About two years ago, my 10-year old son discovered Dungeons & Dragons. I started him and his friends in the old red box version (still the easiest to get into), then briefly into Castles & Crusades, and then into 5th edition where they completed Hoard of the Dragon Queen (an adventure I’d give a C+, but Sly Flourish does a much better job of explaining the good and the bad).
For their next adventure, I thought I’d brush off an old adventure that I had written many years ago. I remembered that it had run pretty well with my regular group at the time. I set out to brush the dust off and run it again. It would be easy to give it a quick update!
Or so I thought. What I had originally thought to be a 30-minute revision turned in several hours of heavy, plot-changing rebooting. The theme of my update was better adventures get smaller:
- A Smaller-scale, More Focused Opening. The original adventure had the PCs start the session in the mountains, just hours after a large clash between two armies. Lost and freezing, their first task was to find shelter fast. I decided this was too much of a cold, open-ended start for newer players (although ironically, I used the same opening in the Black Mine of Teihiihan – I swear not all of my adventures will start with the players lost and temperature-challenged!). I feared that newer players, with unfamiliar characters and an unknown world, might just end up staying lost in the wilderness. To fix this gap, I did two things. First, I started the PCs with a stronger objective. Before they got ambushed, they were out hunting a nefarious, murderous outlaw, Fat Farlsbag! Second, I shrunk the prior battle down. Rather than an epic clash of thousands, it was a now small skirmish between the bounty hunters and mountain orcs. I hoped the smaller scale meant that the players wouldn’t tarry long looking for survivors, looting bodies (a favorite of 10-year olds), or building defenses vs. another attack.
- A New (Far Less Ambitious) Villain. In the original adventure, the PCs stumble into the path of an evil mind flayer, who had an ambitious, barely-competent plan to destroy civilization with a giant golem. Reading this part ten years later made me wince a bit, for all the obvious reasons. So first, I decided to change the villain into something more unknowable, so I removed the face tentacles and made him I’Zor’zah the Azure, a blue, maybe-undead, maybe-unaging sorcerer who had a personal vendetta against the wizard cult he founded. This change meant that the PCs could more easily discover the villain’s history and motivations. A successful skill roll like History or Thaumatology roll enabled the PCs to recall this northern cult of fascist wizards, and their legendary infighting – which is far more interesting than stumbling across a brand new Big Bad, fresh from his lair, no history behind him. Also, this change made I’Zor’zah’s giant golem plot more believable. If you want to knock down the tower of your old buddies, a giant metal golem is conceivably, just the thing. Scoping this villain to have a smaller, more achievable goal gave the PCs more opportunity to have a debate on how to handle him.
- Escaping is a Physical Thing. As I reworked the adventure, I realized that I had unlocked additional emotionally-satisfying win conditions. Fat Farlsbag could be captured or killed! I’Zor’zah could be stopped… or ignored entirely because the PCs had just discovered a legendary dwarven mine. And with more loot to be found along the way, I knew newer players (especially 10-year old boys) might just claim all-out victory after having found a couple of magical axes. The original adventure funneled the players towards I’Zor’zah’s golem, but I wanted to give the players more strategic agency, and feel like surviving was just as satisfying as any of those other wins. I metaphorically shrunk the wilderness and added a familiar landmark, St. Bernard’s Peak, at the halfway point of the adventure. Now, when the players see this peak, they’ll know they can escape to civilization… whenever they choose. This single landmark becomes the physical representation of escape, and hands the players additional agency and interaction during the game. Once the peak is found, they can debate the value of escaping vs. tying up other loose ends.
Satisfied with my changes, I renamed the adventure to The Cold Bounty, and ran it for my son and his friends. They had a great time in the freezing mountains, and it was clear that the smaller scope helped. I embellished the dark crimes of Fat Farlsbag, so by the time they found him, they were pumped and ready for vengeance. Also, the kids appreciated the extra deadliness of GURPS (vs. D&D) after one of the cave yetis body-slammed and nearly killed one of their warriors — they immediately stopped the screaming full-frontal charges and became a highly-coordinated team. Suddenly, after seeing St. Bernard’s Peak, escape became a very good option.
You can download and give The Cold Bounty a try here:
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If I get a chance to run The Cold Bounty again, I’d make a few more tweaks. The most obvious is that I’d flesh out the lost mine at the end of the adventure. Fortunately, our group ran out of time, otherwise I would have been improvising a full-on dungeon.
I’d also plant some more clues about I’Zor’zah up front. Maybe an escaped slave, or a dead sorcerer, signals to the PCs that there’s an evil wizard on the loose in the area. While none of these suggestions are in the adventure above, I did prove that I can learn, and fixed one of the problems I saw with The Black Mine of Teihiihan– all the pregenerated characters in the adventure have intertwining backstories. Since my group created their own characters, if someone plays this version with these characters, let me know how it goes! Tweet me @SageThalcos
Related: From cold mountains to hot deserts – themed fantasy worlds
Hello!
I am probably going to use an adaptation of this scenario at a launching session of a rpg school club – I was wondering, how much time did your son’s team need for this adventure? I’ll have only 1.5h with all new players, so I’m pondering how much trimming do I need.
Thanks for all your work! (I’ll email you how it went 😉 )
Fox’
I think I got through most of it in about 2 hours. But that was at a time when my son’s group didn’t know the rules very well and spent more time running down dead ends vs. stay focused. If you trim the yeti cave a bit, that will definitely help!
Hi!
A bit late, but here is a small summary of how using “The Cold Bounty” went^^
So to provide you with a bit of context, I am helping at my brother’s school as a GM at a RPG Club – we basically got the list of players the day before the game, and as such I need a oneshot for a party of 6 to 7, 12-13yo, with little to no experience in roleplay. Also: it’s a French school.
I’ve switched the system to a French open system (Aventures) popularised by a youtuber. It is very rudimentary, with only three stats: mental, physics and charisma. Also, I’ve let some aspects wide on purpose (like having a character with the skill “Arcana”, so the player can choose to convince me about whatever arcanas are). You can find the pdf (in french, but hey), here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/j1t0ukxgygs5n7y/AADRQAK9s5cOm0wxWRZQtOQya?dl=0
First game, I was planning on following your advice and trimming the yeti cave – however seeing the limited investment of my players at that point, I’ve decided to wake them up a little with a fight. Dice rolls kept failing, we ended up finishing after 2h of play, having defeated the Crag yetis.
I’ve asked my group for some feedback – turns out some of them were advanced players, and as such wanted a more advanced system. I’ve based myself on Beyond the Wall and expanded their characters (without changing any abilities, just converting stats) for our second game (V2 in the dropbox folder)
In my version, the Manakill Crevasses became a single deep crevasse, with an ice bridge to pass, with holes randomly forming (depending on whether the PC was magical or not). We then moved to Fat Farlsbag’s hideout, though in a simplified version, without any Golem in sight, an IronMouth Spider and IZorZah just chilling around Fat Farlsbag – turns out those two were linked, as the latter used Farlsbag to provide him with whatever he needed. The brother of one of the PC’s was being used as a Mind-controlled slave to extract platinum, which requires either being a goblin or a mage to be extracted.
In the end, we needed 4h to finish the scenario in this form: a bit rushed towards the end, which I regret, as this scenario has (in my opinion) a perfect twist, making it more than a dungeon crawler, which accommodated perfectly both new players (who feel most at ease with combat) and advanced players (who are interested in the scenario).
Perfect if you are looking for something to join two types of players, though a bit lenghty, at least the way we played it.
So yeah, that would be it – if you expect anymore details, let me know^^ Thank you for making your resources accessible, really saved me. I will also present 1shotadventures to the club members, once they are familiar enough with the game to try being GM.
Thanks for the awesome summary! I like your version of the crevasses way better than mine too. An icy bridge sounds like a perfect set piece to freak out players. (You also reminded me to check out Beyond the Wall since I’ve heard so many good things about that system)
This was a great adventure to run. Esp. for a novice DM (only 3rd or 4th session and none for about 2 years).
I decided to run it using The Deathbringer RPG rules with some of my own tweaks. We ran with the included characters (I added one a Plague Doctor as we expected an extra player). My players mostly really got into their randomly assigned characters. So much so they want to keep them moving forward. My original plan was to run some one shots to get us used to the rules and mechanics before moving to a campaign. Still going with this but going to loosely tie these characters into the next one shot.
I made some small tweaks. I fleshed out the options post battle in scene 1. Including a random chance to find a wounded enemy and help them. This happened and despite not trusting him much they followed him toward the beacon for the mine. He got them turned around and led them to Fat Farlsbag’s camp instead before fleeing while they were busy.
I added a slave falling from the scaffold to the description of the mine valley and while the other players were arguing about whether to attack to disrupt the ritual or not. My daughter playing the plague doctor I added ran down heedless of being seen to tend the wounded man. Thus they discovered that nobody was paying attention and avoided the suicidal option of attacking I’Zoh’zah.
Very grateful that you published this many thanks.
Ran this one in GURPS 4e because I was said I was going to run something the next time the GM can’t run star wars. And he had to back out two days before the game. I played it a bit loose and fast but the only thing I really changed is that I used goblins instead of hobgoblins and I actually ran the battle that happened before the module.
After some initial confusion since I hadn’t plaid GURPS in a while and everyone else it was their first time, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. And I quite liked running it as well.
That’s cool that you ran the disastrous battle before the opening of the adventure – nice way to start it with a little action!