Review: Icewind Dale - Rime of the Frostmaiden

After swearing off WotC's adventures for a few years, I found myself in the market for a new adventure, provided it grabbed my attention and, crucially, started at 1st level. "Rime of the Frostmaiden" fit the bill, and so I picked up a copy. I'm glad that I did.

This is a fairly standard WotC adventure - it starts with a sandboxy section with a number of small quests to give the PCs XP, then gradually switches to a more linear big-quest approach. I do like this format for adventures. The adventures themselves seem to be pretty well put together, and the general makeup of the book is pretty good.

There were two particular highlights for me: one is the artwork throughout the book, which is outstanding. The other is that this book reveals a secret that they've been building up to through the last several adventures - I really like that sort of seeding of details and world-building (even if I hadn't seen the other adventures that started the mystery). It really shows an attention to a larger world that is nice.

There's not too much that I don't like about the adventure - the big weakness (the overly linear nature of the latter chapters) was something that I had priced in from the outset, so was happy to accept. There are two things, but one is another thing I've come to accept, while the other is something I can work around.

Specifically, this adventure has another case of the 'cheat' BBEG - the PCs are expected to face off against the enemy at 11th level, but that enemy should be far out of their league. So the adventure posits a 'cheat' to allow the match-up to work (this time that the BBEG is massively weakened). I'm not keen on that, but it seems to just be the way they do things now.

The other is the handling of XP. I've really come to dislike milestone XP, and the version as presented in this adventure is worse even than the norm. My strong suspicion is that this is done because the adventure just doesn't include enough 'real' XP for all the levels intended, so again they 'cheat' to speed things up without the players feeling that they haven't earned those levels. (Of course, my view on how XP should be awarded is very different from standard too, but never mind.)

There's not too much more I can say without giving spoilers. Suffice to say that this one almost certainly will be my next campaign, once "The Mist of Lamordia" have parted... and indeed that I may well buy in to the next storyling that WotC choose to present. I'm very impressed with this one.