Eberron Twist: Rime of the Frostmaiden

About the adventure

Our campaign is set in Eberron. I dropped the Icewind Dale area over the Frostfell and I am tweaking small details to reflavor for Eberron. Icewind Dale had Dwarven clans from long before any other race settled there. The dwarves, over the ages, migrated from Sarlona to the Frostfell and to the Mror Holds in Khorvaire. Very few dwarves and only a handful of clans remain in the cold north. Before the Last War began, the Dragonmarked House Tharaskh led a ‘gold rush’ to the region around the lakes to unearth Dragonshard crystals. Those were mostly Eberron shards and a few Syberis shards. Almost no Khyber shards in those areas, but some feel that the Black Ice might have some connection to Khyber. People moved north to get rich, found little, and those who could not afford to travel back to the other continents settled into new industries, like fishing the lakes or scrimshaw. Others came over the course of the 102 years of the Last War to get away from war, the politics of Khorvaire, or the Dragonmarked Houses. A strange time has settled over Icewind Dale in the summer of 998YK. Winter’s cold came in summer, and has gone on, getting colder. The sun doesn’t rise into the sky, even if the sky was visible through the blanket of gray clouds. The horizon gets lighter from roughly 10am to 2pm, and the rest of each day is dark. The moons, stars, and golden ring of Syberis are no longer visible. After almost 7 months, the peoples of the Dale call it an everlasting winter… There is a strong rumor across the breadth of the Dale and Reghed tundra that a goddess walks the ice and snow. They call her The Frostmaiden, and some claim to have seen her. In Eberron, neither the gods of the Sovereign Host nor the Silver Flame or Dark Six ever manifest. They don’t walk the world, as in other fantasy mythos, but most divine abilities are granted through Faith. So if a goddess of winter is actually manifest, this is fearsome and incredible. Our characters enter Icewind Dale for a variety of reasons, but quickly find mountain passes closed by avalanches and the land plagued by blizzards. As heroes & adventurers, they may have their own agenda, but they are drawn together in various quests to make positive change in the icy land. There are four main Reghed ‘barbarian’ tribes, who live mostly between Kelvin’s Cairn mountain, and across the tundra to the Reghed Glacier. They are nomadic and often move to follow herds of elk and sometimes shifts in the normal seasons. They are the Elk Tribe (humans), the Bear Tribe (orcs & half orcs), the Wolf Tribe (elves & half elves) and the Tiger Tribe (goblinoids). Racially each tribe favor one main racial / bloodline basis for membership. Each tribe has a totem animal, but the whole ‘tribe’ does not dwell in one place. There are smaller groupings of barbarian camps who all are members of the same totem-tribe.

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