Hey, everyone! This is something pretty different from my normal content of “just webnovels” and “very occasional update blog post.” But I wanted to do this and I’m not really on any social media and I thought my audience would probably enjoy it, or at least some of you would. I imagine the venn diagram of my readers and people who play D&D is a heavy, heavy overlap.
So long story short, I’m DMing a campaign of (a kind of heavily modified) Rime of the Frostmaiden. Those of you who know me know that I play, but it’s actually been years since I DMed anything. I’ve never actually DMed a full game on Roll20 before; I was an in-person player for the majority of my life. It’s an adjustment! I bought the module and there’s all these buttons and halfway through combat I just gave up and went back to rolling the dice myself lmao.
But anyway, I thought it would be fun to do simple, informal write-ups of my players journey through the Icewind Dale. Just to have a sort of written record, and also for anyone else who might enjoy it! So, without further ado,
Welcome to Icewind Dale!
This campaign is set in the frozen tundra of Icewind Dale, a bit over a year since Auril the Frostmaiden plunged the area into eternal winter. Every night, she casts a spell that fills the sky with an aurora but dooms the sun to never rise on Icewind Dale, their only reprise being the murky 3-4 hour twilight that winter normally affords them right at midday.
Our heroes,
- Taz Krakhorn, half-orc druid, is a farmer from Icewind Dale who has had it up to here with this conflabbin’ endless dark! She left her chickens in her neighbors’ care and headed out with just her axe beak, Bladebeak, to find Auril and give her a stern talking to about this eternal winter nonsense.
- Quinn Quarrel, half-elf bard, has been a Ten-Towns mainstay ever since he moved to the area several years ago… just in time for the damn place to freeze over! Business, which involves a mix of performing at taverns and collecting rumors, has slowed to a frozen river’s crawl, and his pockets are getting awful light.
- Bergen L. Troublesome, shield dwarf barbarian, is an old and well-traveled sherpa and mountain man. There are few, perhaps none, in the Ten-Towns who can match his survival skills out there in the thin air of the Spine of the World. He’s also gone a little bit off-his-rocker, having disappeared several years ago and suddenly reappeared spouting stories of duegar who want to steal the sun, secret messages tapped by the drippings of icicles, and elaborate theories about the nature of the extraplanar hive mind represented by the supposedly-harmless chwinga.
- Ena, human sorcerer, is a young woman who found herself recently in dire straights. Her merchant family was heading to Icewind Dale with much-needed carts of supplies, only to get lost in a blizzard coming through the Spine of the World. Ena was found by friendly trappers, alone and wandering across the tundra towards the Ten Trail, most of the way to frozen and already on the verge of losing several extremities to frostbite. Only the skilled healing and personal care of the folks at Bryn Shander kept her from losing a hand, a foot, or at least a few fingers.
These four would-be adventurers have decided to team up, for reasons of their own ranging from “increased survival odds” to “I really need money and my main marketable skill is eldritch blast” to “this fool will definitely die within MINUTES if I don’t babysit.”
The party elected to go to that most classic of adventuring locales, the tavern. Specifically The Northlook, a tavern run by a retired adventurer and, while rowdy, considered the best place in the Ten-Towns for new adventurers to find work. There, everyone was abuzz with rumors of the spate of murders across the Ten-Towns, with the most recent one being here in Bryn Shander a mere three days ago. Quinn also heard rumor that the Speaker of Caer-Dineval had taken sick and hadn’t even been to Speaker meetings.
While still in the tavern, the party was approached by a lone dwarf, Hlin Trollbane, who had some professional work history with Bergen. She informed them that she’d been researching the murders, and cast her suspicion on one Sephek Kaltro, bodyguard for the shady Torg’s merchant caravan. She claimed that the caravan had been in each town on the very night the murders took place, and furthermore, Sephek could walk in the bitter, deadly cold without so much as a scarf. She believes him to be an agent of Auril, doing her dirty work and killing those who had cheated their way out of each town’s “human sacrifice lottery,” where the person who will be next sacrificed in an attempt to appease Auril is selected.
The party took the case, and headed to pick up some supplies, having decided to leave straight away in an attempt to catch up to Torg’s, which last Hlin had heard, was headed to Caer-Dineval. Ena decided to bow out briefly to let Speaker Duvessa Shane know she was leaving town. Speaker Duvessa had been very kind to Ena since she arrived, going so far as to offer the young girl a home (a shack, really, but still) on the edge of town if she wished to stay and become an official citizen of Bryn Shander.
Unfortunately, Ena is not very good at sharing information, and what she wound up communicating was essentially “I, a sixteen year old girl, have found some nice adult strangers to go on an adventure with, byeeeee.” The concerned Speaker, failing to talk Ena out of leaving, asked if she could meet these kind strangers, and set off with Ena to meet the party on their way to the stables to fetch Bladebeak.
The Speaker expressed her concerns, which were very much not allayed by Taz’s wholehearted declaration that the team was off to find Auril (not knowing where she was) on “whatever mountain was closest” and “give her a stern talking-to.” Bergen pointing out that if Ena didn’t leave with them, she intended to find another group or just leave on her own, also didn’t do much to calm the Speaker down. However, she did eventually suggest that she introduce them to a researcher in town who had a nice, beginning-adventurer-friendly quest.
The Speaker made introductions to Dannika Graysteel, a scholar researching chwinga, who offered the party a lantern of elemental tracking and 25gp if they could bring her a live chwinga specimen to study. The group agreed readily enough and took the lantern with them on their axe-beak-sled-ride journey along the Eastway to Caer-Dineval.
Their journey was uneventful, but with no sign of chwinga from the lantern, and the party made it to Caer-Dineval hours before Auril‘s aurora was set to light up the sky. They headed to the tavern to find news of Torg’s, but were disappointed to learn that the merchant caravan had tried selling overpriced alcohol in the town two days earlier to little luck, and headed out already. They enjoyed a hearty bowl of chowder, wincing at their ever-lightening wallets, and were convinced to head to the Caer as the only inn in town had shut down a year prior.
However, before heading up to the Caer, the party took a detour town to the abandoned Dinev’s Rest; Taz wanted some fresh rats as a treat for Bladebeak’s hard work pulling their sled and thought she might be able to find some sheltering from the cold there. Finding it boarded up and locked, the party merely tore off the boards and unlocked the door…. to the outhouse, before finding the actual front door and repeating.
As the party spread out to look for signs of rats, Bergen felt something strange… a sensation like he was being watched. He loudly declared it to be the bastard invisible duegar here to steal the sun, and began casing the joint hunting for them… only to have a goddamn invisible duegar pop out and attack! Well, damn, it’s gonna be a lot harder to discount him now!
The party had pitched level one combat with a crowd of six duegar, helped by the cramped quarters that kept most of them from growing in size, as they were fighting in a narrow hallway. With some help from Bladebeak, who busted through the front door–taking some wall with her in the process–the team managed to best the duegar, although it nearly cost them Bladebeak‘s life (and Ena‘s, at one point).
Quinn managed to corner one of the duegar alone in a room as it was trying to flee, and closed the door behind them, hiding the two from the rest of the party, who are preoccupied with the direly injured Bladebeak. What could our bard have planned for this duegar?!
We’ll find out what our adventurers have planned in our next session!