Is the mention of Baba Yaga in the Player Guide a spoiler?…

[RPGeezer]

Might run the 2e conversion of this, but I find the mention and talk of Baba Yaga in the PG a spoiler. Can someone explain why it is not?…

[PossibleCabbage]

I think it's reasonable to frame expectations for the players that they won't be necessarily working on the side of "good" so much as working on the side of "preventing eternal winter, which is worse than the alternative."

Reign of Winter is one of those APs where you're entirely justified in playing a bad person, you just have to be willing to commit to stopping a global catastrophe which is rational because you live in the world too.

The start of the adventure is basically "you wandered through a portal since something was weird" so if you came up with a character who absolutely could not stand to assist someone as wicked as Baba Yaga, you might not have a great time (since she's going to force you to anyway.)

[Ectar]

RPGeezer wrote:

Might run the 2e conversion of this, but I find the mention and talk of Baba Yaga in the PG a spoiler. Can someone explain why it is not?…

It is a bit. It's about a much of a spoiler for the AP as reading the back cover of a novel is. Less even, in retrospect.

Part of the players guide, I suspect, is to function as a soft sales pitch.

And it's really not very spoilery (I re-downloaded it to refresh my memory). It basically boils down to Baba Yaga is somehow involved. It's less obvious than Iron Gods involving machine deities.

[randomtone]

Only two of my players out of five had any knowledge of Baba Yaga or the dancing hut in any form, so it wasn't a big deal to me. But I redid the players' guide for our group anyway because we started in Sandpoint. Half of our players had played "Rise of the Runelords," and I thought it would be fun to start there.