The Story Marches On

After party fell inside the frozen fortress of Grimskalle I presented my players with a couple of options. We could call this campaign a wrap and start something entirely new after I wrote and presented a suitable epilogue for what would have happened to Icewind Dale in light of the party’s fall. Or, we could roll up entirely new characters who would head to the glacier and explore the caves beneath looking for the Lost City for entirely new reasons, just so we could see out the last couple chapters of the module.

The possibility of exploring a formerly flying city run by a world spanning magocratic evil empire buried beneath hundreds of feet of ice won out and a new party was born.

After fighting their way across the frigid expanse of the Rheged tribespeople and down into the horrifying haunted caverns beneath the glacier, eventually the group arrived in the lost city where they’ve spent the last several sessions exploring, getting into and out of some sticky situations and just generally working out how they were going to access the central spire to deal with the resident lich and loot some dope treasure. That is until Auril the Frostmaiden showed up and told them to leave the city at once.

That’s pretty much where we’ve left off until we pick up next week.

I really have to hand it to the writers of this book. The exploration of the city is a wonderful bit of adventuring and has largely made me forget that it actually has so little to do with the overarching plot of Auril and her minions and is so loosely linked to what’s going on in Icewind Dale that it really should have been part of a separate module. It’s just that fun.

Now that things have come to a head, I fully expect things to wrap up in the next couple of sessions, for better or for worse. Then it’s on to what comes next.

I’m planning to try a bunch of different systems over the summer and early fall, run some small adventures and one-shots. I want to fish around for some mechanics I can toss into the blender with the rest of what I’ve done to 5e. Also just provide some reviews for some systems that don’t get as much attention and probably deserve it.

A campaign choice document is also in the works. I’m going to present my group with a few cool ideas for campaigns I’ve had and let them vote for which they’d like to participate it. Then it’s just spending the summer trying to flesh out the necessary areas of my world and working with the players to develop the characters they’d like to play.

All that alongside continuing development of some custom classes and subclasses that I plan to publish in the not too distant future (I actually started contacting artists for my Sanguinor class’ PDF document as I think the text will be done by mid summer) and getting some new terrain and minis done up because I’d like to run an in person game sometime soon and my time through until fall is looking pretty packed.

It feels good to be back in the swing of things.