An incredible resource full of great ideas
I highly reccommend buying this. There is so much good stuff in here to make your Icewind Dale campaign feel like a battle against the elements. There were some things in the PDF that I felt were more complicated than they needed to be or made the game too harsh for the players. I ended up using the ideas presented in this PDF more as inspiration for things I wanted to do in my campeign rather than using the ideas directly from this PDF as they are written.
Frost Check modifications I made
The modifiers around frost checks felt way too high and the frost check system was a bit more complicated to run than I was comfortable with. I cut it down to this instead.
Frost checks are a DC 10 Con save. Certain things increase FC DC.
+2 FC DC modifier
- Mountainous terrain (excluding peak)
- Darkness (nightfall)
- Frigid winds / Wind Chill (not blizzard)
- Buried in snow
+3 FC DC modifier
+5 FC DC modifier
- Wet clothes on dry land
- In a Blizzard
- Submerged in Frigid water
- Near mountain peaks
- Extremely cold locations (eg. Aurils lair)
Failing a Frost Check gives you 1 point of exhaustion.
Resistance to cold damage = advantage on frost checks
Immunity to cold damage = auto pass all frost checks
Goliath: Resistant to cold damage and gets +2 to Frost Checks in Mountainous terrain
Triton: Resistant to cold damage and gets +5 to Frost Checks when fully submerged in water.
Wet clothing that isn’t waterproof loses its modifier.
+1 FC modifier:
- Cold weather clothing
- Fur lining
- Blubber Insulation (waterproof)
- Alchemical Heat Salve
+2 FC modifier:
- Near a campfire
- Warming Stone
+3 FC modifier
- Inside a tent or shelter
- Warmth Enchantment
Ring of Warmth = +1 FC modifier per 2 FC DC above 10
I also got super confused trying to figure out how to translate the "2 hours to travel by foot" sort of times presented in the official Icewind Dale module into the "Dog sleds with 6 dogs can travel 3mph". I ended up coming up with this table based on the speeds presented in the PDF to make the calculations easier:
Travel speed calculations
- Normal walking - Full speed = travel hours x 2; Half speed = travel hours x 4
- Snow shoes - Full speed = travel hours / 1; Half speed = travel hours x 2
- Small Dog sled (2 dogs) - Full speed = travel hours / 2; Half speed = travel hours / 1
- Medium Dog sled (4 dogs) - Full speed = travel hours / 4; Half speed = travel hours / 2
- Large Dog sled (6 dogs) - Full speed = travel hours / 6; Half speed = travel hours / 3
- Axe beak - Full speed = travel hours / 3; Half speed = travel hours / 1.5
- Polar bear sled - Full speed = travel hours / 1; Half speed = travel hours x 2
- Polar bear sled (2 bears) - Full speed = travel hours / 2; Half speed = travel hours / 1
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