21 April 2019

Ice Cold in Arrendale - an OSR scenario

A properly nasty film.

I've always liked Disney's Frozen because it's a properly nasty and dangerous fairy tale wrapped in fluff. Parents die, nobles scheme, uncontrolled magic, and a false lover coming between sisters, all wrapped in happy songs and comedy from Olaf and Sven. For a while (maybe six months) it was the youngest lad's favourite film (until his 6-year-old friends told him it wasn't cool).

But it had me thinking, "What if"?

In the end, back in 2017 I wrote a scenario for Heroic Fantasy (Graham Spearing's more complete hack of the Black Hack) and ran it at Furnace XII. I can't see myself publishing this any time soon - and indeed, it'd need a bit of work to protect me from litigious mice, so here's a Google Docs link to the file. It should easily be usable with other OSR clones or plain D&D.

Ice Cold in Arrendale (Google Docs, Comments enabled)

Feel free to make any notes in comments if you should run it.

Here are the six characters I created for the convention. Three are a party from Britannia, sent to set up trade agreements and find out what is causing this damnable weather, and the other three are a party from the Southern Isle sent to find out why the King's youngest son, Prince Hans, has not returned for six months. All the characters have one aspect left for the player to allocate and are gender non-specific.

Ice Cold in Arrendale Characters (Google Drive, PDF, 2MB)

It's fair to say that when I ran it I had imagery from The Golden Compass, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Where Eagles Dare and parts of The Hateful Eight in my mind. The broader area of the seting is a point crawl sandbox in the nature of Slumbering Ursine Dunes.

I'd love to have your feedback for this!

19 April 2019


No comments:

Post a Comment