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wearesorcerer · 2 days

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Sorcerous Reviews: Reign of Winter

For @electricgiga

Reign of Winter is a very well written adventure path, but it is absolutely not a good fit for many tables. I found this out the hard way.

What You Will Need:

A functional understanding of D&D 3.x/Pathfinder 1e's (aka D&D 3.P's) environmental rules.

A desire to play a survival game (i.e., treat all resources as precious).

Experienced players who all have some familiarity with the Romanovs, Rasputin, and Russian Fairies/Fairy Tales.

Reign of Winter's emotional stakes are initially set in dealing with a climate crisis (The Snows of Summer). You can choose to deal with this in one of two ways. If you go about it as written with the players not having specific defenses against hypothermia, blinding precipitation, and snowdrifts, then it becomes a "man vs. nature" drama. If instead every player plays a race with Cold Resistance or picks up the campaign trait that gives Cold Resistance 2, then suddenly you're playing D&D but with hampered movement (with only snowshoes and freedom of movement fixing that problem) and poor visibility (but in a way D&D doesn't handle: in all of third edition, PF included, there are very few ways of seeing through precipitation, but plenty to see through darkness). This gets annoying very, very quickly.

The plot and setting gradually filter in -- and it becomes painfully clear that this is very much The Russian AP. Pathfinder 1e takes place roughly around the turn of the century, with the year this came out falling shortly after the Russian Revolution. Baba Yaga's Dancing Hut (in all editions of D&D) is a TARDIS: it's a semi-sentient, mobile building that is bigger on the inside and can warp to nearly any destination. Combined, that means you go to Earth, with lots and lots of setup in Russian folklore. I don't feel comfortable playing or running this game anymore because I am not familiar enough with the background information to do it justice. That said, it doesn't really kick in until the third module. I mean, there are lots of fey and there are lots of fey that aren't Russian (there's a huldra at one point, plus sprites and atomies, and such). But you'll get the most bang for your buck if you know your Russian fairy stories.

What You Will Forgo:

In general, the ability to stop/pause the adventure and do something else (really anything else):

Downtime

Long-term Crafting (magic items, etc.)

(After a point) Selling Loot

Points of Exit

Divergence from the Theme

Part one begins with the party in Taldor having to investigate a localized cold snap and snowfall in a nearby forest (in the middle of summer). It turns out that this is due to a portal that's been opened to Irrisen, the magically frozen land of witches. The party cannot close the portal from this side, nor can they make it back through the portal once they attempt to close it. Leaving Irrisen is a very difficult prospect on its own, but they can do so via the Dancing Hut -- save that it has a mind of its own, will only go to certain places of its choosing, and won't budge until the players find certain keys in its inside (which changes configurations at each stop, so it's a mini-dungeon).

The travel goes across Avistan (international travel; though you cross the majority of the continent, it's still intracontinental), then to Iobaria (intercontinental), then to Triaxus during its winter period (interplanetary, but same solar system), to the Earth (interstellar and possibly intergalactic), and finally through Matryoshka-themed layers of the Dancing Hut itself. If your players decide they don't want to do this and they want off the ride, well, tough shit, right? There's no exit point and none have the means of wresting complete control of the Dancing Hut (a Major Artifact) from anyone.

The farther you get in the module series, with the main exception being Triaxus, the more Russian it gets. Everything is about winter, hence Triaxus, but things which aren't taken from Russian folklore gradually start to fall away. There's not a whole lot of room for anything else: it will just distract unless it's also cold-themed. You could insert Siberian, Inuit, Finnish, and Scandinavian tidbits if you wanted, but they would still detract from this being a story about Baba Yaga and things of her ilk.

What You Get

Constant Ice/Cold-themed Encounters (+3 Fire Appreciation)

Well-designed dungeons

TO KILL RASPUTIN

So, a few things to point out here.

First of all, there is a long-standing complaint in third edition especially that everything resists fire. This is mostly true: if you are going to resist an energy type, it's almost always fire, followed by cold. Since the vast majority of attacking spells that deal energy damage deal these two types, they're considered suboptimal choices; you're better off selecting acid (no spell resistance, since it's Conjuration instead of Evocation), force (almost nothing resists force), or sonic damage...if you can find them. There aren't very many force effects that deal damage outside of magic missile and some levels of the Bigby's hand series; there are more spells that deal sonic damage, but they're largely isolated to Bards; and acid spells are more common still, but also more likely to be resisted.

Except in this campaign, since 90% of the monsters you face will have some form of winter template on them, giving them immunity to cold but weakness to fire. FIRE IS NOW SUPER-EFFECTIVE! The casters? They also frequently cast cold spells.

This is just obvious from the front cover, though.

What isn't obvious is how well encounters are designed. The initial setup in Taldor is essentially a five-room dungeon, but it's set outside. You have a wide variety of encounters in this introductory bit. From there, you move to an actual dungeon (the tower of the mage responsible for the portal to Taldor). After some travel and interesting side-encounters, you eventually reach the capital, which is very tricksy to get through on its own and then has dungeon-esque levels needed to get to the Dancing Hut. Maiden, Mother, Crone, the third part, takes place in a triple-dungeon that requires lots of switching between parts (kinda like the Spirit Temple in Ocarina of Time).

And then there's part five: Rasputin Must Die! If there is any incentive for playing this AP, it's killing one of the most infamous people of the previous century and playing up the mythos that's grown up around him.

My Experience

I had the benefit of running this during a very bitter winter. However, I didn't realize that this was not a newbie-friendly module up front, as I should have by its title. I was running it for newbs: no one in the group had ever played a TTRPG before. To make matters worse, I was on a time limit (one of them would be moving), so I decided to skip through a lot of it and jump them up to the point where they could face Rasputin...only to find out that none of them knew who Rasputin was and those who had seen Anastasia (the '90s cartoon) had forgotten they had. This resulted in me improvising a smidge, which no one ever wants me to do. (I threw them against a Dread Gazebo riding a Grassy Gnoll because it was going to be more fun for them.)

The worst part was that I had a party of seven players, which is not great for most tables and certainly not good with a group of new players. This part was not my fault, as the setting up of the campaign was a mutual effort with a friend and I couldn't get out of it. (This is especially true given venue: we had to keep shifting apartments we played at, which meant that everyone but me and one other player hosted several sessions at different points. I couldn't because I live with my parents.) They were not a bad group, but balancing play among seven players is difficult at the best of times and seven newbies is much harder.

"But Sorcerer, how can you make these assertions if you skipped so much of the AP when you ran it?"

First, I've read through the module series enough to know this much. I would have been prepared to run the entire thing had we had the time for it, but some of the players going in (including the more engaged ones) didn't realize that D&D campaigns can last months to years.

Second, this is the wide consensus in reviews I have read. Every review I have ever come across about this AP says that it is well done, but it's on rails and you are strapped in until the ride is over -- and you'd better know your Russian stuff, because if you don't, half of what's going on will not make sense. Your only real exit point is after you have closed the portal (in module 1) and before you've gotten into the Dancing Hut (in module 2), as you have the potential to leave Irrisen if you try.

However, doing so is a feat unto itself and you're still in the middle of the Hoarwood; your best chance of reaching regular civilization is to Varisia in the south, but you have to pass over the Kodar Mountains (which are treacherous -- see the end of AP 1) and then are in the middle of nowhere, Varisia. If you go east, you're in the Realm of the Mammoth Lords, which isn't much better (the government is less out to get you, but it's still fucking cold). Going west is a much longer trek and puts you in the Lands of the Linnorm Kings (so still cold). North is the worst idea. All by foot or similar land travel.

The trouble with that is that Irrisen is essentially a prison for all of its citizens. Baba Yaga and her armies of cold and fey descended upon the place and took over; her descendants, the White Witches, rule the area with a cold fist. The land is brutally cold -- to the point of ecological collapse, though somehow certain vegetation survives. Humans are treated worse than anything and natives are not allowed to leave. Trade is vitally important to keep the country alive, but it is also heavily monitored and the roads and borders are guarded more intensely and violently than any others in Golarion. It would be "no one in, no one out" if it weren't for the necessity of trade, which I think is more a logical/logistics error on the part of the game designers than anything; if climate weren't the means by which the White Witches controlled the country, but they still had the same level of power, then the country would be completely sealed off save for whenever it tries to expand. (The whole plot of Reign of Winter, in fact, is predicated on such expansion.)

Thus, it's much, much easier and more entertaining to just go along with the AP than to fight it. This means every player should be aware of all of this up front. Dangling the morsel of killing Rasputin is definitely incentive to play something so railroady.

Suggested Characters

Everything Irrisen is winter, be it the white witches, standard snow animals, or winter fey. If you want to blend in (for a module and a half), there's an idea. This doesn't make sense in the context of starting in Taldor, though.

Obviously, if you are highly skilled at pyromancy, you will not only kill basically anything that comes your way (with few exceptions), but you will also be surprisingly adept at keeping your party alive outside of combat.

There are multiple big animals to tame, so if you're wanting to ride a war weasel or an elk, you're good. These will probably help you move better than you would otherwise. By contrast, if you're a flyer, you're still in for a rough time, given that flurries, blizzards, and snow whipped up from wind are common.

Again, I would not suggest having multiple players with cold resistance, since that defeats a lot of the point and makes the AP more annoying than gripping. Instead, if you're going to have your Legolas/Serafina Pekkala/tiefling, only have one so that you have a panic button in case the rest of the party runs into problems. There will be magic items along the way to assist with all such problems anyway, so what drama there could be you're throwing out to be annoyed until all of the thematic conditions become trivial.

The Cult of Milani features in part two because of how oppressed the humanoid citizens of Irrisen (almost all humans) are under the reign of the White Witches. Indeed, there is a caste system that places at the top the White Witches, then non-witch descendants of Baba Yaga as a sort of nobility, then winter monsters (Wikkawaks, Winter Wolves, Winter Wolf lycanthropes, Ice Trolls, and others), and far below them native humans. Winter fey are adjacent to the caste system, as they mostly don't want to participate in it, but they're just as evil and murderous as anything else. A divine caster of Milani and any type of monster-hunter (e.g., Ranger) or liberator class (e.g., Paladin of Freedom) would fit well, especially as a back-up character in case someone dies before leaving Irrisen.

You're kinda on your own for coming up with a new character once you get to Iobaria, as the only times you'll be interacting with locals after that point are on Triaxus (so Triaxians) or Earth (at which point you're speaking Russian instead of Common).

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wearesorcerer · 2 days

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Spell: "By the power of love, explode!"

"the 'power of love' trope is such an overused and cliche gimmick" i do not care i will love it always and forever. love prevails and explodes the enemy

#spell #the power of love #explosion #delayed post fireball #Tasha's memetic laughter

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wearesorcerer · 2 days

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@wearenecromancers

Communists and anarchists will spend all day talking about abstract concepts and structures like capitalism and the state, but willfully ignore the very real, tangible curse placed upon me by the foul necromancer

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wearesorcerer · 2 days

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@mallowmaenad You are correct. The etymology usually cited says that it literally means "oathbreaker." In contexts in which "witch" is gendered feminine, you'll often see "warlock" used as the masculine form (e.g., Bewitched). Bear in mind, though, that attitudes towards magic in European and European-derived cultures tend to be negative due to the influence of Christianity (emphasis on "tend;" there's plenty of wiggle room in that large collection of cultures), so all arcanists have a little bit of edgelord attributed to them. (I mean, you also see "sorcerer" used specifically to mean "practitioner of evil magic." There are distinctions between the various terms, but they aren't agreed upon.)

On the one hand, it's true that the way Dungeons & Dragons defines terms like "sorcerer" and "warlock" and "wizard" is really only relevant to Dungeons & Dragons and its associated media – indeed, how these terms are used isn't even consistent between editions of D&D! – and trying to apply them in other contexts is rarely productive.

On the other hand, it's not true that these sorts of fine-grained taxonomies of types of magic are strictly a D&D-ism and never occur elsewhere. That folks make this argument is typically a symptom of being unfamiliar with Dungeons & Dragons' source material. D&D's main inspirations are American literary sword and sorcery fantasy spanning roughly the 1930s through the early 1980s, and fine-grained taxonomies of magic users absolutely do appear in these sources; they just aren't anything like as consistent as the folks who try to cram everything into the sorcerer/warlock/wizard model would prefer.

For example, in Lydon Hardy's "Five Magics" series, the five types of magical practitioners are:

Alchemists: Drawing forth the hidden virtues of common materials to craft magic potions; limited by the fact that the outcomes of their formulas are partially random.

Magicians: Crafting enchanted items through complex manufacturing procedures; limited by the fact that each step in the procedure must be performed perfectly with no margin for error.

Sorcerers: Speaking verbal formulas to basically hack other people's minds, permitting illusion-craft and mind control; limited by the fact that the exercise of their art eventually kills them.

Thaumaturges: Shaping matter by manipulating miniature models; limited by the need to draw on outside sources like fires or flywheels to make up the resulting kinetic energy deficit.

Wizards: Summoning and binding demons from other dimensions; limited by the fact that the binding ritual exposes them to mental domination by the summoned demon if their will is weak.

"Warlock", meanwhile, isn't a type of practitioner, but does appear as pejorative term for a wizard who's lost a contest of wills with one of their own summoned demons.

Conversely, Lawrence Watt-Evans' "Legends of Ethshar" series includes such types of magic-users as:

Sorcerers: Channelling power through metal talismans to produce fixed effects; in the time of the novels, talisman-craft is largely a lost art, and most sorcerers use found or inherited talismans.

Theurges: Summoning gods; the setting's gods have no interest in human worship, but are bound not to interfere in the mortal world unless summoned, and are thus amenable to cutting deals.

Warlocks: Wielding X-Men style psychokinesis by virtue of their attunement to the telepathic whispers emanating from the wreckage of a crashed alien starship. (They're the edgy ones!)

Witches: Producing improvisational effects mostly related to healing, telepathy, precognition, and minor telekinesis by drawing on their own internal energy.

Wizards: Drawing down the infinite power of Chaos and shaping it with complex rituals. Basically D&D wizards, albeit with a much greater propensity for exploding.

You'll note that both taxonomies include something called a "sorcerer", something called a "warlock", and something called a "wizard", but what those terms mean in their respective contexts agrees neither with the Dungeons & Dragons definitions, nor with each other.

(Admittedly, these examples are from the 1980s, and are thus not free of D&D's influence; I picked them because they both happened to use all three of the terms in question in ways that are at odds with how D&D uses them. You can find similar taxonomies of magic use in earlier works, but I would have had to use many more examples to offer multiple competing definitions of each of "sorcerer", "warlock" and "wizard", and this post is already long enough!)

So basically what I'm saying is giving people a hard time about using these terms "wrong" – particularly if your objection is that they're not using them in a way that's congruent with however D&D's flavour of the week uses them – makes you a dick, but simply having this sort of taxonomy has a rich history within the genre. Wizard phylogeny is a time-honoured tradition!

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wearesorcerer · 2 days

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This, but also 5e has made a very conscious attempt at hiding its complexity without doing the actual work of overhauling 3.x and 4e to make either truly simpler.

A case in point: feats.

In 5e, feats are much, much more powerful than they were in 3.x -- they do a lot more and frequently increase a stat by one, all so that the choice of feat over stat bumps is harder to make. They also don't offer feat chains: you don't have to take this feat to get that feat. This means the feat system looks simpler, as there are far fewer feats in the core rulebook (and, consequently, in splats). However, since each feat does more, they each impact the game in a variety of ways that may or may not be as balanced (not that 3.x's feats were well balanced, just that it was much easier to tell that one feat was far more powerful than another).

Spells do this a lot, as well. Instead of going off of total hit dice, as the spell did in all editions prior to 4th, sleep now works like a damage dealing spell (appeal: rolling shiny math rocks! complexity: doing the math afterward), but not exactly, since it's a pool of total HP, not an amount deducted from the HP of each creature in the area. You don't have to know what HD means in the context of monsters and it looks simpler because it looks like a familiar mechanic, but it's actually more complicated.

And then there are Warlock spell slots. Contrast with 3.x, in which Warlocks got invocations (and those were always at-will spell-like abilities except [for no good reason] they required somatic components) and very little else (scaling DR and energy resistance, fast healing usable a few times per day, and ways of being better with the Use Magic Device skill, most of which weren't worth waiting on; eldritch blast was an invocation and I count detect magic as one, even though it worked like a normal SLA). Warlock was one of the simplest classes made; it now has some odd mechanics which, if manipulated correctly, break the system.

There are other bits that are hidden hither and thither. Point being, 5e's appeal is marketing (market share and pretensions at simplicity), not real simplicity.

You do of course understand that the reason most people prefer DND 5E is that it's one of the easiest systems to learn? Like I'm sorry it's all well and good to 'break up the cultural monopoly' but I have Dyscalculia and DND is seemingly the only tabletop system that doesn't consistently ask me to do a hefty amount of complex math. I've never given WOTC a penny but the reason I've primarily played 5E over basically everything else is it's the only system that was extremely easy to learn and completely self explanatory. (Also - I like elves and magic and shit.) You roll one dice to see if you can do a thing, you add whatever your plus or minus is, and then roll damage where appropriate. Easy. Meanwhile seemingly everything else is like "Okay so you roll two dice except sometimes it's four and then you take this stat and you divide it by that dice roll and then you add a number equivalent to the day of the week unless it's a leap year then you times that by three and if you get a prime number you can lift that coffee cup." Like have you ever heard of Villains and Vigilantes, for instance? It's fucking insane.Like I'm not saying I don't get why you wanna make this point? But I feel like I have to point out that most people who make indie TTRPG's don't seem to focus on accessibility when designing their systems and they are EXTREMELY intimidating for new players. And often, what people who are big into TTRPG's do is assume that because THEY fully understand this system and how it works, new players will too just as easily. The amount of times I've spoken to a GM, said "This sounds a bit complicated", and they've gone "No no no it's easy" and then described the most complicated set of rules I've ever heard is ridiculous.

Okay it sounds you’ve had a very narrow range of experiences with RPGs then because D&D 5e is on the higher end of complexity when it comes to RPGs and most indie RPGs are actually a lot less complex than D&D 5e. Like, Villains & Vigilantes is not the median when it comes to RPG complexity. There are systems even lighter than D&D out there. :)

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