Winter’s Daughter: the perfect mini-dungeon for beginners

I play relatively few traditional D&D-like fantasy games these days. But it is often the case that new players ask me to run a D&dD game for them. Winter's Daughter is my usual goto in these situations.

As with most of my reviews, I will start with a spoiler free list of Positives, Negatives and a summary of my Overall opinion. This will be followed by a more in-depth review (with spoilers).

Positives

• One of the best-organised RPG adventure books I have ever seen: concise, informative, easy to read, and provides everything you need to prepare it quickly and efficiently.

• Blends seamlessly the telling of a charming fairy tale with dungeon exploration, giving the adventurers the role of deciding how that fairy tale will end.

• Full of ambiance and charm.

Negatives:

• Knowing D&D players, the paucity of combat encounters may disappoint some.

• While I enjoy a bit of whimsy, attacking flying speaking crucifixes and bibles was a bit too much for me.

• The original opening encounter was tonally different from the rest of the scenario. The solution was a revised version that simply removes it. I like to have an encounter  posing a moral challenge to solve, but also believe that it requires changes. Removing it made the module somewhat less rich.

Overall:

• A perfect starting adventure, and an entertaining one-shot that will also thoroughly engage seasoned adventurers with its charming tale..

• Immaculate presentation shows how dungeon-centric adventures should be written.

Detailed Review (with spoilers)

When writing reviews, I typically focus on works that feel like missed opportunities or diamonds in the rough—adventures with great ideas or set pieces that could be improved by one or two key changes. This is why I hesitated to write about Winter’s Daughter at first, as it is already so close to being the perfect mini-dungeon adventure. The changes I would suggest are just a matter of personal taste. 

Winter’s Daughter is a great beginner’s adventure for dungeon-crawling RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons (any edition), or OSR systems like Old-School Essentials (a superbly edited and organised retroclone of D&D BX), or even something more modern like Cairn or Mörk Borg (the rules, not the setting).

I first encountered Winter’s Daughter at Essen Spiel several years ago, where I played a pre-publishing version of the module with one of the guys from Necrotic Gnome as GM. That version was slightly different from the published ones but, since then, I’ve run this adventure many times, mostly for new players. I’ve run it with D&D 5e on some occasions and with Old-School Essentials (D&D BX) on others. It was originally written for Old-School Essentials but you can find a PDF version written natively for 5e on Drivethrurpg. Personally, I like OSE better than 5e, but the adventure also works very well in 5e.

The adventure centres around exploring a small dungeon where lies the tomb of Sir Chyde, a great knight who died 500 years ago after defeating the armies of the Cold King, a terrible fey monarch. Rumours abound that a magical relic of great power is hidden within his tomb.

On the way to the tomb, players will solve puzzles, avoid traps, battle a few monsters, and cross a portal into the realm of the Cold King himself. A mystery unfolds as they explore the dungeon: visions of a beautiful woman—so beautiful that she must be of fey lineage — occasionally appear. These are images of Princess Snowfall-at-Dusk, the Cold King’s 13th daughter, who was exiled to a tower and remains waiting for Sir Chyde in the fey realm, as she was the secret love of his life.

The portal to the Cold King’s realm inside the crypt leads directly to her tower, where she has waited for 500 years for Sir Chyde to come and marry her. Depending on whether the characters find and explore the tomb of Sir Chyde or the portal to the Princess’ tower first, the story can unfold in different ways. Ultimately, it’s up to the players to decide whether to take Sir Chyde’s ring to the princess, reuniting the couple, or simply rob the tomb and leave (or even get into pointless quarrels with fey nobles).

The tone mixes fairy tale ambiance with whimsical elements, like the room where animated speaking religious objects (like a cross and a bible) attack the adventurers, or the one where a pair of floating skeletons waltz in each other’s arms — a novel, ultra-romantic take on eternal love.

The presentation is immaculate. In fact, Winter’s Daughter should be required reading for anyone writing dungeon adventures. It’s extremely well-organised, easy to read, concise, and provides all the information needed to run the scenario without a hitch. I can’t find a single flaw in the organisation. Why can’t larger publishers do this? I have a suspicion that in part is a question of charging for page count…

The problem that was solved by just removing it

The most problematic part of the scenario used to be the opening scene (it has been removed in a revision). Two powerful wizards/cultists are performing a mysterious ritual near the tomb, accompanied by a naked girl. The adventurers can avoid them by sneaking around, or they can try to talk to them. The wizards will happily reveal the location of the tomb, though they know little more. If they ask more questions, the adventurers will learn that the ritual involves sacrificing the girl, who is a willing participant. They are even invited to participate. This can pose a difficult moral dilemma for many groups. Moreover, a typical 5e group might instinctively choose to fight, expecting a balanced encounter and rewards in loot and experience. Meanwhile, old-school players may suspect the wizards are far more powerful than them, and realise that challenging them could lead to a TPK. Even if the adventurers manage to defeat the wizards, they must decide what to do with the willing victim. It’s complicated.

Nonetheless, even if the newer version of the scenario omits this scene, I typically still run it, because I like to introduce a moral dilemma, while downplaying the gory details. If running the scenario for younger players, I replace the girl with a goblin in a cage who pleads for rescue. If the players choose not to save him, I ensure they aren’t around to witness the sacrifice, and I make it possible for them to release him through stealth (while some of the adventurers distract the cultists, another one can open the cage and release the creature), or through diplomacy (managing to convince the wizards that the goblin is not worthy of their god). I also make sure that if the cultists defeat them (which is extremely likely),  they do it through non-lethal ways, replacing the brutal attack spells and powers (easy to explain, they don’t want the site desecrated). In this case, the adventurers will wake up hours later, and there will be no trace of the cultists left.

There remains the problem that if they stop the cultists from sacrificing the girl, what can the adventurers do with her. If they leave her alone in the forest she will not last long. So most likely she must tag along with the adventurers. It never happened in any of my runs (and I ran this scenario more than ten times), but if it did happen, my plan was to have her be very naive, and very friendly, and very useless.

Otherwise, the only change I make is to replace the flying holy relics in the first room with four stone angel statues sliding from the corners of the room to attack any chaotic/neutral character entering the room, while keeping everything else the same.

And I always thoroughly enjoy role-playing the goblin and the troll at the entrance to the princess’ tower and portraying the fey as more bored than hostile when interacting with outsiders.