Leading up to our game using the Silent Tower scenario, my wife and I decided to end our Druid & Trickster campaign for Frostgrave. It was our seventeenth battle of the campaign, and we were ready to mix things up by switching to new warbands and a fresh campaign.
The Campaign
Throughout the campaign, we played scenarios from both the second edition rulebook, a couple of expansions, and an issue of Spellcaster magazine. The scenarios were mostly determined by what I had monsters and terrain to make work rather than trying to follow any particular storyline.
- Default Scenario
- The Library
- The Stars are Wrong (Frostgrave Folio – Sellsword)
- The Complex Temple
- The Breeding Pit (Into the Breeding Pits)
- The Ice Storm
- The Keep
- The Genie in the Bottle
- Here Comes the Flood (Into the Breeding Pits)
- With Magnetic Force (Frostgrave Folio – Sellsword)
- Catacombs of Evrenbright – Green Shadows (Spellcaster 1)
- Catacombs of Evrenbright – Phantasmic Spheres (Spellcaster 1)
- Catacombs of Evrenbright – The Howling Cages (Spellcaster 1)
- The Steam Vents
- The Mausoleum
- The Well of Dreams and Sorrows
- The Silent Tower
Across the campaign, I feel like we got a good mix of scenarios. Each one’s special rules made it interesting and different from the others.
Optional Rules
As I mentioned back when we kicked off the campaign, my wife and I were using most of the optional rules. After playing with them for a while, here are some thoughts on the optional rules we used.
Critical Hits
Critical hits make rolling 20s extra fun. I don’t see any reason why you wouldn’t play with this option.
Wounded
The wounded rolls provide a drawback when a figure is low on health. I think it worked well and the immunity of certain creatures to it add some nice differentiation between monster types. Like the rules for critical hits, I don’t know why you wouldn’t use the wounded rules.
Black Market Contacts
The black market rules limit what you can buy between scenarios. We adjusted the house rule to allow one of the rolls determining available purchases to use an expansion’s treasure table. It ended up being pretty restrictive though and as a result we rarely bought items. Two notable places this had an impact were on my wizard being a Beastcrafter and on pursuing Transcendence. As a Beastcrafter, I gained the ability to learn additional spells, but even rolling on the Into the Breeding Pits treasure table once after each game, I wasn’t able to reliably get access to grimoires for those spells. It felt like that diminished the benefits of the Beastcrafter option. For Transcendence, we really didn’t make progress towards that spell since we couldn’t just decide to buy grimoires from our schools of magic and so we didn’t get anywhere close to learning all eight spells after seventeen games. I think going forward, I’d like to customize the rules a bit to allow for buying particular items at some sort of disadvantage to find a midpoint between the black market optional rule and the default of being able to buy any item. With the Ragged Warbands rule in The Red King, we won’t be using the black market rules for our next campaign.
Random Encounters
We used random encounters in pretty much every scenario we played. They produced a lot of fun and memorable moments from the rampaging boar in our second game to my wizard having to flee skeletons in our very last one. In general, I’d strongly recommend playing with random encounters. That said, I think we’ll be playing The Red King for our next scenario and might leave out random monsters to focus on the monsters built in to the various scenarios.
Casting Roll Criticals
We started using this option from Spellcaster 4 midway through the campaign. It adds both critical successes on 20s and critical failures on 1s to casting rolls with the effects of those dependent on the spell being attempted. We had to do some work since the article was written for the first edition spell list, but it was well worth it. We’ll definitely keep using this option in future campaigns.
Scott's Game Room 