The Frost Marches
Each Rounded token represents one of the players active as of March 15th
Summary
The Frost Marches is an experimental Dungeons and Dragons campaign that began in December 2020. Inspired by a video by Mathew Colville, I along with another GM began planning a Campaign to incorporate all the people we had into a single game.
The key difference between this and a standard campaign is the number of players, and the amount of homebrew. We were planning a campaign that would allow players to interact as they chose and be able to handle 14 players. In this game players could choose which adventure or dungeon to undertake, whether they wanted to explore the surrounding area, or go and delve into the ruined tower, or strangely cold caves.
Within the first month of the game unfortunately my counterpart GM began working a new job that led to him being unable to run so I had to undertake the majority of organization and work on running the games. We had also already decided to use my pre-existing world of Zandria as a base for the game, therefore even since the return of my co-GM I have had to answer questions as to the background of the world as a base for the content he is creating.
So far over the 3 and a half months of running this game I have run 15 sessions, and though there has been one instance of a player character dying I've had frequent praise from the players of every session I've run, even those sessions that didn't end in success.
Onboarding
When starting a new game getting players onboard with the system is a key aspect to running the gaming. In order to bring players onboard to such a different campaign style than normal we had to figure out how to give them an initial environment from which to explore.
In order to do so, I created the map below featuring four dungeons, two of which were created by me, and two of which were created by my Co-GM, we then created a brief set of notes written by a character in the world, in order to give some context to the locations.
We decided to ground the location in the world by making the map intentionally messy, and signed by a character in the world, a halfling named Bruno who scouted out the area. The ruins in the center would be adapted and become the base town for the players Thawvault.
This map gave the players direction when they didn't have much knowledge yet in the world, then future dungeons could be found by information discovered in and on the path to existing dungeons.
In doing so we created a start, now lets talk of the individual portions of the game.
Dungeons
As mentioned in the previous sections the main impetus for the players adventures was the dungeons. The two that I've completely run at this point and can therefore talk about without worrying about a player getting spoilers.
I'll be focusing on the key things included in each of my dungeons to allow for both low level and medium level interaction with the dungeon's contents.
In order to allow for this I had two stages to each of my starting dungeons. The grove for instance had a physical building which included the spaces within which the druids who once stayed there met and discussed issues or worked on their carvings. I then had a second area that was a sealed hedge maze, within which were more dangerous creatures and the source of the dangerous power within.
The next important part to each of my dungeons that keeps the players motivated is a story to the location. Again using the grove as a reference we have what in the past of the world was a meeting place for the druids of the area, but sometime in the past someone sealed a source of dark magic within the back of it, and overtime that led the druids to seal up the location.
These stories make players want to return to the locations over and over again, and slowly uncover whats going on. Having consistent interest in going back and retrying things they've failed, or delving deeper into dungeons got enough that I started having to say no to requests to enter them just to give me time to rest between running sessions.
Treasure Rooms
Two systems that my Co-DM and I have introduced have done a huge amount of work in terms of giving goals to our players. This is the first one and was also one of the first ones the players discovered.
Treasure rooms are rooms within a dungeon that are either hidden or hard to enter. In the case of both of my first dungeons they involved a simple riddle or puzzle to unlock and then the defeat of a guardian in order to reach the actual loot.
Its important to note that the treasure guardians are much more powerful than anything else in their dungeon and in order to convey that I made use of a mechanic that has only been used in one official Dungeons and Dragons supplement, that supplement being "Mythic Odysseys of Theros". Mythic Monsters are creatures who have two phases to them entering their second phase once they reach zero hit points rather than dying.
Only one of the two treasure guardians I created has been defeated and he made for one of the most interesting combats and sessions I've run. To do so they had to solve a puzzle involving the schools of magic in order to open a portal. This portal brought them to a demiplane where they could fight the golem defender of a wizards inner sanctum. This golem was of course a custom monster I've called the Arcane Golem.
The golem fought them in a crystal cage floating over a void of stars below them.
This encounter is one encounter where I've had the most player engagement, fear from the players especially when their escape route was cutoff was something I can take pride in creating. Especially considering the amount of joy they gained from finally defeating the construct.
Named Beasts
Though they would later become known as Wild bosses by the Majority of the players, the Named beasts were a creation of my Co-GM and I. We realized that the players would be spending a large portion of their time in the same portion of this world, we wanted to make sure that the wilderness seemed dangerous.
In order to do so we added a second kind of mythic monster, these named beasts are creatures to be feared whom the players would have to avoid the ire of before they were ready to fight them.
Just recently the first of the named beasts was defeated a wyvern named Shiovrit. She proved to be a dangerous fight for the players, but what I really want to talk about is how she alone became an adventure. The players decided to head out to hunt her therefore I was able to use the hunt in order to show a smaller landmark in the region and have the players encounter other parts of the region than they normally would have.
