2025 Reviews: Witches of Frostwyck
Hello again, folks! Time for another sporadic review of something that I've run. This time I will be writing about Witches of Frostwyck, a wintry and folk-lorey adventure written by Joseph R. Lewis. But first, a little digression.
There were two main reasons that I stopped making this blog a weekly thing; first, I no longer have such a huge backlog of adventures to review, because I've already reviewed them! The second reason is that I've made a slight change to the way I run games for my home group(s). Over the last couple of years where I built up this backlog, I was running almost exclusively quick little one-shots or mini campaigns for a wide pool of players in my Discord server. This year, I still have a wide pool of players (the internet is pretty cool sometimes), but I've opted to pare down the number of different adventures that I'm running and instead focus on a few longer form games; either running a really long adventure or stringing together a few into a more sprawling mini-ish campaign. Part of this time has also been taken up doing extended playtesting and writing for my own system, Glowburn & Radscars. The end result is that I've got fewer separate things to write about, but hopefully I can give them each a thoughtful review and share those thoughts here.
Anyway, back to the adventure!
As previously mentioned, this was written by Joseph R. Lewis (whose work I have reviewed before). Illustrations are by Ari-Matti Toivonen and Joe himself. It was released in two versions-- one for Cairn and one for "OSR" systems, with an accompanying note that it was originally written with 5e D&D in mind but then converted for a more old-school feel. I ran the Cairn version, and this review will focus exclusively on that text.
The premise of this adventure is that the PCs have accidentally wandered into a region that has been cursed so that nobody who enters may leave-- a fact that will likely not be evident to them until they've interacted with the inhabitants of the village or perhaps tried to pass the boundary of the curse by themselves. Thus, the PCs are stuck in a village that has a very serious problem which has now become THEIR problem as well-- winter is approaching, food is scarce, and there's plenty of dangerous things in the woods.
Getting it to the Table
The last two Joseph R. Lewis adventures that I reviewed were the versions that was published as special new editions by the Merry Mushmen, so this one is significantly different in terms of layout and organization. However, it is still laid out in a very clean and usable manner which made preparation very easy. One aspect of this that I found particularly helpful was a concise but thorough "GM introduction" section before the adventure proper, which included helpful overviews of key points as well as good reference material such as a list of important NPCs with a little blurb summarizing each one.
The adventure itself is similarly concise and usable for quick reference; each region of the adventure area is in its own section, and those sections begin with a summary of "What is here", "Who is here", and "What can happen" along with encounter tables and monster/NPC stat blocks. Each area description has bolded text indicating the key interactive points which are then expanded upon in the bullet text following. This made things easy to locate quickly and prioritize when players are asking about features in an area. Maps are included where they are needed, and the adventure closes with a couple of appendices; one detailing the "mentors" mechanic which is a very cool alternate method for growth within the Cairn framework, another listing all of the (incredibly cool and fun) relics that can be found throughout the adventure, and finally a new PC background.
What Worked?
- So much to do, so much to see! Even though the boundary of the curse is relatively small (only 9 miles out from the center of the village), there is a ton of stuff packed in here. There are numerous points of interest in the forest, secrets to uncover in the town itself, and even an entire underworld cave system that has multiple points of entry throughout the forest. My group played through this over about a dozen two-hour sessions (over about 3 months) and explored the heck out of the forest and village, but they never actually set foot in the underworld at all, so it could easily have been another handful of sessions just from that!
- Tons of fun relics! Seriously, 28 new relics, all of them fun. Some of them were simple but effective when used creatively. Some of them could be upgraded when combined with magical eyeballs that you could find. Even my player who invariably seeks to find a "box of grenades" in any game he plays was satisfied.
- Jam-packed with Eastern European folklore and vibes. From Dama Zhadna's spider-legged cottage to river demons to cheery and playful flaming skulls to haughty immortal wizards, there were so many fun things to interact with that were all stitched together into a unified tapestry that really made this whole little forest spring to life at the table.
What Didn't Work?
- In the "Welcome" section, it mentions more than once that the early stage of this adventure will be about survival-- one of the recommended ways to start the adventure (and the one I chose to use) had the PCs as prisoners on a river barge who then escaped when the barge is attacked by raiders; thus, they end up walking through a wintry forest with little more than the rags on their back. A lot of the early focus for them was finding better gear and food and such. Survival stuff. In practice, I think that it was fortunate for my group that they decided to head east down the road and thus directly towards the village where they could pivot to the larger mystery rather than spending more time in survival mode. I think that in theory you could have a really fun time getting into the survival aspect, but I find that that works best when you have some clear procedures built into the game mechanics for what that looks like. Cairn does have that to a certain extent, but it is a bit more abstract and meant for longer travel over greater distances than we are working with in this one. Ultimately this wasn't a big problem for my group though, as we soon transitioned into the next part of the adventure where finding their next meal wasn't as critical.
Final Thoughts
All in all, this was pretty much a perfect adventure for the way my taste is running these days-- it's got a lot of meat on its bones to allow for a long game where PCs can develop and really get to know the world being presented while still having a well-defined end point. My players had solved many mysteries and gained many advantages over Dama Zhadna, and it became clear to them that they felt ready to take her on and try to lift the curse on the village that they had grown to have a bit of a stake in. This is one of the most memorable mini campaigns that I've run in quite a long time.
You can get a PDF of Witches of Frostwyck from Joe's itch page or a print copy from the Cairn Store, and I highly recommend it! Thanks for reading!