of recent selection to the nonetheless comparatively small pool of monsters made for 5E. The journey additionally comprises a number of new magic objects and spells, the latter of which is a primary for a D&D journey.
While it is hardly the main target of the journey, there may be one very intriguing plot level that seems in Rime of the Frostmaiden that doubtlessly opens the D&D franchise as much as a world of prospects. The mysterious obelisks which have appeared in previous adventures are lastly defined in Rime of the Frostmaiden, and so they doubtlessly result in a brand new marketing campaign setting of types that hasn’t been elaborated on in Fifth Edition. It’ll be fascinating to see if Dungeons & Dragons follows up on this thread in any respect, or if it simply exists as a nod to each the previous of the franchise and as a approach for DMs to construct a brand new world that has solely the scantest hyperlinks to the Sword Coast.
Reactions to earlier D&D adventures have been decidedly combined, however I really feel like Rime of the Frostmaiden shall be well-received by each gamers and DMs. There aren’t any obvious flaws or complicated gimmicks that crippled the journey, and the journey permits for gamers to progress as slowly or rapidly as they’d like. The e book additionally continues the great practices began in different adventures, resembling offering a number of endings based mostly on the selections remodeled the course of the marketing campaign.
Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden is the strongest marketing campaign e book launched by Wizards of the Coast since Curse of Strahd. It has the potential to be an instantaneous basic and can doubtless be fondly remembered by adventurers for years to come back.
Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden goes on sale on Setpember 15th.
