The first chapter is extensive. Over yesterday and today, I've now read through the whole adventure. Here are my thoughts:
The past three years, the adventure books have had their location in the Forgotten Realms as the sort of headliner - rather than just "Dragon Heist" and "Dungeon of the Mad Mage," these twin adventures were marketed as Waterdeep: (the title.)
Last year, Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, was sort of funny for doing the same, given that the Baldur's Gate segment and the Avernus segments were quite separate, and even though there was certainly a thematic and plot connection between the events in both, to me the real main event to that adventure was the Avernus segment of it.
Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, I think, is much more location-centric than plot-centric. Indeed, there are actually three major plots going on that are only tangentially related to one another.
I also think I'd raise some doubts as to what extent this truly is a "horror" adventure. If you're looking for something as horror-centric as Curse of Strahd, that's not really what you're going to find here. While there are some adventures that skew that way, and the final segment of the adventure does borrow heavily from H. P. Lovecraft's story At the Mountains of Madness, there's enough here that is more general fantasy adventuring that I find myself disagreeing with the way WotC has characterized the overall book. Admittedly, some of the "secrets" player characters can choose from at the beginning can lend the adventure a more paranoid and creepy feel, but the majority of the adventure locations found in the book carry a more general fantasy danger than what I'd really call horror. The line between them is subjective, of course, but when I compare this to other adventures I've read, such as Tomb of Annihilation, Ghosts of Satlmarsh, and Descent into Avernus, I don't really think that this is that much more horrific.
Still, this will be an adventure in which the bitter cold, harsh environment poses a major threat, and there's a major event that happens after you've gotten to know the location that is less horrific in terms of genre than just horrific for the massive potential loss of life.
So let's get into spoiler territory:
Maybe more than any previously published adventure, this is an open-world sandbox. The party hits level 4 after doing various quests within the Ten-Towns, and at that point it becomes easier for them to head out to farther locations.
There are breadcrumb quests and rumors to send people to these locations, but ultimately after doing some of the broad exploration of the Dale, there are two primary places the party will go:
One is Sunblight, a fortress where an evil duergar warlord wants to take advantage of the permanent night to found the first above-ground Duergar empire. Approaching this dungeon, however, his evil plan goes into effect, sending a massive dragon-construct made out of magically-infused ice to devastate all of the ten towns. This monstrous creature forces the party to choose between actually going into the dungeon (and thus giving the dragon-construct more time to slaughter innocents) or to rush back and try to catch up with it on its rampage. There's a timetable for how long the construct attacks each town and how many people are killed. The party will, of course, also want to take out the warlord by entering the fortress, which is aided by a group of duergar who wish to see someone else take over.
The next is Grimskalle, the abandoned frost giant fortress that serves as Auril the Frostmaiden's base of operations. While I think the fight is designed to be very difficult, it's actually possible to defeat (though you can't truly "kill" her, given that she's a god) Auril here, with the last major chapters still left to go.
Ultimately, the end goal of the adventure is the ancient Netherese city of Ythryn, and I think it's here that the real horror elements start to come into play. The insane magical power of this ancient, once-flying, now crashed and buried beneath a glacier city is the big prize that members of the Arcane Brotherhood are all looking for. Undead and aberrations are plentiful here. There are a number of potential "final bosses," but one that you're almost certainly going to have to face is a Demilich.
So overall thoughts: the adventure is extremely open-world, which does mean that DMs are very free to pick and choose various aspects of it. The openness does mean that the players have a ton of agency in how they wish to proceed, and in fact, if all they care about is ending the Everlasting Rime, as the permanent winter is called, they can complete this before they even reach level 10.
I think I'm more likely to take some of the ideas here as inspiration than to run this adventure itself. The random encounter table for traveling the Icewind Dale wastes is very cool, especially given that about half the time (and more likely for some encounters than others) it occurs in the middle of a blizzard.
I think I'd have liked to see the plots tied together better - Ythryn is a really cool thing to be buried beneath the ice, but it doesn't seem like Auril's motivations are tied to it other than its just being one of the many things that she wishes to keep preserved in ice. I also feel like I could use more of a threat of danger from allowing Ythryn's secrets to escape the ruins - if Auril's motivations were not simply her evil nature, but an extreme and harsh attempt to protect the world from what could be found in Ythryn.
Implementing such a change might not be that hard to do.
To give the book some benefit of the doubt, I think the adventure might feel scarier in practice than in simply reading through it chapter by chapter. Again, player secrets and the dangers of the environment are something that's easy to push to the back of your mind while just reading through another adventure location.
While I think it's a valid criticism of Tomb of Annihilation that the adventure puts too intense a ticking clock on an adventure that rewards a lot of exploration (though it's important to remember the player characters don't necessarily have to have been resurrected prior to the adventure) I also feel like each subsequent major threat actually feels like less of an immediate issue. Xanadorn Sunblight's Dragon-Construct is a very clear and present threat to the lives of everyone in the Dale. But when that's dealt with, stopping Auril is a somewhat less urgent matter - Icewind Dale has survived for two years, and while it's not going to last much longer, one gets the sense that you could really take your time working on the whole unending winter. Meanwhile, Ythryn is just kind of sitting there, and even though there are some really terrifyingly powerful magical artifacts that some of the bad guys could get their hands on (like a scroll that summons the Tarrasque, for instance,) there's not really much indication of that, and it feels like a party could easily shrug their shoulders and move on with their lives without going to the adventure's most dangerous locale.
There are, however, some really cool things to be found here. While it's very silly, the existence of Gnome Cereomorphs - Mind Flayers who are former gnomes and, through a fluke of gnomish physiology, aren't evil and are really the same old tinkerers they were before they went all squid-faced - is really cool. The Caves of Hunger, which one needs to pass through to get to Ythryn, are super-spooky, and have the party stalked by a Gnoll Vampire.
Naturally, given that it has only just come out, I'll be curious to hear what people think of it, and while I think there's a really solid D&D adventure here, I think perhaps the one I had imagined in my head was quite different.
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