Death Frost Doom Part III: Doom Comes to Us All

(Spoilers, Sweetie)

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So, last night my players finished James Raggi’s Death Frost Doom.  Running that last bit was a draining experience.  Playing in it seemed to be equally draining.  When the last die dropped, two players were out of characters, and the survivors were pretty glad to be alive.  On the other hand, faced with the overwhelming odds of what was occurring, my 13-year-old daughter swore at me for the first time.  I didn’t blame her, either.  It was an emotion-laden adventure.

The group used a combination of a rope work and a very potent spider climb to get to the ceiling of the ceiling of the main temple, and from there up the shaft.  When they saw that the shaft was barred, some groaned, but Mike, playing Dob, knew that his wizard could rust the bars out as a consequence of the mercurial magic effect on his magic shield spell.  Another wizard then used his rope work to shoot 50 feet out of the hole, immediately becoming ghoul bait.

(As a brief digression, we had a discussion about how something is easier to see if it is above mist than through mist.  Also, used to other campaigns I’ve run, my players know that I tend to have some un-dead able to sense the living.  They also know that my ghouls do not like the sun, and believe that if they can just get beyond the mist, they will be all right.)

They need to haul up their rope, which means having a front line against ghouls converging from all directions.  On round one, 1d6 ghouls come.  On round two, 2d6.  On round 3, 3d6.  By round 4, everyone is either on the floating rope or dead.  Dob, the wizard whose lucky rolls saved him from the Hound of Hirot, is slain and falls back down the shaft into the Temple of Duvan’Ku.  The rope is long enough to drop the remaining PCs beyond the mist, but ghouls follow them along on the ground.  Dropped in the sun, the ghouls leave them alone.  For now.

Two hours later, the PCs discover that their dog and falcon are gone.  Their conclusion?  Zeke Duncaster ate them.  Two hours after that, as night falls, they decide to camp and start a fire.  Remember, the cold is deadly on the mountain.  The PCs are wounded, dismayed, and low on Luck.  For some reason, they think that the un-dead will be confined to the cemetery even after dark.  One of the PCs is still paralysed at this point, because ghoul paralysis in DCC lasts 1d6 hours, and the clerics are concerned about disapproval by this point.

The fire attracts the ghouls.  I decide that 1d30 are attracted every 5 minutes, appearing as they did before:  1d6 on round 1, 2d6 on round 2, etc., until all the ghouls arrive.  Only five are rolled, 3 arriving on round one and 2 on round two, but the players do not know this.  One cleric is paralysed, and there are still two ghouls left.  The players are pretty sure that more will keep on coming.  The PCs flee, leaving the paralysed cleric behind.  I state odds and roll; the ghouls are distracted enough to eat the cleric while they run.

This is seeming more and more like a horror movie with each choice made, and as the consequences of those choices pile up.  The module as written offers players some hard choices, but the extra oomph of DCC magic actually prevented my players from taking some of the “outs” worked into the module, much to their overall detriment.

The PCs reach Zeke’s shortly before dawn, and collapse from exhaustion.  When they have recovered, they take Zeke (“I told you so!  I told you that you were all doomed!”  “Only half of us were doomed.  So you’re half right.”) with them.  As it turns out, going up there to get more names, Zeke found their animals and rescued them, so they are at Zeke’s “hut” in the woods.   

The group flees onward to Hirot, where they attempt to warn the town.  This means soap-boxing in the town square, visiting the new Jarl, Clohn the Bald, and talking to the witch.  Ymae is openly disdainful and asks what they are going to do about it.  The answer?  Nothing.  Run.

Overall, a bleak module, but definitely worth running.  The players keenly felt their net loss.  The surviving wizard has the spell, cantrip, which the player has been moaning about the uselessness of, so I pointed out that they could have recovered the lock of hair they were after with cantrip, without having woken the dead.

We talked briefly about what the players would like to do next, but my players decompression as much as I did, so I am not completely sure what the next session will be.  I am considering running another session of Through the Cotillion of Hours, to give the players a chance to undo some of the damage they have done.  There is a certain pulp grandeur in giving them the chance to travel back through time to prevent the dead from rising – one last chance to win or lose their surviving characters – that seems irresistible to me.  Of course, they would have to solve the Cotillion to do so.  And then they would still have to deal with the earlier version of Death Frost Doom if they succeed with the Cotillion, and James Raggi still holds some surprises for them!

As I said in a previous post, a little Raggi goes a long way.  I think I’ll hold off on The Monolith from Beyond Space and Time for a while!