How to Pillage/Rework Rime of the Frostmaiden

 So, I'm not someone to generally run published adventures, even though at this point I literally have every official 5E book other than Dungeon of the Mad Mage (some day, probably.)

I imagine I'll do so at some point - it's really a question of commitment. However, I've definitely taken ideas out of published adventures, as well as campaign setting books, to build my own adventures.

Having now read through Rime of the Frostmaiden, I'm thinking about what really appeals to me about the book, and thus what I'd want to take.

Perhaps better than anything, the book really portrays a region of frigid isolation. There's an afterword by Lead Narrative Designer Chris Perkins in which he mentions that when they were first working on the adventure's design, they didn't realize how isolating a year 2020 would be (fingers crossed that we have some return to social engagement in 2021 - though there are a million things I feel anxious about regarding the future that even go beyond the horrific pandemic.)

Rime of the Frostmaiden is dark - literally. The characters never see the sun until they defeat Auril, and I think you could really play with that sort of powerful magical phenomenon as a central concept to an adventure.

Another thing I'd consider taking is the "secrets" option for character creation. There are several secrets that players can draw from a stack, and while some are rather innocuous (like, "I'm looking for my dad's missing ring, which he lost after his finger was bitten off by a knucklehead trout") to totally horrific (like, "I have a slaad tadpole growing in my chest that's going to burst out of my chest and kill me very suddenly, probably at an inopportune time.")

The random encounters, which have a mechanic that causes them to occur during Blizzards (you have an encounter d20 and a weather d20, and if the weather d20's roll plus 1 is more than the encounter roll, it takes place during a blizzard, which can dramatically change it) are actually really exciting.

The book also gives you a rather broad overview of what Icewind Dale is like, and could easily be repurposed to set entirely different adventures within the region.

My tastes, of course, tend toward the really high-fantasy and cosmic horror side of things, and the latter chapters of the book push more in that direction. We were introduced to Living Spells in the Eberron book, but while those tended toward straightforward damaging spells, this one introduces Living Demiplane, which is actually utterly terrifying - a living spell that tries to catch you and trap you in an extradimensional space.

I think the thing I'm most tempted to do is borrow some of the structure - particularly the small, isolated towns amid a frozen wasteland - and use it for events in my own setting. After first hearing about this book, I came up with a frozen island north of the main continent in my setting called Cotieras where people fear to tread. I might borrow some of the creatures and frigid terrain rules here, and perhaps some of the adventure locations, to build a relatively open-ended campaign in that region.

One of the chapters in this adventure presents a really great high-stakes event - while most D&D books tend to focus on explorable dungeon environments, the attack by the chardalyn dragon-construct on Ten-Towns is a massive race against time with the feel of a chaotic battle, and it makes travel-time between the towns feel urgent.

I believe that Rime of the Frostmaiden was designed to be broken up - allowing DMs to use different parts of it depending on what appealed to them. Frankly, I think this makes the adventure itself feel a bit unfocused - Auril herself doesn't totally feel like a big bad you're building up to a fight with - in fact, the place you're most likely to fight her, she's kind of just alone in a random room she pops out of (which, to be fair, is appropriate given how she embodies in part the isolation felt in winter). While I'm sure you could run the whole thing as written and get a really fun game out of it, I think the book is probably best used by pillaging and repurposing the things found within.