OSSR: Frostburn

[ColorBlindNinja61]

No, there does not seem to be a limit on that.

Upon rereading it (again) it appears that is correct. There is no limit on how many times it can split.

[DrPraetor]

In the spirit of freedom and MLK day, I'm going to conjure an old canard, and disagree that open multi-classing is impossible. It's impossible to balance perfectly, but no-one needs that, you just need better balance than a 13th level ranger getting camouflage while the 13th level wizard gets force cage.

So we want to balance a Fighter 9, an Assassin 9, and a Fighter 4 / Assassin 5. Well, if the Fighter 9 and Assassin 9 both get 5th Circle abilities, then the Fighter 4 / Assassin 5 has to get those too.

First pass at balancing this, the Fighter 9 gets 3 5th circle fighter abilities, the Assassin 9 gets 3 5th circle assassin abilities, and the Fighter 4 / Assassin 5 to get one 5th circle assassin ability and one 5th circle ability that can be either fighter or assassin. Now of itself this isn't going to be balanced, because although the F4/A5 only gets two abilities instead of three, his F ability is usable at will (and will be the cream of the crop) while his A ability is usable whenever he successfully studies a target (likewise), meaning less redundancy.

So to balance things out a bit more, F9 and A9 need to have additional class features or something that the F4/A5 doesn't get.

The result is going to be far from perfect - even in an ideal situation, non-synergy multi-class combinations are going to be weaker than the curve, while synergistic multi-class combinations are going to be stronger than the curve. It would also be easy to fall into one of two degenerate solutions, where single-class or multi-class characters are a trap option.

But the bar is very low - as long as the difference is smaller than "I can hide in front of the bushes!" vs. "I can go toe to toe with a death slaad", things will limp along.

And people really like open multi-classing.

That said, I think forbidding open multi-classing, writing up a bunch of hybrid classes, and then having shorter progressions divided into tiers, is a better solution and easier to balance. But that doesn't mean open multiclassing is some kind of impossibility.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

But the bar is very low - as long as the difference is smaller than "I can hide in front of the bushes!" vs. "I can go toe to toe with a death slaad", things will limp along.

And people really like open multi-classing.

As bad as 3.5's multiclassing system is, I think 5e's is worse. If that even needed to be said.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

It needed to be said, and you need to say more about it. Possibly in a different thread, because I'm not quite sure how we got onto multiclassing.

[Ancient History]

Review paused until tomorrow, because I just drove 6.5 hours and I need sleep to work tomorrow.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

It needed to be said, and you need to say more about it. Possibly in a different thread, because I'm not quite sure how we got onto multiclassing.

Not much to say about 5e's multiclassing. It's a mess with a ton of special snowflake rules for how the classes interact.

Spellcasting is particularly bad and if I recall correctly, a Wizard can take a 1 level dip in Cleric and gain the entire Cleric's spell list.

EDIT: Also as a topic multiclassing was brought up in the OSSR itself.

[Ancient History]

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.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

It was good enough for Lone Wolf, godsdammit.

I actually discovered that Lone Wolf was a thing this year. He even has a recent and shitty video game! You're literally the first person I've ever seen mention that... franchise? Maybe that's too strong a word.

While we're mentioning derivative 1980's fantasy and ice palaces, any nods to Fire and Ice in this book? Giant walls of ice? Some implausibly frozen tits, at least? We've got subhumans, but they were already in D&D.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

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.

I find it fascinating how virtually every high level adventure in 3.X was clearly not designed with the abilities of high level PCs in mind.

And that 4e has the exact opposite problem where they try to convince you it's a high level adventure, but it's basically the same game as before but with bigger numbers.

[Ancient History]

While we're mentioning derivative 1980's fantasy and ice palaces, any nods to Fire and Ice in this book? Giant walls of ice? Some implausibly frozen tits, at least? We've got subhumans, but they were already in D&D.

No. There's not even sleds drawn by polar bears, a la the Eternal Champion.

OSSR: Frostburn

Appendix: Encounter Tables

AncientH

Oh my frozen fuck. What goddamn edition are we in? Who in Ithaqua's icy name put these tables together?

Table A-1 takes the cake. It's fucking alphabetical. You can't roll on this table, it's not organized by CR - this literally requires you to roll on a separate goddamn table in the Monstrous Manual, and then cross-reference the results to the tables in this book. Who the fuck does that? WHY?

The rest of the tables are at least percentile rolls, but again...why? This is some AD&D level shit right here. Are we really this hard-up for content we want to auto-roll some wilderness encounters in the frostfell? I mean yes, I've run games like that - even tried the auto-generated dungeon rules from oD&D once on this very forum, until I lost the book and my notes - but is that really something they were trying for here?

Frank

These random encounter tales drag on for 26 pages, which makes them much harder to use than necessary. They don't fill the pages very densely, almost like someone was being paid by the page rather the by the word. Certainly no one felt inclined to present this information in a succinct fashion, and it does kinda look like someone deliberately slow walked the end of this book for whatever reason. Inflating department performance? Having a contracted book length but having cut a chapter for use in another book? I dunno. It's so in-your-face about its inefficiencies that it genuinely seems like the result of office politics rather than a creative decision.

Now personally, I think that random encounter tables aren't just useful, they are awesome. I remember making up my own stories as a small child with some dice and the Fiend Folio rolling up strange monsters for the protagonists of my stories to do combat with or in some cases to simply gaze at in wonder. I think kids these days have X Boxes to do that kind of solo gaming with, but role playing games are still the cheapest hobby – growing up I wouldn't have been able to afford a $240 X Box, but I could certainly use my allowance for a book. And random tables with monsters on them tell an unlimited number of recombinant stories, something you can read again and again.

But yeah, these tables go overboard. They are so fiddly that they are hard to use.

AncientH

The thing is, all they cover is critters. They don't talk about randomly generating environment, weather, hazards, or any of the stuff in chapter 1. It's purely a "what do you run across that tries to eat you?" set of tables.

I feel like this is something monstrously incomplete which should probably have been a widget on the WotC website or something. Because that's the stuff that they should have made available for free. Pick a few parameters and generate a frostfell setting, just buy the book to get the stats for the monsters and hazards and weather and you'd have a wilderness survival adventure ready to go.

Frank

Older editions didn't have a good system, or indeed any system of deciding how powerful the opposition should be. You ran into various monsters, and some of them were too powerful for your adventurers and you should run. But what you should run from wasn't well described. When you encountered weird monsters from new books that you've never heard of, should you fight or run? I have no idea. Neither did anyone else. It was a source of feelbads.


Why didn't you run from the white fluffy bunny?

3rd edition goes the opposite way and hammers it down a little too firmly. All the monsters are given an exact monster level, and these are roughly equivalent to player character levels in threat. You know your 7th level party can take a Hill Giant because it's basically a 7th level character and so are the characters in your 7th level adventuring party, but there's four or five of you and only one of him. It would be a fair fight against just Carlos the Dwarf Cleric, but you also have Susan, Matt, and Emma. The system works for the most part. There are some monsters whose threat levels are hilariously misassigned, but those failures are notable because there are few enough of them that we can talk about them individually.

I would be lying if I said this pleased everyone. The guidelines of what kinds of enemies you “should” be facing are if anything too firm. I mean, there's some discussion of fighting higher or lower level opposition – but once it's all been made that explicit the puppet strings become a lot more visible. Peoples' sense of fairness happens.

In any case, the main place these charts get lost in the weeds is where they provide different wilderness encounters for every level. Well, every level up to 16th. Even this set of charts doesn't think it makes sense to roll up random wilderness encounters for the 17th level characters. This actually makes things a lot less useful. Like, you'd expect the wilderness to have things of varying levels of threat in it. Sometimes you meet the fox, sometimes you meet the bear. These charts give you outputs only after you've already decided how threatening the encounter is going to be, which is kind of beside the point.

AncientH

Well, there is the possibility of "exploding charts" - that is, if you roll 00 on your percentile dice, you go to the next chart up - but that's rare. Also, some of the entries on the chart are plainly there to fill a CR slot, whether appropriate or not. What the fhtagn is a Zombie Minotaur doing in the Cold Plains?



I mean, aside from being very well preserved?

Wrap Up


More like Parap up, amirite?

Frank

Third edition and 3.5 Dungeons & Dragons provided a perfectly acceptable game experience for several levels of play. And it did so in a way where things just sort of ambiently worked and you could dump in more content from all sides without things falling apart. If you had a crazy idea, you could muddle through because the core physics engine was surprisingly strong. And because of this, the D&D playing community was pretty resistant to questioning the fundamental assumptions. When I put up my Cleric Archer demonstration in 2001 to show how fighters didn't get nice things, there was a lot of pushback. The basic idea that at higher levels Spellcasters >> You didn't get generally accepted until like 2006, and by that point the accepted nomenclature was “CoDzilla” for various reasons that are too dumb to go into in depth. My point here is that I don't think a more foundational overhaul of Dungeons & Dragons would have been accepted by the playerbase at large. Hell, the book of Weeaboo Fightan Magicks came out two years later and the fanbase still collectively shat themselves.

We deride Frostburn today for its lack of ambition. We clearly see things in its edition of Dungeons & Dragons that needed fixing and we see this book just mindlessly turn the crank of procedural content generation to produce procedural content even when the edition's procedures produced failure and despair. But I don't think this book was the place for that kind of major overhaul. Skills and magic item costs and shit were just borked at higher level, and this book wasn't in a position to do anything about that. The 3.5 Revision could have solved or at least addressed a lot of those issues and obviously it did not, and I think condemnation on that point is a lot more reasonable.

Frostburn is simply a book of its time and place. Where the edition it was written for worked, the material in Frostburn also works. Where the edition fails, this book also fails. This book is simply a Gentleman's C – a book just good enough that if you found something in this book you wanted to use it wouldn't take a big argument to let you use it at any given gaming table. And just unambitious enough that most of the material was stuff you factually did not care about using.

Still, the fact that Frostburn provides writeups of times and difficulties for climbing out of snowy crevasses and sliding across icy ponds and it just gives out reasonable outputs without a lot of work is something that really set material written for 3rd edition D&D apart from its competitors. Only GURPS would ever think of writing up rules for shoveling snow that had been math hammered to the point where they gave acceptable outputs in actual play. If snow shoveling rules existed in Vampire: the Masquerade or Call of Cthulhu the amount of snow shoveled would be a fucking war crime. Frostburn belonged to that era of workmanly competent D&D materials, and its passive acceptance by the fanbase is testament to that fact.

AncientH

This book is filler. It's not completely incompetent or useless filler, but it was obviously not a "core" book. It was the first in a series of "what the fuck do we write now?" books, and I think it's fairly obvious that the folks in charge of the design didn't think too hard about what should actually be in it except for the obvious procedurally generated content and some specific weather/survival rules no one was going to use.

It's not incompetent. I mean, the prestige classes largely are, and a lot of the feats are worthless, but not in any sense that stands out from any of the feats being pushed out in the Complete series or any of the officially-branded setting books at the time. I know I rant about this stuff, but that's mostly because they either missed low-hanging fruit (ice elementals), or they went into some incredibly baroque weirdness that manages to squander what little potential there was in the book (anything to do with rimefire).

It was a lot of fairly competent people working independently and without the coordination needed to make a really great book. And so they made a marginal one. And this is the best in a series of books. They actually go downhill from here.

Frank

I think Frostburn is a reasonable brand. An edition of D&D needs expansion, and “It's Cold Outside” is a better premise to center a book around than “Races of Short” or whatever. Were I in charge of an edition of D&D, I would have a new Frostburn as one of the early expansion books with other books to follow being similarly focused on environments.

Obviously you want to cover stuff that should have made it in the 3.5 version. Snow balls. Playable Snow Goblins. Cold options for Assassins and Rangers. Penguin snipers. But there's enough wasted space in this book that I don't think that's hard to manage.

Future books in the series could have less and less to do with the 3.5 versions. To the point that I don't think you even need to use the name Dungeonscape. You want like a Swamps book full of undead and giant frogs. The later environment books that 3.5 actually delivered were so bad, but they didn't have to be.

AncientH

I will agree with Frank that the initial premise of this book is good, maybe even necessary. Having a theme to base a book around is critical in roleplaying games - yes, you can sell a book that's just a random pile of miscellaneous crap - Chaosium used to make a business of it - but that doesn't mean it's to be done. If I regret anything about this book, it's that it isn't better.

Because it's not like there aren't cold places in heroic fantasy. Conan comes from a grey land of ice and snow, with Asgard and Vanheim further north. Fafhrd comes from a land of snow witches, skis, and snowballs. Erekose rode into battle like the coldest pimp in the world, a black blade strapped to his back and a chariot pulled by fucking polar bears.



Someone mentioned A Song of Ice and Fire, and the Wall is a great bit to "borrow" creatively, with necromancers preferring it up there because the bodies last longer. But we don't get talk about that here. We don't get talk about a lot of things.

Frank

Sometimes it seems like a book like Frostburn essentially writes itself. And I think with decent writers and strong development guidelines, that's basically true. But it's important to add those caveats, because there's an ocean of difference between a book like Frostburn that on the balance is a net positive to the edition it's written for and a self-writing shovelware work like Midnight Roads that adds nothing for anyone is immense.

In the era of Google it possibly doesn't seem like a big deal to accurately state the average temperature drop for rising altitude. But that kind of shit has value added. Without the book mentioning that, some players wouldn't even know that was a thing they could ask Google. Frostburn had basic research and basic math hammering. And that meant that even when it was unambitious it was still adding to the game instead of shitting on the table. You could do better, and maybe you should. But this is a reasonable thing for an expansion book to be. It's better than most.

AncientH

Eh. The "most" for late 3.x was pretty bad. Like I said, for all the tables and shit at the end, this book doesn't even try to be comprehensive with the cold critters in 3.5 as it was. They could have easily tossed the tables and upgraded some of the cold beasties from the Fiend Folio or Manual of the Planes and added a lot more value.

Frank

And that's the book!

[Thaluikhain]

A floating town full of pirates in the middle of the ocean seemed a lot more Stormwrack than Frostburn to me. Given that Stormwrack was published the next year, you're losing all the nauticalness, aren't you?

[Shiritai]

It was good enough for Lone Wolf, godsdammit.

I actually discovered that Lone Wolf was a thing this year. He even has a recent and shitty video game! You're literally the first person I've ever seen mention that... franchise? Maybe that's too strong a word.

Are you talking about the mobile game conversion of the books? I thought that was pretty decently done - granted, I didn't finish it.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Okay, what is with you guys and snowballs? What is the goal of snowball rules? Because all I can think of is making giant snowboulders to roll at people or make avalanches. Speaking of, avalanche rules might be appropriate.

Are you talking about the mobile game conversion of the books?

Probably. I played it on PC and almost liked it, but it felt like a mobile game and that was totally not what I signed on for or expected.

[Ancient History]

Okay, what is with you guys and snowballs? What is the goal of snowball rules? Because all I can think of is making giant snowboulders to roll at people or make avalanches. Speaking of, avalanche rules might be appropriate.

Aside from being thematically appropriate to the setting (and the aforementioned hilarity of the Stygian iceball), snowball rules are part of a larger subset of "random rules to throw shit" which often gets overlooked. Sure, if you dig around there's some rule about improvised projectile weapons around somewhere...probably buried in a feat nobody uses...but for me, it's the nature of the thing: you're in a setting with infinite ammunition and nobody wrote rules for a snowball fight?

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Fair enough, I've lamented that D&D somehow doesn't have basic rules for picking a dude up and throwing him somewhere. Hulking Hurlers don't count.

[K]

When I first read Frostburn, I loved that it admitted that the millions in GP of Blue Ice was completely game-breaking.

It was as if someone finally admitted that buying magic items with gold was a stupid fucking idea and actively harmful to writing decent adventures.

[Username17]

When I first read Frostburn, I loved that it admitted that the millions in GP of Blue Ice was completely game-breaking.

It was as if someone finally admitted that buying magic items with gold was a stupid fucking idea and actively harmful to writing decent adventures.

Several times during this book you can see the authors banging their heads face first into real problems of this edition and being prevented by the development team from changing anything. They outline an issue, and then they just... trail off... and give you the answer that is rigorously defined by the 3.5 cost guidelines despite having just subtly telling the reader how ridiculous that is. If they had been given more mathematical freedom I don't know if what they would have offered would have been better or not, and in general I'm in favor of editorial standards. But it's absolutely undeniable that the people in charge during the early 3.5 days were absolutely obsessed with adhering to cargo cult design choices that had been known to have been mistakes for years at the point this book came out.

But then, sometimes the book really runs with its creative freedom and then does stupid shit no one cares about. The Uldra originally appeared in AD&D in a Dragon Magazine article from 1987 as cold environment Gnomes that no one cared about. The Uldra from Frostburn are blue ice Smurfs that are substantially changed from the Dragon Magazine article and get new and different gods that also no one cares about (but there is a winking reference in that Hleid the Dismembered in Frostburn is presumably the unnamed goddess who got murder stabbed in the Dragon Magazine article). And then they made a new flavor of Arctic Gnomes called Ice Gnomes that are basically just exactly what the Uldra were in the 1987 Dragon Magazine article and specified in Frostburn that Uldra and Ice Gnomes are related somehow. Why? That's a lot of layers of secrets and mystery and tie-ins to a Dragon Magazine Article from 1987 that also too is not compatible with the Dragon Magazine article from 1987. And the end result is something no one likes or cares about.

-Username17

[maglag]

Okay, what is with you guys and snowballs? What is the goal of snowball rules? Because all I can think of is making giant snowboulders to roll at people or make avalanches. Speaking of, avalanche rules might be appropriate.

Aside from being thematically appropriate to the setting (and the aforementioned hilarity of the Stygian iceball), snowball rules are part of a larger subset of "random rules to throw shit" which often gets overlooked. Sure, if you dig around there's some rule about improvised projectile weapons around somewhere...probably buried in a feat nobody uses...but for me, it's the nature of the thing: you're in a setting with infinite ammunition and nobody wrote rules for a snowball fight?

The weapons section has generic rule for improvised weapons, no need for feats or anything.

Basically -4 penalty on the attack roll, crit x2 on a natural 20, base damage as the official weapon of closest size/weight, range increment 10 feet for throwing improvised stuff. Not too shabby.

Any melee weapon can be thrown as an improvised weapon with range increment 10 feet actually as long as you don't mind taking the -4 penalty on the attack roll (and crit gets reduced to x2 on a natural 20).

So since snowballs are usually pretty small they would probably deal damage as shurikens (1d2 from a medium-sized creature).

[ColorBlindNinja61]

The weapons section has generic rule for improvised weapons, no need for feats or anything.

The Complete Warrior offers more comprehensive rules on improvised weapons, including thrown ones.

[Iduno]

The thing is, they don't cover any of the races you'd expect them to cover. Half-White Dragons.

Even for D&D, I think making a player put the words "half-white" under race is going to be uncomfortable.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

So there's a difference between Half-White Dragons and White Half-Dragons, right?

[Foxwarrior]

White Dragon Halves are a fine meal for someone who's very hungry, but not quite hungry enough to eat a whole dragon.

[Prak]

One of the things that gets me about Frostburn is... just the name. Why Frostburn? Or more specifically, why "burn"? Like, "Fellfrost" would be a fine name for the book, even "Frostfell," and it would be a decent bow to tie up their insistent terminology with. But as it is, it just conflicts with the next book in the set, Sandstorm, which I literally just had to go check the exact name of, because it fucking trods on the toes of the next book.

Like, fuck, it should have been something like Fellfrost, Scorching Sands, and then, fine, Stormwrack. Or Wracking Storm, or something. Hell, call it Wrack Storms and then explain in the intro that a "Wrack Storm" is a powerful, magical storm that often strikes at sea where abyssal elemental energies bleed into the material realm.

But, as it is, the naming of the books was just sloppy with no thought given to the distinctive identities of the individual products.

Edit: Wait, fuck, no. It should have been Fellfrost, Sandflame, Torrent Sea*, and then they could have capped them with Wrack Storm, which is about elemental storms powered by lower planar energies that interconnects with the previous three books to give info on evil blizzards, evil hails of flame, evil storms, and then some other weirder evil weather.


*or something, it needs to convey that it's about the seas and maybe mundane storms, but without the word storm

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I'm very glad you didn't name any of these books.

My answer was going to be "because frostburn is a real thing, dummy", but then I looked around and it is, apparently, not a real thing and I am totally full of shit. Now I'm bothered - what the fuck is the name of the burning sensation you get from being in contact with super cold shit like dry ice? Am I just conflating it with frostbite like a retard?

EDIT: I am, in fact, thinking of freezer burn. Fuck me.

[Username17]

Frost Burn is an old timey name for Frost Bite. The degrees of Frost Burn and the degrees of regular Burn were the same. The terminology has diverged now that we know more about tissue damage. So now we have full thickness burns and partial thickness burns rather than third and second degree burns. And Frost Bite depths are not exactly the same as that.

But Frostburn is obviously a reasonable name for a fantasy book, because old timey terminology is in-character and shit.

-Username17