With the Winter Jam at an end, in a way it has only begun. With all the new modules available to us, wintertime has become an exciting time to explore the Land of Cicadas. Here's a little guide on how to create a rich winter campaign in the Land of Cicadas.
0. Bringing your existing summer campaign into winter
Odds are you already have a campaign going and are in the middle of summer. If not, skip this step. It might not seem like it, but there are plenty of ways to transition it into winter! Here are some ideas.
- Travel to the other hemisphere. The party has ruffled the wrong feathers and need to disappear. Snow Traders from across the hemisphere will take the party back with them, far away into a land that is now in winter, for a price. Use the module Snow Traders and any of the region modules in the section 'Look for Greener Pastures' below.
- Timeslip! Like watt mentioned, Cloud Empress includes plenty of the weird so that wardens and creators can use that to diegetically mould the world to fit their own ideas. A freak slip incident can take them forward in time. Perhaps related to the slippery winter weather from the Whiteout! module.
- Alternate reality beyond the slip. Just like cursed people can emerge from alternate realities through the slip, so can you. Here, it's winter. It seems to you that everyone shares a curse here. To them, you're the cursed one.
- Help a community of farmerlings prepare for winter. If the players want to devote themselves to hard work preparing the Farmerlings for the harsh winter, how about you zoom out with a storytelling session or montage that spans months? @parodical_son suggested using a game like The Quiet Year, which I think is a great shout.
- Winter has come early. As the Century brood came early, so did winter. Perhaps with a transitional session for fall to happen. What caused winter to come early? Perhaps it is related to the Whiteout, or a wish granted by the Cloud Empress. Perhaps the answer is as unknown as the answer to the early arrival of the century brood. Perhaps the answers are connected.
- The slow burn. It has to be included. And this is how my own group did it. Between sessions, a week passes for downtime. If you play long enough, it's winter.
Several of the options above could also be used to bring players back from winter to summer so that you can always go back to summer content in the future.
1. Wintrify the Land of Cicadas
Follow the steps below to wintrify the existing Land of Cicadas.
- Swap the Couriers Table with Couriers from Snow Traders. This adds winter trade and new adventure hooks for The Land of Cicadas year one.
- Adjust Travel Rules from The Land of Cicadas according to the Travel in the Whistling Valley rules in Chalk and Ice. This adds harsh winter weather and deters hunting, gathering and finding shelter.
- You could swap the Weather Table from the above travel rules with the Regional Weather from Oriven, based on personal preference. This adds winter weather specific to the microclimates players might travel through.
- Add the characters Soot and Soil to Tack Town. This adds a sense of slowing down during winter, and philosophising about the bigger picture.
- Hold the Dance of the Dead festival from the Lowland Festivals , in which farmerlings bring their dead to the frozen feeding grounds.
- Freeze the acid lake in the east, and have four local settlements compete to be the champion of this year's Little War On Ice using Challengers on Ice.
- Reread what the official year one materials have to say about winter, priming your mind to reinterpret existing prompts that were written for summer. How is Tack Town changed by the Council's Winter Heads? Are all the cicadas gone now? Has the 29th expedition fully retreated? What's the Order of the Broken Bread up to in their absence?
2. Hand out wintry stuff to your players
These are things you can give to the players, or place somewhere for them to find, adding themes of winter through their characters.
- The Engagement Bangle (Wedding of the Winter Lord); whichever player character wears it will have a story that unfolds in between adventures through hallucinations wherever they go.
- Commune with the Dead, a winter ritual, when the dead can't be buried.
- New player character jobs. These are not winter specific, but deserve a mention as they're a lot of fun: The slipsinger, the Sporebinder and the Brood Prophet.
3. Session 1: Trap them in a blizzard
When in doubt on how to start your winter campaign, start in a blizzard while traveling. If you wintrified the existing Land of Cicadas, you'll probably find that traveling is way too dangerous. That means you're doing it right. There's a good reason people do not travel in winter. When players find themselves in great peril on the road or in the wild without any decent shelter, that's a great time to lure them into one of these strange and isolated locations until the blizzard subsides.
- Perhaps the blizzard is unnatural; an ethereal curtain of falling snow. This could be the first introduction of the Whiteout, and could set players on a longer path to find Brightstar Experimental Laboratories. If they can find shelter first that is. Perhaps in one of the following locations;
- The Crack (Slipping Through the Cracks), for when you want to give your characters a place they could spend up to a week in.
- A cave ( The Tearful Tragedy of the Hannelore-Marr Party) provides 'slip-looped horror'.
- A pillbox with a small bunker (Low Lying Mist), when you want to explore the intimacy of two strangers reliant upon eachother to survive the isolation of winter.
- Nebb's Nook (Cold Comfort at Nebb's Nook), when you want the creepyness of a small isolated family and 'infant curses'.
4. Even settlements are frostbitten by winter
If your characters survived the road or the wild, well done. But even the settlements aren't safe. Here are some new settlements with wintry situations to confront your players with.
- Timbrilin (Stolen Summer). A settlement under siege, with a battle between two large groups playing out in multiple phases.
- Marzanna (Marzanna's Blazing Heart). Somewhere in the Breadbasket. A strange device that protects against winter's bite has gone wrong.
- The Hollow (Hollow Wishes) explores the seeming aftereffects in winter of the missing Cloud Empress' travels during the summer.
- Frosford, a frontier town from which players can Journey To The Crystal Caverns.
- Lake Beryl (Beneath the Lake); a town with a dungeon underneath, hiding a cool secret.
5. Look for greener pastures - to no avail
The roads, the wilds and the settlements are all dangerous during winter. An ideal opportunity to tempt your players to find greener pastures beyond the confines of the hex map. Spoiler: things only ever become stranger, never safer. Here are some new regions to explore.
- The Whistling Valley (Chalk and Ice), a region once known for its chalk, now run dry.
- Oriven (The High-Desert Region of Oriven) with several microclimates and plenty of the strange.
- The Fen (Beneath These Grasses Grieving), a new biome which holds back the Slip and memories.
6. Forfeit outdoor travel and spend a whole campaign inside
If players come to the conclusion that winter travel is a fool's errand anywhere in the Land of Cicadas, they are correct. The wise choice would be to give up travel altogether. With the modules below, it's also an interesting choice that can last you a campaign. But will they go up? Or down?
- Players may travel upwards to the Upsilon Cloud city, a collection of modules with enough districts to have a winter campaign without traveling outside its walls. Use this if you want a big city that lasts you a campaign.
- Players may travel downwards to The Unseen City, an underground biome. The module contains the adventure Down the Snail's Spire. Within the mazeworld of the Unseen City lies the Marble Palace. While more details about this palace are underway, you can already play Frozen Wings, an adventure in the Marble Palace.
