Welcome to the seventh set of game notes of our The Rime of Frost Maiden campaign from a player’s perspective. We’ll discuss the pre-game, the session itself, the post-game and what I’m taking into the next session in each of these posts. The aim is to provide a diary of the experience from a player’s perspective.
Disclaimer
These posts are written from the perspective of a player who has purposefully not looked up spoilers. I am enjoying the game. These thoughts are my own and I can’t speak for my fellow players.
These reports are written close to the session but may not be released immediately after.
The sections
The pre-game
I think this is the longest online game I’ve played? Possibly, it’s a close call between this and Star Trek Adventures. Either way, it’s just a matter of time before this one becomes the longest. I do find online games a bit odd. It’s the crazy convenience of them. There is something odd about doing a host of other things and then just rocking up five minutes before it starts. That’s their advantage, but it’s still odd.
Anyway, it’s getting to be an easy routine at this point.
Key points
The session had the following key points: –
- We travelled to the north of Lonelywood to find The Black Cabin
- An old inventor was working to solve the permanent twilight
- On the way to the Black Cabin Adastra sent an illusionary threat
- An experiment had failed in the cabin
- Ash was sent into the realm between life and death as a device exploded
- We finished the experiment to complete The Summer Star
At the end of the adventure, we seem to have a magical artefact that can end the permanent twilight in some way, form or time it just doesn’t seem to be currently active.
The session
I liked this adventure, but it was pretty weird and different to the others.
It involved going to The Black Cabin to find that an inventor was working on something called The Summer Star which could in some way break the permanent twilight. I’m not sure why he was working on it in some ramshackle cabin like some crazy old boomer.
The set-up seemed to be predicated on some people, but I suspect not all, dying during the adventure so some would be ‘between worlds’ while others would not be. There were probably a number of ways to bring these deaths into play, like gaps in the decking, but the main one was The Summer Star exploding. The damage was set to ensure it outright killed anyone within a certain range.
Once some are lost in the ‘in-between’ and some aren’t there is some figuring out of how to fix The Summer Star. I have no idea what hoops and craziness we needed to jump through to achieve this but I suspect it was much more byzantine and pixel bitching in the actual adventure. A small part of me thinks this figuring out of The Summer Star in actuality is a crock of shit, but I am speculating. I think a sensible decision was taken to shortcut this both by making it simpler and allowing for speak to animals to help out via squirrel.
I really liked it. It was different to the other adventures which usually had something to kill, or even if they didn’t from the outset, they soon did once you were into it. I’m someone who likes some great monster ass-kicking but sometimes a different setup works.
The post-game
The first observation. I did a quick scan of the internet to remind myself of what the name of the device was. What the hell? Some of the top content returned had people hitting The Black Cabin at session 24+ based on the titles. As I’ve said numerous times, this is a spoiler-free experience for me both pre and post-experience. I am left totally intrigued as to how people spent 24+ sessions on chapter one of the module. I can’t imagine how long it takes them to get all the way through it at that pace.
To be blunt, that sounds like a special hell.
The second observation. The adventures in the module just all seem very, random? They don’t feel like they are part of an overall story leading to something? It is very much like a World of Warcraft zone for which there are numerous people with quest markers above their heads asking you to do things you have only the remotest affinity for. I’d also say what they choose to have you do and figure out just seems very idiosyncratic and lacking in things to make you care. Maybe that’s just me. It’s like you’re ticking things off. This may also be a function of chapter one, maybe?
Stars and Wishes
At the end of each session, we can list stars (things to keep doing) and wishes (things we want to see).
We didn’t do it this week.
Plans for the next session
We didn’t discuss much about what the plan for the next session was. We are literally entering chapter two. There is a number of things we could do from the rumour sheet and we are going to decide between sessions.