Death Frost Doom and The Pillories - Part 1

 I like this adventure quite a lot - Death Frost Doom.  It showed how an adventure module could be game-breaking, campaign-breaking, in a way that wasn't really done before.  Sure, Tomb of Horrors could nuke a 14th level party, but it's not like the stakes included Acererak leaving the tomb and wrecking their home town.  I struggle to recall a TSR adventure, or even a WOTC-era adventure, that fundamentally altered the state of the campaign if the players pulled the wrong lever or opened the wrong door.  Since 2009 there have been quite a few LOTFP adventures that can wreck your game world, but this was the first, the OG.

Naturally I wanted to make it the capstone to the Pillories campaign, our York 1630 game.

How'd we get here?  The early adventures involved the characters collecting materials for a secretive patron, The Doctor, who was researching the story of a Roman Empire era military adventurer in Caledonia, who fought against a tribe of death cultists.  The Doctor betrayed the adventurers, they killed him and took his stuff, including his notes, and now they're trying to complete his quest - to find a path towards eternal life (and loot a really old place at the same time).

Their travels took them from York to Carlisle and across the river into Scotland, traveling through Langholm and then into the nearby mountains.  There were fisticuffs with Scottish brigands, some whiskey was tasted, a truce with Clan Armstrong forged, and the malign history of the place was recounted by a parish priest who asked them to leave sleeping horrors alone.

Death Frost Doom embraces many of the tropes of classic horror - dire warnings not to trespass from a crazed hermit, a foreboding locale with frozen graves and an ominous hanging tree, and unsettling haunting effects that make the players question their faculties and doubt their senses.

I ran Death Frost Doom a decade ago with a different group, using the original printing.  This time I'm using the 2014 update, primarily because the cartography is a higher quality and the new maps look better on a virtual table top.

Here's an aside to modern designers; please consider having sanitized or VTT friendly versions of your maps available for download.  There's an OSR design trend to load the maps with GM information and reminders right on the map, which is laudable, but it creates extra work when you're converting the map to a virtual table top and you don't want to immediately spoil the players.  Besides "fog of war" and other obfuscations, the referee needs to hide secret doors, traps, and similar concealed features, usually by editing the map image in a graphics program or hiding it somehow in the VTT.

The Pillories have been sufficiently impressed with the eerie qualities of Cold Mountain (the name of the mountain top in this game world).  An eerie humming sound suffused the peak, emanating from around and beneath the endless frozen cairns and graves surrounding the lonely cabin on the mountain top.  They found the body of a man who had fled the cabin in night clothes, having died of fright or exposure in the dark of night.  (They would return to the corpse later and discover it was beginning to reanimate, fingers twitching, faint zombie groans emanating from its lips, and one of the henchmen, Wood, beheaded it with his battle axe).

The cabin had plenty of its own weird effects, whether it was a haunted harpsichord, the ancient painting from hundreds of years ago that depicted the player characters perfectly, or the weird mirror that didn't reflect the magic user or elf (which our player/sketch artist captured here, where the halfling, Remi, can't see the mage Allister or the elf Yuri in the mirror, even though they are standing right behind him).

Eventually they went through the trap door that led down into the ancient dungeon beneath the cabin.  They encountered additional weird an unsettling things, such as the room of severed skeletal left hands, the chapel with it's haunting murals, cursed altar, and weird unholy basins full of human teeth in sickly black water.  There were moments where the players were a little dumbstruck and just said, "what the f*ck?"  It's a referee's dream to stop the players in their tracks and make them say "what the f*ck?"

Zeke, the crazed hermit, had warned the players not to sleep on the mountain, a warning they took to heart after finding the frozen corpse of the guy who ran out into the night after bedding down in the cabin.  As their first day on the mountain got late, they collected his gear and headed down the mountain.  They had also been transcribing all the Duvan Ku writing they encountered, and planned to use a Comprehend Languages the next day to translate it all; our group is a mix of level 3 and level 4 characters at this point, and Allister had researched that spell during their long months of in-game downtime between Strict Time Records Must Be Kept and the start of this one.

This ended our first foray into Death Frost Doom.  More to come.