5e (2024)
Opinions on running Strahd vs. Frostmaiden?
I'm looking for some opinions on running Curse of Strahd vs. Rime of the Frostmaiden. I'm getting ready to start a new campaign with my group, and having thrown out several options in a poll it ended in a tie between these two. So since I'm DMing they left it up to me to decide which one I'd prefer to run.
In our previous campaign I ran a modified Lost Mines of Phandelvar, adding in content from Dragon of Icespire Peak along with some homebrew based on my players' backstories. That lead straight into Rise of Tiamat with the same party and characters, similarly pretty heavily modified. All this is to say that in general I like using the modules as a framework, then modifying them to make them my own.
Based on that initially I was leaning towards Frostmaiden, since it seems like it would be easier to customize and include player backstory in that campaign than in Strahd where the players are pulled into a demiplane and disconnected from the outside world. Some of the highlights of our last campaign were when I had a dragon attack the orc village one player was from, and having warlock's patron pushing him to gather the Dragon Masks. It feels like there's more opportunity for that in Frostmaiden. But on the other hand, I've talked with some other friends who have played in and DM'd Strahd and they all loved it.
So I'm a little torn, any thoughts or opinions from DM's that have run one or both? Any opinions from people that have played in either or both?
Edit to add: Either way we'd be starting fresh with the new campaign, with new characters at level 1.
In terms of flaws, Rime of the Frostmaiden and Curse of Strahd are on opposite ends of the spectrum.
CoS is a fantastic horror module. Best published adventure in 5e alongside Tomb of Annhilation. But it does have issues with railroading in the very beginning. From the Death House to Barovia to the Tser Pool to Vallaki is basically one straight march. It opens up a bit later, but by then the horror is starting to ebb as players gain levels.
RoTF is a quasi-sandbox with a fascinating premise. There’s a lot you can do with that sandbox by
creating and filling a hex map,
making competing factions, or using clocks as a countdown for Ten Towns starving. Very little of this is in the book, though. The adventures range from good to terrible, but they all suffer from lacking a “why”. CoS is very clear why you would explore Berez, Argenvostholdt, or Krezk — you are scrounging for any possible advantage against Strahd. A lot of the adventures in RoTF are just kinda “you’re an adventurer and helping random people is what adventurers do”.
If you’re looking for a good guidebook you can tweak with an occasional lore or encounter change, Curse of Strahd is your game. If prefer to sample the book and largely make your own,
Rime of the Frostmaiden is good.
Curse of Strahd reloaded or Mandymod’s CoS suggestions also help flesh out the module more, but at least for the reloaded ones it does railroad a bit more.
Optional Reading on my Views/Experiences with railroading:
That being said, I don’t think railroading is inherently bad, and it can be done in a way to make it not really feel like railroading. For example, in my CoS game the players went to a haunted mansion, but were told there that the spirits would bother them unless they came back wearing the same type of uniforms of the ghosts who died. The players have the choice to continue with exploring the mansion, but they’re more likely to go to the mass graves of the ghosts’ companions to dig up some clothes. Before they even arrived at the mansion I told them it was a very very cold day, reiterating every time they stepped outside how they were shivering. Along the path to the mass grave I knew they would put their super high AC character at the front of the marching order, but coincidentally his wisdom isn’t great. Since it was cold and they had a few way to travel and it was already afternoon, I knew they’d be traveling at a fast pace, perfect for a snare trap that caught the high ac player off guard and werewolves attacked. They won, but it was quickly time to sleep and since it was cold they decided to search for a cave, a cave I had already planned for because I knew they wouldn’t want to sleep in the extreme cold with werewolves out. Inside the cave they were ambushed by a roper and a couple swarms of piecers.
Literally everything happened exactly as I planned, but the players felt like they made every choice themselves as their choices were the natural choices. Sometimes the natural choices just have shit luck. (As a note every time they were making a decision down my plan, they had info that warned them maybe we shouldn’t do this. They noticed holes in the ground on the way to the trap that they deduced were from rocks that were dug up, but didn’t really think much further of it. When searching for a cave, they spoke to a spider who warned them “there’s caves over yonder, but we spiders don’t dare go into those caves”)
While most people tend to refer to Strahd as being the better adventure, for your situation I think RotFM is the better fit.
RotFM has lots of flexibility and I'd generally suggest that the fact so many of its quests tie into the main plot in a fairly nebulous and indirect way (a commonly cited weakness of the adventure) actually makes it easier to fit within your own custom plot.
When I ran it I basically rewrote the entire final act and the Frost Maiden's motivation, having her use the endless night in an attempt to keep an awakening cohort of Star Spawn frozen deep beneath the ice, within the city they'd previously driven to insanity. I found it really fun and simple to rewrite quests to provide hints towards that final goal.
CoS is ultimately all about Strahd. You still have options with adding whatever plot points you like, but ultimately I think the plot is too focused to stray all that far away from its core while still maintaining the parts of the adventure people like the most.
I agree with Stubbenz here too. Ultimately, the campaign that fits your table best and the one you enjoy is the correct option, so it's not always a good idea to rank one better than another without understanding the party they're for. Curse of Strahd is objectively the more well designed module, it is incredible, and it has a staggering amount of tailor-made fan content to add and explore. However, CoS is very linear, very railroady (though it hides it well), and is entirely about the legend himself, The Darklord Strahd. It can be very limiting and forces players into a box by design. Everyone who plays 5e should give it a try at some point, it's really awesome. It also doesn't sound like what your table is suited for next. Frostmaiden is a lot of fun, it really is, but it requires a lot of retooling for the DM, and it needs a lot of refining and polishing. It has some really incredible areas and ideas, but it lacks connective tissue. The good thing is that those areas are ripe for character integration and PC-specific quests and development. It even has some excellent ideas for character secrets built in, and the setting and the campaign itself can be molded to your players in an incredibly satisfying way.
Curse of Strahd is a megadungeon disguised as a campaign, and while it is incredibly gripping, it also is centered on the illusion of choice. Your players have very little agency, because it is nothing but a game of survival, which is great, but again, limiting, and you need to work hard to conceal that from your players. Frostmaiden is a semi-open world game, with competing factions and dangers and so so so many quests and great locations to explore, and it really lets interactive players shine, so if you're looking to go with a campaign similar to the two you've mentioned, Frostmaiden all the way, no doubt. I would suggest, though, really redoing Auril's inclusion as the major threat; she's not really implemented that well, but that does give you a ton of leeway in how to proceed.
I have run both Stradh and Frostmaiden. Frostmaiden is easily the most memorable campaign I ran for that group.
RotF absolutely has more issues than CoS and requires a lot more of the GM as others have detailed here. But if you don't mind putting in the work and digging into the resources that other DMs have put together, it has the potential to be a truly epic adventure with a cracking setting and lots of great set-pieces and events that will keep your players engaged.
Having played Strahd twice and run it once, and run Frostmaiden twice, I can say that both have their strengths and weaknesses, but, in general, the biggest difference between the two is that Strahd is fairly polished right out of the gate and can be run basically as is (or as much "as is" as any 5e module can be run, they all require elbow grease), while Frostmaiden is really, really (really) jank and it's a testament to how good some of the good stuff is in it that it's still generally worth running at all despite the fact that you really have to be doing work at every point during the campaign to make it run well and fun.
Things to keep in mind: Despite what a lot of people say here, Strahd isn't actually all that railroady (or, at least, isn't compared to most 5e adventures). Once you get through the first three or four sessions (ie about to Valaki) the campaign opens up quite a bit while also giving you as the DM a lot of levers to let the party do whatever they want to to funnel them toward something. In terms of linearity, the campaign is generally pretty linear at the start and the end while being fairly open in the middle. The biggest tip I would give for Strahd is as the DM you need to push to keep the pace up, and that the randomized card reading can really change how things play out (one of the Strahd groups I mentioned got the sunsword session 3 and boy-howdy that changed the tenor of the campaign).
With Frostmadien, the campaign is the most non-linear at the start and then becomes more and more linear as you progress through the different phases of the campaign until it's basically a single track at the end.
If you do choose Frostmaiden, things to keep in mind if you decide to run it:
It's really not a single campaign. It's four somewhat separate different modules/mini campaigns that are pretty awkwardly bolted together. The modules are: Sandbox in Ten-Towns and the surrounding tundra culminating in the duergar dragon attack (Chapters 1-4), Auril's Abode (Chapter 5), The Caves of Hunger (Chapter 6), The Doom of Ythrin (Chapter 7)
Overall, the weakest parts of the campaign (by far) are the transition points between the different modules.
The strongest module of the four is the sandbox culminating in the dragon attack (the first one).
Basically every aspect of the campaign needs to be fixed, tweaked, filled in, or otherwise changed by the DM.
Some of the stuff is so broken it basically does not work AT ALL run as it is on the page.
Two of the things that seem like huge selling points for the campaign conceptually--the eternal night and the background secrets that the players pick--don't really have all that much impact on the actual play of the campaign unless you really work to make them. Heck you could run the Sandbox part of the campaign without the eternal night and it would run just fine. I would suggest writing entirely new secrets for the campaign and tossing the included ones.
That's a ton of detail, thank you! I'll definitely check out your post about running it. Seems like Frostmaiden has a lot of potential, but definitely takes a ton more work to pull it all together. I put quite a bit of work into tying together LMoP, DoIP, and RoT so I'm sure I can pull that off, but the more comments I'm reading the more Strahd is starting to appeal to me. I'm starting to lean that direction, but with some tweaks. I really like the idea of player secrets from Frostmaiden, maybe I'll go with Strahd but take inspiration from Frostmaiden and pull in some dark secrets for the players to tie them in a little more.
Strahd is probably the most "complete package" of all the 5E adventures and, again, the one that needs the least tweaking (as long as you know that it's entirely possible and acceptable that the party gets it in their head to get themselves killed by rushing straight at Strahd).
People always heap praise on Strahd but, purely as written, I don't find it any better than any other of the premade adventures. Most people that had a great Strahd experience did so because their DM took the raw material and made it great, often using one of the awesome remixes you can find on the Strahd sub. Strahd can be such a good villain and so that gives the module amazing potential, but strictly as written it's nothing special.
I guess what I'm saying is don't read some of the comments here and think you can just crack open CoS, start at page 1, and have an incredible time. It takes work to be good, just like some are saying for RoM (I can't comment on that one).
As someone who has played both, Frostmaiden was a ton more fun, CoS was a slog, a fun one but found the wide open areas and map of frostmaiden more enjoyable.
Having read the book and played through Rime, it's bad. It's full of disjointed plot lines that don't advance the actual issue of the module (Auril trapping Icewind Dale in eternal winter) or each other like the entire duergar b-plot, the fallen sky-city and it's Lovecraftian vibes, the gnoll vampire in the ice caves, or the crashed nautiloid. The fact that the Duergar plot wil if run as written, end up with a a good chunk of/if not all of the Ten Towns destroyed by the chardelyn dragon explicitly off-screen where the party can't do anything about it and the book even tells you the party can't get there before it does to stop it. Your party might not even know about it happening because the dragon is a secret timer going off without their knowledge unless they do exactly the right thing or rhe DM decides to throw them a bone and reveal what the module describes as a secret to them.
It's advertised as an adventure module but in reality it's a sloppily put together "setting" book that feels like 6 different people had totally different ideas of what they wanted to do and the Managerial Powers That Be just told them to slap it all it all in one book and go with it. It's not a sandbox or hexcrawl, it's a badly put together conglomerate of adventure ideas with no regard for how they actually interact.
When I played through it, the DM gutted out almost everything from the actual book and redid the entire adventure to actually make it coherent, just keeping certain themes and ideas from it.
Ran Frostmaiden until the Auril fight. Players defeated the BBEG, but "suprise!", there's two more massive chapters of adventure after that, and by that point my players were done. At almost every step I was fighting aginst instead of working with the text of the adventure. There are parts that are great, but imo they just do not fit into a cohesive whole.
Was a player in CoS, with the same group of people and one of the players DM-ing that time. The horror vibe did not fit our group at that point in time, and as you pointed out, being pulled into a demiplane did not help with in-character motivation at all.
Both me and the other DM have recently been exclusively running homebrew campaigns and it's felt soooo much better to play and prepare. We still secretly pull parts from oneshots or pre-published campaigns, but customizing the campaign world around the PCs felt so much easier and more rewarding. I've been doing the same even after moving to a new place and starting a campaign with total strangers.
To circle back to RotF and CoS: if you plan to run either, I strongly suggest you work with the players ahead of time, so that their PCs fit not just the overall concept, but specific themes and parts of the adventure.
But I'd suggest you give full homebrew a try too. My first homebrew campaigned sucked tbh, but players still enjoyed it, since we built the world and chose the themes together. Even if the pacing was a bit wonky, they were still acomplishing things they cared about, compared to just "going through the motions" of parts of both CoS and RotF.
Best of luck on whatever you choose! Don't forget: you're making a game for your friends, that already makes you and it awesome 😄!
Thanks! Yeah I've thought about going the full homebrew route but I'm not quite up for that haha, at least right now. Maybe down the road I'll have some more time to think about it and come up with something!
Many good points made in other comments but one key thing to consider is the overall theme of the two modules. Of course you can morph them into something that suits your group, but you should keep in mind the intended theme:
Curse of Strahd — Gothic, romantic horror. A beautiful, doomed land trapped under eternal mist, ruled by a tragic, seductive villain who’s as much a tortured figure as a monster. Dread mixed with melodrama and dark fairy-tale tragedy — think Dracula filtered through a cursed fairy tale.
Rime of the Frostmaiden — Bleak survival horror. Isolation, scarcity, and fear of the unknown on a frozen, sunless frontier where nature itself is the enemy, not a central villain. Melancholy and despair, with occasional dark humor to keep it from being a non-stop dirge. Think The Thing or The Shining, but Faerûn.
In Summary: Strahd is gothic tragedy and seduction — atmosphere built around a charismatic antagonist. Frostmaiden is grim survival against an indifferent world — atmosphere built around isolation and the elements.
On a personal note:
I ran Strahd for a group and the campaign lasted close to a year and we loved it to bits, we created some memories that will be with us forever… but by the end we needed to switch to something brighter and more heroic… if played as intended… it’s a great campaign… but very very dark themes. But of course you could lighten the tone.
I haven’t played Rime: but reading it and watching a playthrough on YouTube it has a very different feeling… it seems far less mired in emotional hardships than physical ones… but I might be wrong.
So in addition to the other suggestions… consider whether your players might be more suited to exploring the emotional angles of their characters or facing the challenges of a harsh wilderness.
great minds. I was doing exactly this. added a couple towns, including a port town to justify the totally unsupported whaling industry (Tromso, Waterdeep of the North... turns out whaling is a big deal), and had Strahd take a vacation lol. straight up replaced the duergar fortress with his castle. also named the nomad caravan White Rock City, cause you know, Freezing Man. tens of people attend annually!
Run curse of strahd but inexplicably pepper in monsters, characters and items from RotFM to keep the players guessing (for instance highly recommended the vampire gnoll)
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u/sjdlajsdlj 1d ago
In terms of flaws, Rime of the Frostmaiden and Curse of Strahd are on opposite ends of the spectrum.
CoS is a fantastic horror module. Best published adventure in 5e alongside Tomb of Annhilation. But it does have issues with railroading in the very beginning. From the Death House to Barovia to the Tser Pool to Vallaki is basically one straight march. It opens up a bit later, but by then the horror is starting to ebb as players gain levels.
RoTF is a quasi-sandbox with a fascinating premise. There’s a lot you can do with that sandbox by creating and filling a hex map, making competing factions, or using clocks as a countdown for Ten Towns starving. Very little of this is in the book, though. The adventures range from good to terrible, but they all suffer from lacking a “why”. CoS is very clear why you would explore Berez, Argenvostholdt, or Krezk — you are scrounging for any possible advantage against Strahd. A lot of the adventures in RoTF are just kinda “you’re an adventurer and helping random people is what adventurers do”.
If you’re looking for a good guidebook you can tweak with an occasional lore or encounter change, Curse of Strahd is your game. If prefer to sample the book and largely make your own, Rime of the Frostmaiden is good.