OSSR: Frostburn
Chapter Seven: Adventure Sites
There bear is cold and lonely.
AncientH
Jesus Iceskating Christ, I would rather have ten more pages of Mutant Penguins and Walrus-Men with magical tattoos than read
thirty-two pages covering two EL 5 drop-in challenges.
This is explicitly the kind of shit that you're supposed to put online or in Dungeon Magazine, not a goddamn book.
Frank
While Dungeons & Dragons has always had at its disposal efficient means of presenting information about
enemies, the means to effectively present information about adventuring locales has not been as easy to hand. Threading the needle between short and incomprehensibly telegraphic on the one hand; and ponderously overlong on the other is just not actually a simple problem. There isn't even a sweet spot, as more fantastic locations
require more explanation to avoid incoherence.
The natural tendency as 3.5 progressed was for increasing text bloat and reduced content density. But this wasn't a smooth process by any means. There were individual Dungeon Magazine articles that were better or worse written, and you had adventures that were better or worse written than things that came both immediately before and after. The overall arc was mostly caused by a combination of word processors and electronic publication making it very easy to put together a large draft in a hurry and the attrition of the original 3rd edition design crew who both “gave a shit” and “knew how the rules worked.”
This chapter is kind of a 32 page nothing burger, but it's fucking
nothing to shit that came later.
AncientH
I think it is critically important at this point to emphasize that yes, it is good to have an ice wizard in an ice castle with lots of minions. It was good enough for Lone Wolf, godsdammit.
...that being said, Delzomen's Iceforge is just fucking stupid. Why the fuck does a human wizard powerful enough to create
simulacra need to replace a bunch of dwarfs one-at-a-time? And what do you do with it once the ice wizard is dead? Is there anything wrong with just having the ice-wizard
hire the fucking dwarfs to build his ice-dungeon, so that players can have a nice little bit of introducing their daggers to the mage's back at the end? DID WE NEED THE GODDAMNED BACKSTORY?
No, we did not.
Frank
Our first adventuring location is presented both as ruin intended to be explored by fifth level adventurers, and also as the old stomping grounds of a 13th level (or high) Wizard that is covered in more gold worth of blue ice than a 5th level party is supposed to see in the next seven levels worth of dragon hoards. This is a fundamental issue with how 3rd edition tried to do wealth by level. In addition to the Murder Hobo and the Christmas Tree problems we talked about earlier, there was a thing called “Greyhawking.” That is: if your character's power is directly affected by how much loot they bring back home, it simply pays to really
loot things. And once players get into that mindset, you can't really have cool shit in the
scenery. Obsidian pillars and glorious tapestries and shit have a monetary value, and you could put them into an ox cart if you were sufficiently disrespectful of future archaeologists.
So this book didn't get the memo. There was a wizard who was going to make an army of simulacra using powerful magics and the walls of his house were made of awesome somewhat expensive semi-magic ice. Pretty cool, but the moment someone in the party figures out what the cost of the walls are
per kilogram, your experiment with playing 3rd edition D&D by the rules as written has just abruptly ended one way or the other.
AncientH
There is a map, although not a
good one. There's a tribe of Neanderthals squatting at the entrance then you go down into the dungeon proper, where it's all simulacra.
Which sort of underlines one of the basic problems with an environment-themed adventure dungeon: the danger presented by the dungeon is inversely proportional to your knowledge of the dangers in said dungeon. If you're going into a frostfell dungeon, people are going to bring their fur capes and
potions of endure elements and
staff of burning shit and flasks of burning oil and all that sort of thing. When all your enemies are presumably vulnerable to fire
you pack fire.
It's a lot more interesting if you come across an
unexpected environmental peril. You're delving in a dungeon in a nice, seismically inactive mountain and come across a hot spot with a pool of lava and the temperature shoots up to 100 degrees Celsius and you're not ready for it, and you're probably
really not ready for the Magmin chillin' in the lava pool.
But if you know in advance you're going into a frostfell dungeon, your PCs are presumably going to pack accordingly, provided they have the means and wherewithal to do so.
Or they go unprotected into the elements and die.
That's not exactly
heroic.
Realistic, yes. But giving a Total Party Kill to a fucking snowstorm isn't exactly something that's going to endear you to the players. So there is that fundamental challenge to be set: the players have to be made to realize
and accept the danger. But it then becomes more difficult to make a proper challenge because...your players are ready for what they expect you to throw at them.
Frank
I kind of feel like Delzomen's Ice Forge was written with a D&D themed game of Apples to Apples or Madlibs. It's a
Wizard's Factory filled with
Neanderthals . Jigga
whut?
There's not a lot of
connection between the ideas here. The Neanderthals are planning to use some magic weaponry they found to attack some villages, but they haven't done that yet so there's no reason for the player characters to get involved on that end. The Neanderthals didn't have any particular reason to have found and claimed some of the weaponry in the Ice Forge, they apparently just found it randomly after being encroached upon by civilization.
A larger question is why these guys are Neanderthals at all. This story would work just as well if there were Ogres. And if you needed them to be guys from this book for marketing reasons they could jolly well be Snow Goblins. What I'm saying is that having supposedly civilized heroes go genocide Neanderthals on the edge of livable environments is a bit
on the nose. And also too the word Neanderthal is a bit real and sciency for my personal elf game preferences and I doubt I'm alone in that. Even if you're committed to Clan of the Cave Bear fanfic in your D&D, I feel like you should use Orcs instead actual human “primitives.” Nothing good has ever come from referring to groups of humans as primitives.
The juxtaposition of cave paintings and furs and a trashed magic workshop is the kind of thing that you could get really philosophical about. What good is your knowledge and technology when in the end it's going to be swallowed by an uncaring nature and post apocalyptic scavengers will use your astrolabe to crush seeds? But if any of the authors were thinking that deeply about this scenario, they kept that shit to themselves. I suspect the Madlibs explanation is more accurate – there are simply discordant concepts in this adventure because there are multiple cooks. The book has three authors, but it also has
four people on the development team and it's edited by the woman who wrote the Book of Erotic Fantasy. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this was originally supposed to be a high level fight in a mad wizard's workshop and someone with a nameplate on their desk wanted it lower level and someone else with a nameplate wanted to show off more of the humanoids from this book and someone else with a nameplate wanted more cowbell and so on.
AncientH
I should emphasize that despite being called an iceforge, there is only one room in this dungeon dedicated to
forging ice, and I don't know why it is here because the glacier dwarfs very patently mined and forged the blue ice somewhere else. The blue ice plates were technically "forged," so it would be more appropriate to say this was
Iceforged, like we were in Dwarf Fortress.
Also,
why the fuck was this place not just carved out of a goddamn glacier to begin with? Fantasy global climate change? The whole blue ice schtick is something that makes sense if this was in a goddamn jungle or desert, but it's explicitly
not in a hot and/or arid region. Which would actually be the best fucking place to put it, since no-one would really expect a bunch of ice critters in a region under the burning sands. (Also because the wizard could probably have made a side business selling ice if he located his dungeon at a minor oasis.)
I shouldn't make such noise about the whole thing, since a large part of this was patently an effort to drop as much Frostburn-themed crap into the player character's laps as could easily be done. Your great prize at the end of this icy dungeon are three spellbooks with no stats or descriptions which can contain whatever the goddamn Mister Cavern wants. Literally:
m. These spellbooks provide a good way to introduce any of the new wizard spells from this book to your characters.
You lazy fucking hacks.
Frank
If you actually get all the way into the sealed off areas of the Ice Forge, shit gets weird. With remaining constructs made of snow. The previous occupant made a bunch of snow constructs of various random monsters and set them to tasks. It's a classic dungeon, combining the well worn concepts of “a Wizard did it” with “monsters and treasures are in a series of locked rooms for some reason.” Gygax approves of your offering!
The final battle is with the undead remains of a failed mind transfer into a robot made of snow. I am pretty sure that's not how anything works, since snow robots don't even leave behind bodies to turn into zombies. Also, there's a dead wizard right next to the pile of ex-robot snow and it feels like in an earlier draft the
wizard rose as an Ice Gaunt, because that would make a lot more sense.
AncientH
It doesn't really matter. This dungeon would be 100% better without any of the backstory. Random dungeon covered with blue ice in an unexpected locale! Full of strange and exotic ice magic and terrible dangers! Can you wrest the secrts of the frostfell from their cold dead hands?
That is what the pitch of this locale should have been.
The painful fucking thing about this is: there are frozen adventures in Dungeon Magazine. They could have just dusted one off, updated the stats, given somebody a credit and republished the thing in a bright and shiny new Frostburn(TM) edition. But they didn't.
Anyway. Moving on.
Frank
Icerazer
Icerazer is an evil city full of villains that is built onto an iceberg. It floats around the polar seas and like pirates and devil worshipers call to port. It's... fine. I would have Dungeons & Dragons adventures there. Well... maybe
one Dungeons & Dragons adventure there.
You need evil cities full of villains sometimes, and a mobile island docked at by pirates is fine. This fills a decent niche.
AncientH
The main problems with an iceberg city are what you might expect: it's built on ice, which is inherently fragile, mobile, and has few natural resources. Now you can
live on an iceberg if you're careful about it - hunt up food from the sea, melt some of it down for drinking water, try to stay away from the edges where it will crumble away or smash into things - but it's still a bit of a stretch to imagine an iceberg a couple miles in diameter that can float indefinitely without either going too far south or just running into shit.
Also, I stopped reading the backstory after this:
the powerful half-fiend harpy assassin Azediel
Note: If you have to tell someone your Mary Sue is powerful,
they are not powerful.
Frank
For reasons that defy ready analysis, someone tried their hand at fanfiction involving a Rimefire Eidolon getting stabbed with Stygian Ice and exploding. And I kinda lost the plot, or maybe the authors did because I don't know what the fuck any of that has to do with pirates setting up a base of operations in an iceberg city. I suspect the work of Madlibs again, with the development team demanding sacrifices in the form of more internal references so that they could showcase material from the book.
Anyway, the book tries to sell me on a World of Darkness style government for this place with people having titles like Ninerazers, Razerwings, and Axelords. I've already stopped caring and so have you.
AncientH
Honestly, this could just be an island not on any charts. It would be a lot less stupid.
Anyway, population 5,800. I'd personally qualify that as a town, but whatever. Mostly snow goblins, orcs, tieflings, humans - presumably these have some strong nautical tradition, since this is supposed to be a pirate city, which begs the question: what the fuck are they pirating? Why is Icerazor a base of operations for pirates? Is it a place where you can fence the loot your stole from the dwarf ironclad icebreakers traveling the Northwest Passage, or do the orcs steal magical narwhal tusks from the Snow Elf whaling fleets, or what? I have no idea, and that's a problem. You can't just plop some pirates down in the middle of nowhere. You need to give us some idea of why and how these people can fucking survive.
Frank
The floorplans for Icerazer Palace and the various encounters with the devil leaders and shit are all meticulously written up. The problem is that you're never going to use this because the game breaks down well before 15th level. This whole place is a victim of other flaws in the system. In abstract I'd be totally happy to lay siege to a town full of devil worshipers and pirates, but the game falls apart at high levels for all the reasons we've discussed elsewhere in this review.
There's all the pieces of a classic brutal AD&D style dungeon crawl with caverns under the palace and shit. But none of that fucking matters because you are definitely not going to do an Against The Giants style attrition run in 3rd edition D&D with 15th level characters. That's just
definitely not a thing you're going to do.
This whole section is written to spec. The text boxes say the correct things as dictated by the rules of the edition they were written for. It's just, this edition should have been less shitty about stuff exactly like this. There are a few places I'd improve the text of this section, but the bottom line is that it needed a major overhaul. It's like the epic spells from earlier in this book – the official guidelines were followed but you aren't going to use them because the official guidelines were bad.
AncientH
THey want you to care about the ice palace and stuff, but honestly they should be concerned about why the PCs want to go there. Are
they pirates? Are they fighting pirates? Is there a slave auction block they can free, or a place where they can safely fence stolen goods? I mean, over 5,000 beings live here and they live on an iceberg that doesn't grow shit. They must have some sort of operation to bring in booze and food at least, but we never see it.
Also, and I acknowledge this is a quibble, the CR 19 "Arch-priestess" harpy furry fapfest doesn't actually have any ranks in a divine spellcaster class. Which irks me for several reasons, none of which are terribly relevant here.
Frank
Next up: The Appendix!
Well, just kidding, there's virtually nothing in the Appendix except some wilderness encounter tables. The next bit is actually going to be the wrapup.