My #1 piece of advice for running Rime of the Frostmaiden

**This post contains spoilers – if you are playing Rime of the Frostmaiden, beware!***

I’m 17 sessions into my Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign and I want to tell everyone my #1 piece of advice for running this adventure.

The Complaint

One of the biggest complaints I have seen about this adventure is that the elements in each chapter are not connected and some have no purpose in the overall story whatsoever. When completing some of the quests in chapters 1 and 2 I see DM’s asking “What did the party gain from completing this? What did they learn? Where did the quest lead?” Mike ‘SlyFlourish’ Shea put it this way: “There is just a big question of “Why?” that seems to come up for me when I look through them.”

I will be the first to say that the book doesn’t do a good job of explaining how to actually run the adventure – it does a piss poor job of it, actually. For evidence of this, just look at the ‘flowchart’ on page 9 that isn’t actually a flowchart, it just simply says do chapter 1 and then chapter 2 and then chapter 3, etc. I will also say that the book never calls this a sandbox adventure.

Rime is a very sandboxy adventure and that can sometimes feel like the elements in the different chapters are not connected at all. And in fact, some of them aren’t directly connected to the overall storyline. But just because a location or quest isn’t tied to the overall main story arc doesn’t mean that it isn’t connected to the theme of the adventure. And this is why this type of adventure is called a sandbox. I understand the complaint that ‘none of it is connected’ – that is, the parts in chapter 1 aren’t connected to chapter 2 – I get it, I really do. But the thing missed in this complaint is that the DM is the one that is supposed to connect the pieces based on their and their players’ preferences and character actions.

The Response

For example: The Black Cabin quest/location in chapter 2. It is true that the party may not learn anything about other activities in Icewind Dale directly from the black cabin. BUT that is where the DM comes in. The Black Cabin is an opportunity for you, as the DM, to seed in clues about things in the other chapters. In fact, as written, the black cabin does provide three specific opportunities to give information to the PCs: the charred book, the letter to Copper Knobberknocker, and the blueprints in the laboratory. The book is a hint about Netherese magic and a copy can also be found in the lost spire – the DM can feel free to give any and all clues about Netherese magic and the location of Ythryn as they choose just simply because this book was in the Black Cabin. The letter to Copper is a direct connection between this location and the House of the Morninglord in Bryn Shander, and if they tell him Macreadus’ fate he may give them whatever information the DM sees fit. The blueprints in the laboratory show different versions of the gyroscope machine, but the DM can seed the blueprints with any information that they want the party to have. Hint at future problems? Go for it. Provide a map to another location? Perfect. Provide a schematic to the chardalyn dragon? Great. Give the party the map of the dragon’s path early? Awesome – now they have to figure out what the map means… but it is a great clue that leads them to another part of the adventure. All of that is there for the DM to do as they please.

I also know that many of you may be used to the authors of an adventure putting all of these clues and hooks and seeds into the adventure for you. After all, you paid 50 bucks for this book, so you shouldn’t have to be the one to choose where the information is found, right? I’m not saying that is an invalid feeling, but I will say that I just don’t see it that way. The sandbox nature, with so many clues but none of them connected, is a feature not a bug. It is meant to be open so that you can seed what you want, when you want, and based on the preferences of your players. The entire point of it is to make it so that the authors of the adventure give you almost too much material, but then YOU get to decide what to use and what not to use. The black cabin doesn’t have very many direct clues because they want the DM to decide what other elements from chapters 1 and 2 you want to have in your adventure and use that knowledge to give clues to your players.

In Defense of the Sandbox

What if it wasn’t like that? Wouldn’t it be easier to run? In my opinion, NO, it would not. Let’s say you don’t like the Id Ascendant location, but you DO like the black cabin location. Now let’s say that the authors placed all of the clues/seeds/hooks into the book for you. What if the Black Cabin had a bunch of clues to leading to the Id Ascendant? If you wanted to run the Cabin but not Ascendant, it would now make you feel like you couldn’t do that effectively because the cabin is inexorably connected to Id Ascendant and you don’t like that one. So now you don’t do either of those locations. So instead of having that situation, the authors leave both of them unconnected so that you can seed either one with whatever clues you want and let the players form the connections as they discover the clues. This makes the adventure more flexible.

Or what if you hate the Revel’s End part of Frostmaiden, but they seed it into two of the quests that you liked? That would suck and probably make it feel railroady at the same time. The way it is written is meant to make it completely modular for you to take what you want and leave what you don’t. Again – it’s a feature, not a bug. In other words, if the authors seed location A with all sorts of clues leading to location B, but you don’t like location B, then you must forego locations A and B. You have effectively made location A unusable. If they give you the clues, but let you place them where you see fit, then you can use any and all of the locations and quests that match your style and mold the adventure into something well suited to your players.

Sandbox adventures rely on a living environment for the PCs to explore. If everything is set in stone, it won’t feel alive. It won’t feel as if the world goes on and the NPCs carry on with their lives when the PCs aren’t in town. All of this leads me to my biggest piece of advice…

My #1 Advice

My biggest, best, most important, #1 piece of advice for anyone running Rime of the Frostmaiden is to READ ALL of chapters 1 and 2, then decide which quests you like and don’t like in each chapter before you run a single session. This way you will know what clues you need to place into the different quests and what clues to leave out or change. If a DM doesn’t read chapter 2 before they run chapter 1, then it will be difficult to make those connections and everything WILL feel disconnected. Sometime between your first and third sessions, you should read chapters 3 & 4 – that way you can seed those clues into chapters 1 & 2. By the time the PCs are doing any chapter 2 quests, you should have read the rest of the adventure as well.

Knowing what is happening in the wider region is extremely important for a sandbox style game as it allows the DM to improvise readily and be able to provide clues to the PCs even if things went off in an unexpected direction. Reading ahead in THIS book is more important than perhaps any other 5e adventure published to date. Because of that it is definitely not suited to a DM who only reads the chapter right before the party gets there – if you do that this will surely feel like an unconnected mess. At it’s heart, this is NOT an unconnected mess, it simply starts with 2 strong sandbox chapters that the DM needs to know well so that they can provide the clues for the PCs to make connections.

Campaign Update

My Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign, which we have dubbed Endless Night, is well on its way – 17 sessions in! You can watch it here: Endless Night Playlist 

You can support my work by checking out my Frostmaiden DMsGuild release – it is a SILVER best seller called The Creed of Auril and contains information on the Church of Auril and descriptions of cult beliefs, behaviors, membership, and rationale. It also has 16 new spells, 2 new magic items, 6 new NPC statblocks, and over 12 detailed ways to add cultists and cult activity to the Ten-Towns area. The product is $4.99 on the DMs Guild and you can purchase it by clicking here: The Creed of Auril

You can also support me and my co-creators by purchasing Scientific Secrets of Icewind Dale – new and challenging creatures and lore for your arctic D&D game: Scientific Secrets of Icewind Dale on the DMsGuild or by shopping on the DMsGuild for other great products by clicking the banner below, which contains an affiliate link.

Until next time, I wish you good gaming!

 ~DMSamuel