OSSR: Frostburn

[Ancient History]

Fix'd.

[deaddmwalking]

So 3.x halflings have exactly the same proportions as full-sized humans at half the size (not like Tolkien halflings which are portlier). For that reason, you shouldn't put a picture of a halfling with a Neanderthal - it makes it look like they're trying to show you an actual frost-giant inspired race and they're not... The art is extra disappointing there.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Back in the day I thought it would be neat to run a Neanderthal paladin who got their holy powers from their tribal ancestors. He was basically a shaman who clobbered dudes with a giant bone club and wore badass mammoth bone armor or something.
Naturally, that never happened.

[Libertad]

What they really should have done is give out a lot more feats, but also give them out in the middle of the adventures. So characters would get Altitude Adaptation during the high altitude adventure so that they could show off their toys in a way that they would actually matter.

Paizo actually tried this early on during the first year or so of Pathfinder with Achievement Feats. But instead of automatically getting the feat upon completion of the prerequisites like you would in a video game, said prerequisites were dumb "kill XX enemy of type X" or "heal a total of X damage via channeling positive energy" which would be a book-keeping nightmare for GMs. And then you'd still have to take the feat in question with a feat slot.

The only basic class that gets more than an acknowledgment or a placeholder where an undeveloped Prestige Class might have been is the Cleric. And that's because every Cleric gets to be a prophet of some specific god and get some minor adjustments to their power set. This book has its own set of nine gods for its own pantheon. Some of them had been previously used in other D&D books (including one that got into D&D books through being a Norse god), and three of them were made up by James Jacobs for the lulz. In any case, none of this shit matters because you don't care about these fantasy nordic religions. They aren't as interesting as real world nordic religions and there isn't enough meat here to do anything with. If you step into a shrine to one of these guys, what does it look like? What calendar do they use? What days do they drink reindeer piss on? I don't know. James Jacobs cared enough to write two and a half pages of this drivel, but not enough to flesh these fantasy religions into a fantasy culture. And because of that, it never went anywhere or meant anything to anyone.

I'm reminded of that Northlands Saga campaign setting/adventure path I reviewed, which at the very least tried to make the various deities and religious traditions notably different and grouped by theme. You had not-Sami elves who forswore worship of all gods and instead made pacts with spirits they could perceive and control (druidism). And you had who I believe are not-Celtics who believe that all magic is holy regardless of the source and build their communities around enchanted tree stumps which they claim house their gods. While the dominant not-Nordic culture had priesthood as a part-time thing where the gods may grant power on a case-by-case basis to mortals they deem worthy and the locals contextualized is as akin to a jarl and huscarl's bond.* Although there were still standard "evil demon deities" and "druids who live in the wilds," it was very clear that the various societies approached divine magic differently and their local pantheons in question had clear impressions on the shaping of their culture.

*for all you Skyrim newbs out there, a local lord and their knight for a more British European comparison.

Wizards of the Coast has a bad habit of making "themed pantheons" like in Complete Warrior where they just throw a bunch of gods together with no connection to a world or its people and just feels dissonant. Complete Warrior had an alignment-appropriate "warrior pantheon" representing different aspects of war. As a third party example, Book of Erotic Fantasy did a similar thing with its sex gods.

The result is it feels formulaic and very obviously an artificial creation of the system rather than something you can imagine a fantasy kingdom or society incorporating into their daily lives.

[Orca]

I have actually seen someone play a snow elf. Probably because despite the terribad illustrations in this book it's not hard to imagine a sexy snow elf adventurer. The rest...never.

[Username17]

I have actually seen someone play a snow elf. Probably because despite the terribad illustrations in this book it's not hard to imagine a sexy snow elf adventurer. The rest...never.

From a pure min/max standpoint they aren't bad. It's exactly like a regular Elf except you have a penalty to Charisma instead of Constitution. Since Charisma is a dump stat for a lot of characters and Constitution is a dump stat for almost nobody, it's a good choice. Nobody wants to trade their Gnomish ability to speak with burrowing animals with the ability to speak with Arctic mammals. By the time the ability to speak with polar bears was remotely relevant you'd be high enough level to simply do that.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

Is there any reason to have Snow Dwarfs different from normal Dwarfs? That just happen to live in the snow and thus probably wear more fur?

Sure, it's an easy way to stick more content in, but can't you just talk about how their culture is somewhat different to Dwarfs elsewhere because they have to live in the cold?

Secondly, can you play a Narnia style Ice Queen Clone (not to be confused with an Ice Cream Cone)? Cause The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a pretty popular book, one you'd probably want to be able to rip-off.

[Koumei]

I have seen someone play an Uldra. They took the maximum Strength and minimum Intelligence, and I allowed them to have Strength as their casting stat for a Psion (with a vague "but if you transform into a giant or something it won't apply" patch in case of future shenanigans), and basically she would fly about and shout "EYE AM THE STRONGEST". So they were playing as Cirno.

Then I went to bed, and when I woke up, the others had all discussed things and chose to play as a very Touhou-inspired party.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Frostburn

AncientH

I feel I should rant about feats just a little more. Let's talk about Cold Focus.

The Spell Focus and Greater Spell Focus feats in the Player's Handbook display a great deal of symmetry: there are 8 schools of spells, the feats increase save DC for their respective school. No-brainer feat, right? The obvious reason this isn't a great feat is because it's a static bonus that becomes increasingly irrelevant as you go up in level, but dig into it a little and it becomes even worse.

For one, the schools aren't remotely balanced with regard to each other. No symmetry there. So this is a bit more like Circles of Protection from Magic: the Gathering. No one plays CoP: White. It isn't worth it. When was the last time you picked Spell Focus (Divination)? A lot of those spells don't even have save DCs. There's no saving throw against detect magic.

So when you get to Cold Focus, you're looking at a variation of an already existing feat. It's CoP: Shadow, to continue the Magic metaphor.

Chapter 4: Equipment


This. But like... it's cold outside.

Frank

One of the most obvious places for expansion of Dungeons & Dragons is with equipment. It may not be obvious how to have your Dwarf Cleric named Carlos take advantage of new content for non-Dwarves or for non-Clerics, but he can obvious find and loot and purchase different stuff and hold it in his hands. So it might surprise you that the entire equipment section of this book is only eight pages. We spent twenty five pages prattling about ten different dudes you were never going to play or meet, but when it comes to oiled tent cloth and snow shoes, we only get 8 pages to work with. That's weird.

Much of this is the formatting of the items of 3rd edition was actually quite efficient. There are eleven weapons in this chapter, and while they are mostly kind of dumb, they get slightly poetic descriptions and some attached art. The rules for what they do are clear, and it all comes in at two and a half pages. Like, you don't need or want or care about rules for hitting your enemies with a big stick that has antlers stuck on the end because you have some fucking self respect and you're going to kill people with a fucking sword like a non-idiot.

But the bottom line is that 3rd edition had means to differentiate a harpoon from a javelin or an ax from a spear that were sufficient and concise. Game relevant information was conveyed in an effective and accessible format. You could get stuff for your character so that Carlos and Susan were different characters without going through a forty page chapter of dense text.

AncientH

Still no rules for snowballs.

One of the bizarre aspects of this book is the focus on "primeval" animals and "primitive" weapons. They compound this in a sidebar on "Primitive Exotic Weapons" where the new weapons they describe made of bone, stone, and sinew has a chance to break...but not any of the equally primitive shit from the Player's Handbook.

That's bullshit. I mean, the whole thing of weapon's breaking in combat is one of those things that sounds cool in theory and in practice is always a pain in the ass to implement, but D&D3 gave weapons actual hit points. This system doesn't use those. If you deal maximum damage with one of these weapons, it literally comes apart in your hands. That's stupid.

Bonus points for laziest weapon is the Tigerskull Club. Literally, it's a smilodon skull on a stick. Why not a giant club with a mammoth tusk embedded in it? Walrus spear? Lazy assholes.

Frank

Crampons. Skis. Snowshoes. All the basic snow crap you would be genuinely offended by its absence is... not absent. Do I think they could have gone farther? Absolutely. It's a fucking fantasy world, we could have vines that take root in ice or stones that you put in a fire and stay warm to the touch for days afterward. I wouldn't say it's a failure of imagination because the basics are in fact covered and the rules and costs for them are adequate. But only just. Someone thought about what the actual minimum for this part of the chapter, and they did that.

There are a few alchemical items and they are... acceptable. Ice Chalk is a waxy material that you can use to draw on ice. That's fine. I like it. It gets a passing grade. It doesn't get a good passing grade because no one ever went back and talked about how cold climate culture is influenced by the fantasy inventions that exist. But it does get a passing grade. C+. Meets listed requirements.

AncientH

Skates: Skates allow full movement across icy surfaces for
anyone with at least 5 ranks of Balance, but cannot be used
at all on any other terrain.

The fun part about this is, of course, it doesn't specify anything else except "icy surface." Does that mean you can move normally through sleet storm? I guess! Does it mean you can use them with Wall Runner and skate on walls of ice and frozen waterfalls and shit? Probably!

Frank

3rd edition came up with an elaborate numbers for how much things should cost in terms of gold pieces for various amounts of enchantment. And while they were elegant in their way they didn't do good things for the game at higher levels. The biggest offender of course is the “murder hobo” phenomenon, where spending gold on food or shelter or buying a farm or investing in an army or your domain or in fact literally anything at all that wasn't getting yourself a better magic sword came out of your magic sword budget. Which of course resulted in people who cared about the game having to shit on the story and vice versa. Not great for a storytelling game.

The second deal breaker is the “christmas tree effect” which is that optimal play involved getting your hands on large numbers of individually trivial items and voltroning them together. This has to do with quadratic costing – that each progressively larger bonus costs progressively more. The way square numbers work, the base increase simply goes up by each successive odd number – add 1, then add 3, then add 5, then add 7, and so on. But while that makes sure that each successive cost increase remains relevant while you seize progressively larger piles of gold from progressively more dangerous dragon lairs – but it turns out there's one weird trick. The very start of the progression is one, which is 3 less than 4 which is in turn 5 less than 9 and so on, but very importantly it's also the actual number one. Four isn't just 3 higher, it's four times higher. So there are various cost multipliers for magic items that don't fit into a main clothing slot and cost multipliers for things that add weird bullshit stacking bonus types, and none of that shit matters because it doesn't take very many steps up the quadratic cost escalation before applying those modifiers to something at the bottom was considerably cheaper thsn getting the next bigger main thing. Why would you get a better magic sword at all, when for less resources you could keep the sword you had and add a floating rock that gave a psionic bonus to your strength that added to a number that modified a number that added to the same roll that a better magic sword would? Thus, at high level the optimal play pattern was to collect a bunch of stacking trivial bullshit that had no narrative significance and also was really hard to keep track of but added up to considerable numbers on the character sheet.

Anyway, the importance of all this is that there's weird shit like magic furnaces that propel ice ships across glaciers. And while that's kind of awesome, no one cared because the immediate thing to do with that was melt it down for more ornaments on the christmas tree. And secondly, there's some weird “blue ice” material that does some stuff and has a fixed cost so that showed up in a shockingly large amount of character optimization builds because for certain characters it was one more type of christmas ornament you could have.

Guidelines were followed, but this book is a microcosm of why those guidelines were things that should have been completely revamped. Of course they weren't, and when the Magic Item Compendium happened three years later they were still trying to patch this monkey spunk together by sharply policing where christmas tree ornaments could be hung.

It should also be noted that in the first few levels of play none of this shit is a problem because no one has enough resources to worry about cost progressions and if anyone has a magic item that is better than the minimum possible it's a plot device.

AncientH

There are new Exotic Materials. Exotic materials were things like mithril and adamantine and iron wood and living steel and crap that gave you some minor bonus in exchange for costing a shitload more money to basic gear. Which is fine. That's a fine tradeoff. You didn't need it, but it was A Thing.

They went a little overboard with this shit in D&D3, though.

We get Blue Ice, which is like regular ice but harder and colder. It can be forged like iron. That's stupid, but it's magic, whatever. You can have dwarfs forge ice armor and ice spears and giant fucking ice fortresses and that's all fine.

Rimefire Ice glows, and is as flammable as wood. Yes, you can burn this shit. Burning rimefire ice causes cold damage, which makes no sense since the whole point of rimefire is that it does fire AND cold damage.

Stygian Ice is supercold. So cold. +1d6 cold damage cold. It isn't harder than regular ice, so this is really a point where you wish you had snowball rules, since you could just toss iceballs of devil piss at people and laugh as they die.

There are new vehicles, but vehicles in D&D3.x are still terrible and you don't give a fuck about how many hitpoints a sled has, or what the difficulty is to pilot a goddamn iceberg or skyberg (which is like an iceberg, but floats through the sky. That may sound stupid, but cloud giants and dragons have been living in solid clouds for decades, so this isn't a major issue as far as I'm concerned.)

Chapter 5: Magic of the Frostfell

Frank

3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons is sometimes called “Caster Edition” and games that are derived from it such as 3.5 and Pathfinder are similarly described and that is totally fair. Spells are divided into levels and people who can cast spells just keep getting access to more and more powerful effects. When people who can't cast spells are having discussions about how High Altitude Adaptation costs too much, the wizards of the game are fucking wizards and are like summoning monsters that are individually more threatening than the barbarian's entire character. And most casters just get a pile of spells. It isn't just that the Wizard taps out for an overpowered Pokemon, he makes his golem or army of the dead or whatever and still lights shit on fire because he has spell slots left over.



At lower levels, wizards run out of spells pretty quickly and have to conserve magic and hide behind the Paladin and whatever. At higher levels, this isn't an issue. The Wizard functionally never runs out of magic because they have more spells per day than there are meaningful rounds of combat.

AncientH

There are no wujen spells. Fuck off, wu jen! You are not wanted here.

Actually, that's probably a good thing all considered, because while the Wu Jen are elementalist wizards, they had a mishandling in their initial write-up where they got a bonus if they mastered all the spells of a given element on their spell list, so if you added new spells, they lost it! This was eventually fixed, but you still didn't want to play them.

Some of these spells are pointless. Do druids need Conjure Ice Beast I-IX? I say this because the feat Beckon the Frozen (which you won't take) already gives summoned critters the cold subtype and +1d6 cold damage to cold attacks. Did you need separate spells for that?

Frank

The best spells in the game show up on the Wizard list. And Wizards have to go finding new spells to put into their spell book. New spells get written in expansion material and it obviously is an improvement for the Wizard because maybe they could learn a better or more useful version of a spell they would otherwise get. But if they learned it, it would be in lieu of something else. Clerics and Druids don't even have that limitation. They just select spells every day, and they select from whatever expansion books they feel like. The simple act of writing a new situational spell that Clerics could cast simply makes Carlos the Dwarf Cleric better. In a real and tangible way.

To be honest, the theoretical power of the Cleric or Druid almost never manifested itself, because while you could optimize your spells every day off a list of hundreds of options, in actual reality that is daunting and people just normally won't do it. So there's some kind of diminishing returns for Carlos as well, in the sense that eventually you just won't fucking want to deal with it.

AncientH

My favorite spell is probably the 5th level Druid/6th level Cleric spell Mantle of the Icy Soul. For 2,000 XP, a critter or character permanently gains the Cold subtype. That's the entire goal of some of those prestige classes from earlier. Let that sink in for a bit.

The thing is, the ability to do this kind of thing is absolutely an ability that people wanted spellslingers to have. You should be able to create entire magical subraces with a sufficiently powerful spell/ritual. The fact that almost nobody would want to do it is pointless, this is NPC fodder, or maybe some frost god's blessing for returning their frozen heart or something.

Frank

The whole chapter is 31 pages, and spells proper are 24 of them. It averages about 5 spells per page, and five pages of that is just a series of lists that tell you what is on the other 19 pages. It probably adds up to a little less than one hundred spells, but I cannot be assed to check.

In any case, most of the spells are hot garbage that you would never prepare, but a few of them are high impact. But we should discuss a bit of what makes a spell “good.” Most good spells aren't spells that you cast every day or spells you throw around in every combat encounter. A spell is good because it is better than other spells in a specific circumstance and you can reasonably predict when that circumstance might be when you're preparing spells for the day. Find the Path is a very good spell because it is better than other options at solving a particular kind of problem that you are likely to know about in advance. We're going to go through the Maze of Despair? Well fuck, better prepare Find the Path.

So let's consider Blood Snow and Shivering Touch. Both are 3rd level spells, and most people who have played 3.5 D&D have heard about Shivering Touch and Blood Snow has been lost to memory. So first off, Blood Snow causes an area of snow to very slowly kill everyone near it. If people like walk away they don't die. So it's a spell whose killer app is if you can get your enemies stuck in a confined space, but that space also has to be covered in snow so it's generally outside. You could imagine getting enemies stuck in a courtyard or casting a wall spell to seal off a ravine filled with blood snow or something, but you're not going to prepare it speculatively because it's essentially garbage in most scenarios.

Shivering Touch makes a single target clumsier by lowering their Dexterity score, giving the target minor penalties. But if the target's Dexterity actually hits zero, they become paralyzed and combat is over. Against most enemies, this isn't particularly good. But if you happen to have a single powerful enemy whose Dexterity is on the low end of the scale to start with, this can fucking end things. Is that good? Most of the time no, but it turns out to have a certain utility...



The game is literally named “Dungeons & Dragons” and the end boss of a lot of adventures is a Dragon. And it turns out that 80% of Dragons are very weak to the exact kind of cold damage to Dexterity caused by Shivering Touch. You don't prepare it every day, but the fact that it exists on the spell list means that Carlos the Dwarf Cleric can sometimes prepare spells in the morning and then literally one-punch the final boss. Making everyone else feel small in the pants.

The very fact that we can evaluate these two niche spells and meaningfully say which one is likely to save the day and which is likely to molder on the bench waiting for its chance is one of the really cool things about 3rd edition D&D. Monsters have stats, you can know which ones are vulnerable to which kinds of attacks. It's not a guessing game, the world has rules and it follows them. When things are emergently useful, it's not an asspull by Mr. Cavern. It's very empowering to the players.

AncientH

Leomund's Tiny Hut is a 3rd level Sor/Wiz spell, Leomund's Tiny Igloo is a 2nd level Sor/Wiz spell. The latter is smaller & colder, and this is another example of extremely low-hanging fruit, designed more for thematics than practicality. There's less of this than you might expect; there's no coldball or or frostball iceball or snowball as a counterpart to the standard fireball. I don't know why. If you were trying to build a cold wizard, that is something you'd actually want. Because that is something actually covered by a Cold Domain wizard.

Frank

Do we have to talk about Ice Assassin? We probably do. Ice Assassin is an improved version of Simulacrum, a spell where you make a shitty copy of a creature out of snow. Ice Assassin is better in the sense that it's higher level and makes a copy that is not shitty – it's just as competent as the original. Ice Assassin comes up a lot as an example of the game fully breaking down, since obviously if you make a copy of a boss monster that's more powerful than half the party, you have gotten yourself a minion that is better than any two other player characters. Also while there is significant XP costs involved, if you make an ice copy of yourself, that copy can obviously cast Ice Assassin because you can, and then we get a pyramid scheme of game breakingly powerful wizards and their ice clones. You normally have to 17th level to cast this spell, so the game already fell apart – but this spell would also tear the game apart if it somehow hadn't collapsed already.

Of more interest is the fact that the spell is written using templating from the 3rd edition ruleset and the wording hasn't been adjusted to conform to how Simulacrum was rewritten in 3.5. It doesn't actually matter, but it's another data point proving that the book was being worked on in some form for a long time before it came out.

AncientH

There are Epic spells. You don't fucking care. Yes, you can summon an Ice Age. But that isn't a good idea.

Frank

Dungeons & Dragons has always been a little bit Science Fiction and a lot bit Fantasy on the Fantasy/Science Fiction axis. There have been “Psionic Powers” since the seventies, but the fanbase has always been sharply divided on whether they belong. Other than Bruce Cordell, most of the designers of 3rd edition could probably take or leave psychic powers for the most part.

There's a short bit of expansion Psionics material, and it ties into the Expanded Psionics Handbook for 3.5, which came out in April 2004 and was different from the Psionics Handbook that came out in 2001 that this book's authors were actually more familiar with. It is entirely possible that rising these pages to conform to Bruce Cordell's latest psionics rantings caused a significant delay in this book's release. Which would be totally on brand for Bruce Cordell and for nerd arguments in general, and the end result is a single page of psionic powers that no one has ever cared about lengthwise or widdershins.

AncientH

The psionic powers in XPH were generally a lot more adaptable in terms of which energy damage you were dealing that normal spells, so they needed fewer cold-specific powers...and got, actually, fewer cold-specific powers. Psions are the redheaded stepchildren of the setting. I can relate.

Frank

You may wonder why there are 4 pages of magic items in the magic chapter when some of the items in the equipment chapter were magic. The answer is a lack of editorial clarity, but probably the magic boats and magic ice armor were written up by a different dude and submitted in a different draft. Probably the traps from chapter one were submitted in a different draft as well. There's three main authors, it checks out.

Most of these are garbage for the price. Some of them are kind of cool from a thematic standpoint. A lot of them are cool in the sense that they are ice themed, but a lot of them arre even things I would like to have in a story. Like a snowball that turns into an igloo when thrown on the ground, or a diamond that turns into a crystalline giant frog that fights my enemies. The problem is the cost. It's just not worth it to have any of these things instead of selling them and buying more ornaments for your head tree.


Sadly, all optimized 3e D&D characters eventually look like this.

AncientH

I promised to talk about skull talismans (not to be mistaken for skull totems). These are one-shot spell storage items, like scrolls or potions. You break the skull and unleash the effect. The real benefit is that you can use these things like grenades, and you don't need to Use Magic Device. A well-placed bone arrow can break these damn things and unleash the spell.

That said, you're probably not going to ever use them. How often are you going to want to make one of these? What's the opportunity cost? They're not as terrible as they could be, but it doesn't exactly fill a niche that people were desperate for.

I will say, the idea of an ice shaman bedecked with skulls is pretty cool, especially since they can just have a string of tiny fragile skulls full of cantrips and you can break them and set off like a dozen magical effects at once. But again, how often are you going to do that?

Frank

Next Up: Monsters!

[K]

I'm surprised that you guys didn't mention the cheese that people got from this book.

For example, Snowcasting lets you turn any spell into the Cold subtype. This is normally not a interesting thing, even with the +1 caster level if you do it to a spell that already was Cold Subtype.

But, it gets fun when you look at Blue Ice. Armor made from blue ice has no caster failure with Cold Subtype spells, so you took Snowcasting and just walked around as a Wizard wearing full plate with a Tower Shield around 7th or 8th level when you could afford it. Blue Ice also acts as a refrigerator, so a small box in your Handy Haversack provides all the fresh ice you need for the feat.

Now I know this is not high quality cheese, but to an arcane caster player the ability to get on the magic armor train was very attractive to a class that became auto-hit very soon in their career without magic armor.

Another shout-out has to go to Primal Casting. A pretty consistent +1 to caster level is a pretty big deal at low levels, and combined with the few other feats that add to caster level in other sourcebooks, it made for a decent low-level evoker build.

Also, I think the spells in this book deserve a little more credit. Ice Castle and Fimbulwinter are cool. Building an ice fortress out of spells is what I want to do as an ice-caster, and honestly the game is poorer for not going into this shit more often. That there is a spell that makes ice boats is just cool.

As far as I can tell, Mantle of the Icy Soul is supposed to be paired with Mantle of the Fiery Soul from Sandstorm so that you could be both Cold and Fire type and thus immune to both weaknesses. Just watch out for clerics with the domains that let them turn or command your type.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

I have actually seen someone play a snow elf. Probably because despite the terribad illustrations in this book it's not hard to imagine a sexy snow elf adventurer. The rest...never.

Snow Elf also doesn't have a CON penalty. That's nice if you're planning on taking a prestige class/class feature that requires you to be an elf.

For example, Snowcasting lets you turn any spell into the Cold subtype. This is normally not a interesting thing, even with the +1 caster level if you do it to a spell that already was Cold Subtype.

But, it gets fun when you look at Blue Ice. Armor made from blue ice has no caster failure with Cold Subtype spells, so you took Snowcasting and just walked around as a Wizard wearing full plate with a Tower Shield around 7th or 8th level when you could afford it. Blue Ice also acts as a refrigerator, so a small box in your Handy Haversack provides all the fresh ice you need for the feat.

Now I know this is not high quality cheese, but to an arcane caster player the ability to get on the magic armor train was very attractive to a class that became auto-hit very soon in their career without magic armor.

One of the things I legit love about 3.5 is that I still learn new things about it from time to time, despite having played the game for 5 years.

Also, I think the spells in this book deserve a little more credit. Ice Castle and Fimbulwinter are cool.

One of the coolest combos I've seen with Fimbulwinter is to combine it with Fell Drain and create a months blizzard that turns anyone unfortunate enough to be inside of it into Wights.

You could center an entire campaign around that.

EDIT: With various shenanigans, you could boost the duration to years.

[Ancient History]

Also, I think the spells in this book deserve a little more credit. Ice Castle and Fimbulwinter are cool. Building an ice fortress out of spells is what I want to do as an ice-caster, and honestly the game is poorer for not going into this shit more often. That there is a spell that makes ice boats is just cool.

Eh. Like a lot of things D&D, it's not that you can't do X, it's just that the way to do X is never optimal or even good. How do you build a magical ice fortress? Well, there are options. There are just never good options. Are you ever going to build an ice fortress as a player character? Probably fucking not. Ice fortresses are a thing mostly for NPCs, who don't have to consider the logistics. Fimbulwinter is an 8th/9th level spell. It is worth being an 8th level spell? At 8th level you can use greater planar binding and summon noble djinn to grant multiple wishes.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Frostburn

Chapter Six: Monsters of the Frostfell


It's a Rimefire Eidolon. It shoots bolts of rimefire, but that glowing stuff on its face is just regular cold. Because go fuck yourself.

Put the Eagles back on, because it's time for more... Life in the Frostfell!\
Surely make you lose your mind.
Life in the Frostfell!
Everything.. All the time.

AncientH

I need to express my general philosophy with splatbooks. A splatbook should be the book you pull off the shelf when you want to know about X. So your first rule for the splatbook is that it should contain, if not everything already printed on x, then at least pointers to and references towards everything involving x.

So, this book kind of fails. I wouldn't expect it to contain every critter with the cold subtype, but I would at least expect pointers to everything that was printed with the cold subtype. We don't get that. It contains a lot of cold critters, though. Quite a few.

No dragons though. That feels like an oversight.

Frank

This is the chapter that the authors really wanted to be writing. It's fifty five pages, and has fifty two monsters in it (plus or minus a few depending on what you think about templates that could potentially be recombined or monsters like the Abominable Yeti that are just the Pokevolved version of a normal Yeti). It's quite likely that at some point in the design stage this book was a monster book featuring monsters from the snow. Like the old 2nd Edition Monstrous Compendium Appendices but less dumb than that.

Sure, there are some dumb monsters in here, and some monster writeups of the playable snow races that I don't think anyone needed. But you got stats for the Irish Elk, the Woolly Mammoth, and the Sabretooth Cat, and those stats are acceptable. The only other thing we need to do our Ice Age adventuring is the Cave Bear, and that's already in the 3.5 Monster Manual core, so this book gets a pass on that one. We do get a Dire Polar Bear, but that was unnecessary because D&D already had enough gradations of bear.


Unfortunately some of the house artists for 3.5 D&D liked to draw dire animals covered in rock dildos and it looks goofy as hell.

The format in 3.5 D&D is information rich and effective. D&D stumbled on a good presentation of monster book information back in the 1970s, and 3.5 kept that. Well, it kept that in the early books – a few years later they were making monster books with whole pages wasted on sample battle maps and weird pieces of box text about Eberron and shit. But in Frostburn that decadence and rot hadn't happened yet and you get a decent amount of creature for your feature.

AncientH

Again, you've got some weird extinct critters in here. I'm not complaining. D&D has dinosaurs in it. No one thinks that's inappropriate. I'm just not sure why, exactly.

A lot of these critters also don't fill any exact gap or need. The chillblain is a CR18 aberration. It should probably be CR5 if you were ever going to use it in any actual campaign.

The Midgard Dwarf is...um. It's a thing. It's supposed to be a dwarf, but moreso. They've already tried that before, with Azers and Urdunnir, but apparently they haven't got it right yet because they keep making more special dwarfs, this time in Mythic Norse flavor. Literally. Also, they have one of the most impressively weird and bullshit abilities ever:

Master Smith (Ex): Midgard dwarves gain Craft Magic
Arms and Armor, Craft Wondrous Item, and Forge Ring as
bonus feats. They are considered to possess the prerequisites
necessary to craft any magic item of those types, even if they
do not otherwise meet the requirements or have the ability
to cast the necessary spells.

When you're tired of writing mechanics, that's the kind of ability you write.

Frank

There are monster writeups for the various humanoids as well as the actual monsters of the frozen wastes. So like, Glacier Dwarves and Neanderthals get monster entries. In case you wanted to poke them with a sharp stick, I suppose. There's no particular benefit, since the rules aren't different from them being a player character race and just making NPCs out of them. This was one of the strengths of 3rd edition – the ruleson either side of the Dungeon Master's Screen were the same. A hostile Glacier Dwarf had the same numbers as a friendly Glacier Dwarf. But it also means that presenting the information twice as Player Characters and then again as potential foes is just presenting exactly the same information twice. This makes more sense when the Player's Handbook and the Monster Manual are actually different books, but in this case it's just Chapter 2 and Chapter 6 of the same book. I don't have a good answer for this issue, and neither did they.

In any case, we get Domovoi and Snow Goblins in the monster section. Seems like these could have gotten full writeups in the player races section, as there's no particular reason you couldn't play a Snow Goblin.

AncientH

Cold undead are present, notably the Entombed, Frostfell Ghost, Icegaunt, and Winterspawn. You can't actually animate those. Which is weird, right? There's an entomb spell, but you can't animate an Entombed. Notably missing are just random undead killed in the goddamn snow. I guess that's more Libris Mortis territory, but you'd think that there'd be reanimated wooly mammoth skeletons or Frost Giant mummies or something.

There are couple nods towards what would become the 3.5 critter bloat style. We have entries for Orc Snowshaman and Frost Giant Maulers which are completely superfluous. If a goddamn orc is operating in the frostfell, it better be some sort of goddamn Ice Orc if you're going to make a separate entry for it.

I suppose I should talk about the rimefire eidolon, which is a CR 9 fey that is a "living manifestation of the shards of the ancient deity Hleid." They can actually throw rimefire bolts, which is good. They live in self-made glacier dungeons, which is stupid but workable. You don't really care unless you're a Rimefire Witch, which means you don't really care.

Frank

There are a few monsters from German and Japanese lore, and actually several from Russian folk tales. Personally, I would have expected more Germanic stuff because we have Jotun in the form of Fost Giants and we've imported Thrym, so it would make sense to me to go whole hog with Ragnarok shenanigans. But they don't.

A lot of the Russian mythological creatures aren't specifically associated with cold in the original context. Vodyanoi and Rusalka are associated with water. The only association with cold they really have is that they are Slavic. And Russians have like fur hats and shit. That's as deep as it goes.

A lot of these Slavic creatures are also folktales in non-Russian Slavic lore. So for example: Rusalka are also a Czech thing and that is why Dvorak made an Opera about it. These Rusalka have a beguiling song, which might be a reference to that. Some of them may be references more obscure, like how the Marzanna are human-eating hags with really long fingers. I don't know what the fingers thing is about, but maybe some drawing of Slavic folklore they were working out of drew it with long fingers. I dunno.

AncientH

I'm really kind of weirded out at how many aberrations there are in this book, going all the way up to CR 21 for the Shivhad. You've never heard of any of these because they made zero impression whatsofucking ever. I guess mindflayers figured the frostfell was too goddamn cold and anything that decided to live up there didn't have the brains that Ilsenine gave a veliger. Which actually makes me think people moving into supercold climates to escape the mindflayers is something that actively could have been a bit of setting lore. It makes me sad we didn't get stuff like that.

"Once," the snow orc said. "Our people lived in the jungles to the south. We faced great dragons that breathed fire, cannibal halflings, humans riding horses, elves with great wooden bows...so we fled to the mountains, onto the glaciers where they wouldn't follow."

"Yeah?" The hobgoblin said, interested. "How did that work out?"

"Dragons that breathe ice, glacier dwarfs, snow elves, Neanderthals." The snow orc conceded. "But at least it's too gods-damned cold for much else."

Also, I want to lodge a complaint. The Urskans are a race of sentient, tool-using, armor-wearing polar bears. Why the fuck aren't they player characters?

Frank

Not all D&D monsters are winners. Some of them are straight goofy. Some of them seem like someone was playing mad libs.

When you're making genuinely new material, there are hits and misses. The Rimefire Eidolon is a miss. The Shivhad is... well... it's inexplicable. It's a crab with a lot of protruding mouths that wanders around on glaciers. It's like... what the actual fuck?


I just don't know.

AncientH

The Shivhad is CR 21. Your game will never see it.

Frank

As far as monster difficulty goes, it's mostly OK. When you hear about individual D&D monsters, it's mostly because they are either horrendously off balance when placed into combat with nominally appropriately leveled characters (like the Giant Crab), or because it's stupid and insulting (like the Throat Leech). You don't hear about Frostburn monsters much, which is because most of them are workmanly acceptable. The higher level monsters are mostly chumps, but 3rd edition D&D already falls apart for other reasons.

AncientH

I like the Yeti. It's not a complicated critter, and it doesn't have to be. It's a giant bone-crushing furry ape-man. That's all it needs to be.

Frank

It would be easy to do fifty entries here, but I think we don't have to.
Next up: Adventure Sites!

[ColorBlindNinja61]

There are a few monsters from German and Japanese lore, and actually several from Russian folk tales.

I am amused that D&D 3rd edition has the Yuki-onna not just in this book but also in Oriental Adventures.

Not all D&D monsters are winners. Some of them are straight goofy. Some of them seem like someone was playing mad libs.

When you're making genuinely new material, there are hits and misses. The Rimefire Eidolon is a miss. The Shivhad is... well... it's inexplicable. It's a crab with a lot of protruding mouths that wanders around on glaciers. It's like... what the actual fuck?


I just don't know.

The Shivhad is CR 21. Your game will never see it.

I know what I'm having my players fight in the end game of our campaign.

[Blicero]

Does the Shivhad have any ability to deal with flying dudes using ranged effects, or is it Tarrasque-equivalent in its vulnerabilities?

[ColorBlindNinja61]

Does the Shivhad have any ability to deal with flying dudes using ranged effects, or is it Tarrasque-equivalent in its vulnerabilities?

It can't fly and has no ranged attacks. It's got a cold aura but if you fly 65+ feet above its head it can't do a damn thing about it.

It's basically a lamer Tarrasque.

[deaddmwalking]

Does the Shivhad have any ability to deal with flying dudes using ranged effects, or is it Tarrasque-equivalent in its vulnerabilities?

It can't fly and has no ranged attacks. It's got a cold aura but if you fly 65+ feet above its head it can't do a damn thing about it.

It's basically a lamer Tarrasque.

Maybe it could throw snowballs if someone figures out how that works.

[Sir Aubergine]

It can't fly and has no ranged attacks. It's got a cold aura but if you fly 65+ feet above its head it can't do a damn thing about it.

It's basically a lamer Tarrasque.

Poor guy never could never fill the shoes of the Thing. XD

[ColorBlindNinja61]

It can't fly and has no ranged attacks. It's got a cold aura but if you fly 65+ feet above its head it can't do a damn thing about it.

It's basically a lamer Tarrasque.

Poor guy never could never fill the shoes of the Thing. XD

Interestingly, d20 Modern's Menace Manual has a monster called a Star Doppelganger.

It's quite literally The Thing, right down to disguising itself as a Husky in its backstory.

Or did you mean the Thing from Fantastic Four?

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Oh, fuck, that looks amazing. The fact that someone actually statted up the Thing is far more interesting than anything in this book... even if I'm not certain how strong it is.

[Sir Aubergine]

Interestingly, d20 Modern's Menace Manual has a monster called a Star Doppelganger.

It's quite literally The Thing, right down to disguising itself as a Husky in its backstory.

Or did you mean the Thing from Fantastic Four?

No you're right I meant the body horror one from the movies. Shame the designers of Frostburn didn't go for something like the Star Doppelganger and not the spider+lamprey loser with no cool abilities.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

Interestingly, d20 Modern's Menace Manual has a monster called a Star Doppelganger.

It's quite literally The Thing, right down to disguising itself as a Husky in its backstory.

Or did you mean the Thing from Fantastic Four?

No you're right I meant the body horror one from the movies. Shame the designers of Frostburn didn't go for something like the Star Doppelganger and not the spider+lamprey loser with no cool abilities.

Gotcha.

Oh, fuck, that looks amazing. The fact that someone actually statted up the Thing is far more interesting than anything in this book... even if I'm not certain how strong it is.

There are three different statblocks for the Star Doppelganger. A medium one (CR 3), a Large one (CR 7) and a huge one (CR 10).

EDIT: Forgot a Tiny one at CR 1/2.

It's a pretty complicated monster since it can mimic other lifeforms. The main limitations from keeping it from launching into crazy town is that it can only mimic a given creature once and it only lasts for 24 hours.

It can also split into off a portion of its body to make a new Star Doppelganger, which makes it a lot more dangerous.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

It's a pretty complicated monster since it can mimic other lifeforms. The main limitations from keeping it from launching into crazy town is that it can only mimic a given creature once and it only lasts for 24 hours.

Goddammit, why write up an apocalyptic rape-monster if you remove the apocalyptic part?

[ColorBlindNinja61]

It's a pretty complicated monster since it can mimic other lifeforms. The main limitations from keeping it from launching into crazy town is that it can only mimic a given creature once and it only lasts for 24 hours.

Goddammit, why write up an apocalyptic rape-monster if you remove the apocalyptic part?

I'd assume to make it possible for the PCs to actually kill it. Or maybe to avoid ending up with something like Pun Pun.

EDIT: Although, now that I look at its splitting ability, I don't think there's a limit on how many times it can do that...

Nevermind, it shrinks when it does that and can't be smaller than tiny. But it can grow by eating people and can turn them into other Star Doppelgangers.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

No, there does not seem to be a limit on that. Sounds like a good excuse for the GM to "conveniently" have a tiny one hiding in the ventilation until it's time to drop on somebody. I wonder how it works in practice?