Review: The Frozen Ascent
The premise is mythic. Every 1,000 years the Frozen King shows up and the whole land is frozen over. Someone needs to climb up Orn Mountain and set things right.
Let's get this out of the way. The art is superb. You want to own a print copy of this just so you can leave it on the coffee table as a sign of your good taste. You want to put a poster of the cover up in your gaming room. You want a tattoo of a Frostbitten Cave Crab. The art is also a nice break from the de rigueur black and white fare that you typically find in Shadowdark adventures.
Our adventure begins with some overland travel. There are a few points of interest but they are given only a few sentences and would require some fleshing out if your players plan to spend any time there. For example, we are told the town of Farharbor is "A port town filled with thieves, pirates, and scumbags. A true den of treachery and turpitude." Anything beyond that will need to be filled in by the GM.
We are also not given any indication of the travel time between these points of interest except that it takes three days to climb the mountain. At least the random encounter table is very well done, with some interesting situations for the party to interact with and potentially resolve. Since there really isn't enough here to support any overland travel procedures I would probably just run 2 or 3 of my favorite random encounters and then tell the players they've arrived.
The dungeon proper has 14 keyed areas and a lovely map but the map is also sort of emblematic of this adventure's problems - it's a great piece of art but it could do more to support the GM and gameplay. The enemies and traps are all shown on the map so you can't show it to players. There's no sense of scale so you can't convey the information needed for player mapping or figure out how many moves (and thus how many random encounter checks) it takes to get from place to place.
The room keys themselves are also lacking when it comes to supporting the GM and the gameplay. Here's the description for area 9:
"Frost pours from a Frozen Orb floating in the center of the icy cavern. Characters make Cold Checks (pg. 5) every turn they are within near of the Orb."
Imagine that you're running this adventure and the PCs come across this orb. They're going to want to mess with it - probably destroy it or maybe try to take it. So how can it be harmed? Can it be moved? What happens if they do destroy it?
We don't really get answers to these questions. There are stats for a Frost Orb, which appears in a few different places. But it's unclear if this is the same thing. Even if it is, we're not given any indication of how it responds to the party or what happens if it is destroyed. Does the ice start to melt? Does it weaken the Frozen King? Or nothing at all?
In another place we have a dragon frozen in a massive block of ice that is a potential ally. But, in a game where the first thing mentioned in the core ethos is that time is "the most important resource", we get no indication of how long it should take to chip or melt through the ice. Yes, the GM can make it up or wing it, but that's no excuse. I'm running your adventure because I want your ideas. Something like this is going to have big impact on the game and it should be well-considered. I can think of at least a few ways were it could interact with the mechanics of the game and the adventure. How many torches are they willing to commit and how does that speed up the process? What if they exhaust themselves trying to break it? Maybe the time spent allows the Frozen King to advance his ritual?
So it's a bit under-designed. But there is also a lot to love besides the art. Interesting situations like the aforementioned dragon, or the capybara hot spring, or the thief with his feet frozen to the edge of a pit trap. These are encounters where your players will get up to some shenanigans and that they'll remember after the dice have stopped rolling. It's the kind of interactivity that is missing from a lot of adventures I read, where the gameplay loop is fight -> trap -> treasure -> repeat.
There's also a pretty cool (pun INTENDED) set piece encounter at the end as the Frozen King conducts his ritual on an icy lake with zombies threating to drag you down to it's chilly depths. But there's a fly in the ointment here as well.
This is a level 3 adventure. The Frozen King is level 12(!), has 58 hp and can make two blasts with his ice staff at +8 for 1d12 in addition to casting some nasty area effect spells. Not to mention the cracking ice and zombies. By the numbers, it's a losing battle for the PCs.
I'm not against difficult or even impossible fights in principle, as long as the players have a choice of whether to engage or not and if there are opportunities to approach the encounter with some strategy. But this is a pitched battle on a frozen lake and is setup as the culmination of the adventure and the entire reason for being there. It creates a situation where either GM is seriously pulling punches or the players are rolling up new PCs. UNLESS they free the dragon and have her do their dirty work. But that's a bit anticlimactic, right? The party just sits back and watches someone else defeat the BBEG?
The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford puts the party in a similar predicament where they face off against foe that is well above their weight class. But by the time the party goes to battle the wyrm they probably have a good idea of what they're up against as well as an arsenal of magic weapons and maybe some poisonous wine.
A similar structure would elevate The Frozen Ascent from good to excellent. Give the region map a reason to exist and seed those locations with clues and tools that the party can use to gain an advantage. Reward exploration with advantages that will help in the final battle against The Frozen King. I don't think every adventure needs a hex crawl or overland exploration, but when you've got a regional threat like this it would really enhance the mythic vibe. In this case the region and optional locations don't matter but they could.
So if I'm running this I've got to go through it and fill in the blanks in a few places and massage the final encounter a bit. And although I wish the author had taken a little more time with it, I would absolutely run this. There's enough good here to make it worth it.
On a scale of 2-12, The Frozen Ascent gets 8 stingbats.
Well, I'm a sucker for the "zine as artpiece", so this is a buy for me. Bonus that the adventure is decent! I don't mind using my imagination to flesh things out a bit if there's a strong core.
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