Lessons Learned: Running Rime of the Frostmaiden
My thoughts on running Rime of the Frostmaiden, and what it taught me as a relatively new DM at the time.
I first played D&D back in 2015, where I was roped into DMing a full homebrew 5e campaign for some friends. I was awful at it and the campaign eventually lost traction and died. It wasn’t until January 2020 that I picked up my DMG again and started running a Descent into Avernus game - I wasn’t that great at it then either, but my new group stuck with me and we finished the full campaign with an emotional flourish. I learned a lot during those few months, mostly through mistakes made, but it wasn’t until my next campaign that I could put those lessons into practice.
At the end of 2020, my Descent group had enough faith in me to stick around for our 2nd campaign, Rime of the Frostmaiden. This time I was ready with a session 0, player primers, and the Crystal Shard trilogy on Audible. I even read the entire module back to front before the first session! I planned and prepped for weeks to ensure that I was ready to give the campaign that stories are made of.
My first lesson was just mentioned - player primers are incredibly important. When making characters for Descent, my players had no idea what they were making characters for. They knew that they would start out in Baldur’s Gate, but half of the group had never played before and weren’t aware that Avernus was in hell. I didn’t do anything to help with that. With RotF, I gave my players Steve Pankotai’s IWD Player Primer (https://www.dmsguild.com/product/318990/Player-Primer-Icewind-Dale). This introduced them to the setting, the factions, the history, and how they could tie themselves into the location. Most importantly, it got us all excited about living there for the next year.
When reading through the module, the main thing that I took away was that this wasn’t just a linear campaign, this was a sandbox setting which could be played in and interacted with in whatever way my players wished. This was a location campaign, and so I had to give each character a strong connection to that location, even if that connection is that the Dale is a total mystery to them. I worked with each individual player to flesh out not just their IWD-specific backstories, but items, anecdotes, and events which tied them to the greater Dale and would guide their own stories throughout the campaign.
Now that I had characters and their families built into the foundations of the Tentowns, I started to sprinkle sections from various backstories into each chapter, giving each character a time to shine. This was my next lesson - giving characters AND players moments. Since it was our 2nd campaign and I knew my players well enough, I felt much more comfortable putting them in situations where I believed that they could shine with their own personal strengths, not just their characters’. I’d planned in advance key moments, but I knew them and the module well enough now to learn when I should call on them and create impromptu moments that would drive the story without breaking the plot and leaving something for me to fix down the line.
At no point in the first half of the campaign did I feel in charge of the direction, and it felt great. I didn’t fear plot consistency because I knew it all well enough to modify and adapt on the fly - and I trusted my players to make the story that they most wanted to play. Icewind Dale was their sandbox and the interactions that they had were their doing. I wasn’t there to tell a story, just to moderate it, give them breadcrumbs to follow, and to foreshadow future events. This was my favorite lesson to learn, and my favorite part of DMing now.
There are a few other minor takeaways that I figured out along the way.
Making a thematically consistent soundtrack goes a long way towards setting a mood.
Work with players to create backup characters that can work in the setting, and start planning for ways to bring them in early if it’s looking bad for a certain person.
Side-stories and quests never have to have a conclusion. They can go nowhere, trail off, and never be fully realized if it’s not what the players are interested in at the time.
Rime of the Frostmaiden was the perfect 2nd campaign for me and my group. Now that we’re on our 3rd, I miss that module and that setting. It taught me a lot of general DMing advice, which I’ve already used to transform our current linear module into a continent-wide sandbox, but it also gave me years of stories to tell.