Ian Livingstone's Cavern of the Snow Witch was the ninth book in the Fighting Fantasy book series. Originally published in 1984, the Fighting Fantasy books combined the surprise of the "Choose your own Adventure" books, with the dice-rolling suspense of fantasy roleplaying. Myriador Limited has converted the Caverns of the Snow Witch into a conventional d20 adventure, designed for three characters of 8th level. It includes d20 mechanics for the Luck attribute, introduced in the FF book series. Divisible into three acts, the first two capture the ice theme just fine, while the last one

(Note: The Look (ie. art and layout), Luck, and Download of The Cavern of the Snow Witch are the same as that in their previous release, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Thus, my comments about them are pretty much the same.)

The Look

The Caverns of the Snow Witch is a 40-page adventure for up to four 8th level characters. It follows the standard color cover, black-and-white pages, and retails for $15.95 (ouch). The exterior and interior art are superb, and the layout is very well done. (Sorry, I don't know if it's new or original art.) The adventure comes with additional mechanics for Luck; additional monsters, magic items, and spells; and four pregenerated characters (the same as that in Warlord of Firetop Mountain, but at 8th level). The party will have about fifty or sixty encounters.

Luck

The original Fighting Fantasy books had a Luck attribute. Myriador now makes it a d20 mechanic. Luck starts off as any attribute, including its modifier. (Eg. a Luck of 16 gives a +3 modifier.) Luck is usable in almost any situation: As a bonus to hit, increase in AC, damage reduction, skill check bonus, etc.. Essentially, BEFORE the dice are rolled, a player announces he will make a Luck check, and reduces his Luck by one. He then rolls a d20 and adds his modifier, against a Luck DC, typically 10. For every two points above 10, he receives a +1 modifier. But if he fails by six or more, he receives a -2 modifier. Luck can be regained through Luck-related magical items and normal regeneration of ability points. Like experience points, the GM may also award Luck. If you use a point-generation system for characters, they start off with an additional five points, since they now have an additional ability score. For existing characters, the GM can simply fiat that these five points go into the character's Luck attribute.

The Adventure Itself

** SPOILERS **

The adventure is divided into The Dungeon, where the players meet the Snow Witch, and Into the Wilderness, where they seek to undo a slow death curse. The Dungeon is thankfully inaccurate. It's more than a dungeon. It starts out with some introductory encounters in the Snow Witch's snowy wilderness, then her own frozen caverns. I'll refer to it as the Introduction and Ice Caverns, respectively.

Introduction

I liked this section very much. Sure, someone's done a frozen wilderness before, but it's still an unlikely setting for a d20 adventure. Also, since the witch is responsible for the cold, you can add it to any campaign. ("In half a year, the sunny fertile fields became a cold wasteland." Or something.) The snow encounters include natural hazards (blizzard, ice bridge, crevasse, avalance) that you can use in other snow-based adventures. The creatures (mammoth, tundra wolves, yeti) fit the snow theme. There's even a trapper's log cabin the party stumbles on to to learn of the ice caverns.

Ice Caverns

After the party finds the illusionary wall that hides the caverns, we find quite quickly what sort of evil villain the witch is. She's enslaved various servants with "obedience collars". Some evil sorts -- including a bard -- have chosen to ally with her. After several encounters, they finally meet the Snow Witch and her pet white dragon (!). The party then rescues some grateful -- though not exactly competant -- NPCs.

That's not all. The Snow Witch then returns from the dead (undead?) as a spirit in her Magical Orb. After some gloating (I like how she eliminates her now-useless servants), she offers them a game to play. Unfortunately, it turns out to be an (ugh) rock-scissors-paper game, but I suggest making the game rigged. (Maybe she uses clairvoyance or clairaudience to read the victim's mind and the only way to defeat her is to select a shape **at random**.)

What I found interesting is that the evil villain dies **midway** in the overall adventure. Most D&D adventures have the "boss" monster at the end. But after the Snow Witch is killed, she's back for vengence, the caverns collapse, and the players are only two-thirds the way through!

I also appreciated how the NPCs were used. Most adventures have the heroes rescuing the prisoners who then... well, most of the time, the text stops there. These NPCs actually do something -- although the first thing they do is panic, get captured by a brain slayer, and need rescuing **again**. Then one of them later triggers a slow death trap for the **entire** party. Notice how the NPC's incompetance foreshadows the party's doom.

The only nitpick I have is that many of the "tricks and traps" seem lifted out of a standard dungeon: a rhyme next to two magic items, one cursed, and one not; two sets of differently colored footprints on a path in the floor; a shield, when touched, releasing an air elemental. Why are these there? Why not invest in a portcullous instead? The rest of this section is otherwise well-themed, so it's easy to overlook this minor criticism.

Into the Wilderness

Unfortunately, I felt that the remainder of the adventure was something of a letdown. The party, under the death spell, must find The Healer to cure them. About a third of the encounters are with a random assortment creatures and humanoids -- who do nothing but attack. Where'd this werewolf come from? Why are there centaur bandits? Why is a barbarian sleeping here? Don't they have anything better to do than attack our heroes? Roughly another third are low-level NPCs on their own business. Why haven't **they** been attacked by these baddies plaguing the country?

The party encounters some Hill Trolls about to attack the dwarven town of Stonebridge, and Stubb, the rescued dwarven NPC, later leaves to help retrieve a fabled dwarven warhammer ("some things are more important than living"). Redswift, the elven NPC soon becomes ill from the death spell (wonder how the dwarf is doing) and soon dies. (Good riddance.)

Finally, the adventurers find The Healer. The ritual to remove the death spell requires a few trials and a few, rather arbitrary, components: a candle to help pass a dark bridge; a dragon's egg to make a calming brew to help resist a banshee; a piece of silver to summon a pegasus so they may travel to the summit of Firetop mountain; and identifying a phoenix in a dream. The party has several opportunities to pick up the the dragon's egg and silver in the dungeon. I'd highly recommend some forewarning of these trials and components to the players so they don't seem to arbitrarily come out of thin air.

Another suggestion, to make the adventure more consistent, is to simply turn the bad guys outside of the caverns all into humanoids. The backstory then becomes that the witch enslaved the neighboring towns in ice, but kept at bay the humanoids from destroying the towns. Now that the witch is dead, the humanoids are free to attack. This would also explain the low-level NPCs, who were originally isolated individuals, unimportant to the witch, and not yet aware of the humanoid threat. The elf and dwarf NPCs, of course, can provide the adventurers this information.

*** SPOILER ENDS ***

Additional Material

Caverns comes with eight pages of fourteen new monsters. Winter-themed ones include the neanderthal, mammoth, ice demon, snow wolf, and yeti. Others include the illithid-like brain slayer, the crystal warrior and metal sentinel constructs. The adventure contains one page of exotic new magical items and the Ancient Death Spells. The adventure gives suggestions for scaling the adventure to 5th-7th level PCs. Stats and illustrations (but no descriptions) are given for the NPCs.

Downloads

Downloads are available for the adventure. The downloads consist of four two-page pregen character sheets (the book's pregen sheets are half-page, double-sided) (about 3.5 MB each), 24 one-page illustrations from the book (30 MB), and two monster token sheets (about 2 MB each). I was somewhat disappointed by the tokens -- only those monsters which had art in the book have a token with art. The book illustrations, however, are quite useful as game aids (GM: "You see... THIS!!!" Players: "Aieee!"). The book's back cover also says full-scale battlemaps are available, but I didn't find them in the downloads section.

The download interface itself is quite irritating. You have to turn to page X of the book, look for encounter Y, find paragraph Z, then find the (hmm... running out of letters here...) the Nth word. And before you do this, you have to register to their forums. I understand the desire for a password-protected product, but, really, even software game manufacturers stopped using this sort of protection. Thankfully, after your succeed in logging in (it only took me THIRTEEN tries...), you don't have to do it again. Necromancer Games uses just a password, published in the book. I far prefer this method.

Conclusion

Caverns of the Snow Witch is substantially better than The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, and certainly more novel than your typical dungeon crawl. But for$15.95, it has an awful lot of competition for your d20 dollar. Again, like Warlock of Firetop Mountain, if you did like the original adventure, and would like a d20 version of it, pick up Caverns of the Snow Witch. But again, don't let nostalgia influence your decision.

Please help support RPGnet by purchasing the following (probably) related items through DriveThruRPG.