TMA integrating Under Frozen Stars & Baleful Coven


Jade Regent


So, my group is probably 3 weeks away from starting The Hungry Storm. Compared to Books 1 & 2, this looks to be a colossal FAIL as we have completely hand-waved the caravan (I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in thinking that they are terri-bad). I'd like to hear from others who incorporated one or both of these and what you left out, changed, etc. I realize that there is already a similar thread, but this is specific to using one or both of those modules and putting a serious edit on THS.

Your posts and suggestions are greatly appreciated.


I increased the encounter chart to 54 different encounters, one for each card in a Harrow deck (this included mapping the ones that currently exist to Harrow cards), then I dealt out sets of encounters appropriate for Outer Ring, High Ice, and Boreal Expanse. I put a lot of emphasis on the fact that with temperatures as low as they are in the High Ice, the only thing keeping the caravan alive is the combination of the Sashimono of Comfort and endure elements on everyone, which also explained to them why the oni were unable to pursue.

Another thing that helped me tie into Part 3 was that the party had a sylph sky druid whose backstory was that her father was a wizard named Tornaq who studied sky magic (I had decided to allow a sylph from the beginning of the campaign explicitly so she could be Tornaq's daughter and Katiyana's half-sister).

I incorporated both Baleful Coven and Under Frozen Stars exactly where those adventures recommend they be incorporated. My caravan actually now has Miriya in their group, since her dissolution seems to assume she doesn't bring a Clockwork Servant to keep herself alive. The group also used Knowledge: Engineering and Miriya and Lin's expertise to salvage parts and make a clockwork wagon that hovers slightly above the ground (but can't fly any higher, so if there's a pit it will still fall).


I ran both modules, more or less in the suggested places. Baleful Coven was run in-between Avistan and the Crown itself (in the unmapped land bridge area) and I don't remember changing anything important. Ameiko and Shale came with the party for all the encounters while Sandru, Ulf and Koya protected the caravan. The only suggestion I have for this module is to personalize those nightmares. I tailored each one to the specific players and their characters fears and they ate it up!

Under Frozen Stars I changed up a bit, as well as The Hungry Storm itself for this part. I moved the Storm Tower to the north pole so it would be part of The Nameless Spires, because when else is the party gonna have an opportunity to explore an alien city on top of the world? The events of the module happened after the party killed Katiyana. Didn't change anything else, ran it as written and the players loved it. The boss fight is memorable, though depending on your party's setup you may want to change the boss robot's stats, dude hits like a truck. Miriya came along when all was said and done, but I did have her pass away when she was away from the city. It wound up being a pretty touching moment for the party.

Overall, I'd say both modules are worth it and make THS better, but definitely run Under Frozen Stars if you had to pick one.

Scarab Sages RPG Superstar 2008 Top 4; Contributor; Publisher, Legendary Games

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The Storm Tower as I conceived it was always supposed to be on the outskirts of the city at the North Pole. I didn't even notice until much later that in the official adventure they had moved it like 150 miles away. My notion was that the city had six of these storm towers encircling it as part of an ancient technomagical weather control system, and the other five were mostly destroyed but this one had enough functioning stuff in it that Katiyana was able to repurpose it for her morozko plan.


Thanks for pointing that out Jason!

The Exchange

As for the caravan rules, I stopped using them after book one, it was clear they weren't scaling with the encounters so I left them out and ran the encounters as actual combats or RP obstacles.
Actual combats while in caravan can be challenging in their own right; PCs are often spread out among wagons at the beginning, hardly a good tactical position, or may be off scouting/hunting and not even there. Scouts might have their own combat.

I ran Under Frozen Stars (great addition - they all are, give us more legendary games!) as an "outer city" to the storm tower as Jason suggested - no point having two different locations, and it makes a good story. With Under Frozen Stars you have less need for random encounters if you are tracking XP and not hand-waving level advancement.

Baleful Coven was not released in time for my group to encounter it in the correct location, but I plugged it in during "Forest of Spirits" between Ordu-Aganhei and the Forest proper. Everything got advanced by about 4CR though, so that was a bit of work.

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