Frosty Encounters in the Arctic
Now that D&D Unleashed has released its first entirely free compendium, The Elements and Beyond, its time to look at some of what it can offer. The compendium covers all the combinations of the elements, and icy cold is no exception. Whether you’re running an entire campaign in the official Icewind Dale setting, journeying into the frozen north in your own homebrew campaign setting, or just taking a chilling trip through arctic wilderness to reach the next dungeon, you’ll find something you can use as a player or as a DM to match that frosty theme you’re looking for.
With icy landscapes comes gods and goddesses of winter and ice. Whether you’re building a player character that follows the benevolent goddess Skadi, or a villainous NPC that worships the spiteful and wicked deity Auril, this domain will give you a heavily armored cleric with close-ranged spellcasting talents that focus on cold damage and restricting enemies. Will this cleric preach wisdom to help townsfolk survive the winter? Or will they bring the wrath of the icy wilderness upon those foolish enough to defy their deity’s will with shelter and warmth?
A villainous harbinger of ice and winter could be such a cleric, a druid, or even a sorcerer. But they may be accompanied by elementals of ice and cold, which you’ll have at your disposal if you use the new compendium. To accompany the official air elementals and water elementals that might be found amid the frozen arctic coastlines, why not some ice elementals?
These elementals are excellent in both ground and water scenarios, and their ability to swim through ice and snow can make them extremely dangerous in the arctic environments they often inhabit. They can use this movement to dart in and out of reach of their slowed, frostbitten foes.
Of course you might want some smaller elementals. If the small ice mephits from the official Monster Manual aren’t enough for you, you can add the tiny snow spirits from this compendium to the mix.
These little elementals are extremely flighty when it comes to spells and magic, which helps to protect them against their vulnerabilities to both fire and radiant damage — which are common enough that most groups of PCs will have access to one or the other among their members.
Snow spirits are also slow, and they are harmless outside of melee range, so ranged attacks and spells, combined with careful retreats can easily defeat them with just a bit of luck. They’re perfect for portraying spirits of winter that are more often the victim of violence than the instigators of it.
Oh, did you want a bigger elemental? What about an elemental that combines ice, mud, dust, and freezing wind, a symbol of the frozen, wind-swept mountains that line your setting’s arctic horizon? The summit elemental is one of four new triple-element hybrid elementals that can be found in this compendium. The combination of three elements — air, earth, and water — produce a very powerful elemental with many abilities, but with particular traits and weaknesses that relate to the one missing element. Summit elementals are missing the element of fire, so they are particularly weak to it. While not as vulnerable to fire as snow spirits or ice elementals, intense heat will still melt the body of a summit elemental, weakening its defenses and slowing its movement.
These massive elementals are excellent representations of glaciers, avalanches, and frozen peaks. Combine them with ice elementals and ice mephits to create a truly massive arctic encounter for high-level players. If you’re exploring the Frostfell, the Para-elemental Plane of Ice, don’t be surprised if your DM throws a fight like that at you!
All of these elementals — the snow spirit, ice elemental, and summit elemental — all have chilling effects that slow and weaken melee attackers that don’t have resistance or immunity to cold damage. That means that if you’re fighting many of these creatures, you could get a lot of value from casting protection from energy on the party’s melee attacker. That also means that some of the new subraces in the compendium are especially good at fighting them, such as Tundra Dwarves, who make for excellent variation in the fantasy races of an arctic region that already has goliaths. Note that these dwarves can easily be styled after the real-life cultures of the Inuit People and other peoples of the extreme North. The compendium also features Ice Genasi — born to an elemental lineage of both marids and djinnis — who might journey to a frozen land intentionally, eking out a living using their icy talents.
There are other, more common elementals with these chilling defenses that an ice genasi or tundra dwarf can bypass, such as animated snowmen. These snowmen go great with an ice queen or winter witch (such as the fantastic Bheur Hag from Volo’s Guide to Monsters), acting as guardians, sentinels, scouts, and pets. They go very well with the Snow Golem found in Rime of the Frostmaiden, and a crafty ice mage might hide some snow golems among their snowman servants and soldiers.
Adventurers might also encounter snowmen without a creator living among the arctic wilderness or inside frozen dungeons that are suffused with magic. These snowmen communities can be enemies or friends to adventurers, depending on circumstances. Perhaps a winter fey has convinced them to help him rid the land of all who can’t naturally withstand its cold, driving them to attack the PCs. Or perhaps the snowmen are terrorized by the intrusion of frost giant raiding parties on the way to attack humanoid settlements, and the snowmen could ally with the PCs against their mutual foe.
Of course, elementals aren’t the only enemy this compendium provides for an arctic adventure, and the fey of winter have pets that are much more dangerous than simple snowmen. Take the wintry giant spiders known as frostbite spiders, for example. These fey spiders allow their riders to climb, swim, or even burrow through ice and snow, in addition to being highly dangerous to the riders’ enemies. They pair very well with winter eladrin from Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes or with the previously mentioned bheur hag, but they also make excellent encounters when encountered in the wild. A nest of frostbite spiders poses a dangerous challenge even for mid and high-tier characters, especially if they have favorable terrain that is covered in ice, snow, and webbing. A DM can even throw some winter oozes (a variant of the molten ooze in the compendium) into the corners of the spiders’ lair, remaining camouflaged as ice or water and feeding off the spiders’ food scraps in secret.
Frostbite spiders are far from the most dangerous fey of the arctic wilderness to be found in the compendium, however. Those wandering the most primal parts of the icy wastes, and especially those who travel to the winter-lands in the Feywild, may eventually encounter these fey. The Bear of the Arctic is the avatar of the arctic primal spirit, and while it is usually used as a summoned creature by druids using the new 9th-level summon primal spirit spell from the compendium, it can also be used as a spiritual fey creature unassociated with the individual primal spirit. Alternatively, a DM could make players face off against a bear of the arctic as a response to actions the players have taken to harm the arctic wilderness, as the primal spirit uses its avatar to enact the justice of natural law.
For those snow-covered alpine forests, the Evergreen Treant is a more powerful kind of treant that has been transformed into a winter fey, and has lost its good alignment to become chaotic neutral instead. That means it has an easier time coming into conflict with most adventuring groups, but still isn’t beyond reasoning with for those groups who don’t wish to harm a primal symbol of the arctic forests. These treants can even be found among the armies of winter fey at times, helping to add even more variety to any battlefield between summer and winter.
The most dangerous denizen of the arctic found in this compendium, however, may first appear to PCs as a strange mammoth or winter wolf with icy fur like frozen armor. It might transform into a killer whale or a giant owl to escape, only to be found later leading the army of frost giants. When it reveals its true form, this frost giant druid — a Winter Herald — also displays their true power by evoking cold and ice in freezing sheets across the battlefield.
The winter herald combines official ice and cold spells and the new ones found in the compendium with their own unique cryomancy trait. They can be particularly dangerous when combined with a group of frost giants because all frost giants are immune to cold damage, so the winter herald can cast their area spells without worrying about damaging their allies. Combine them with regular Frost Giants from the Monster Manual and Frost Giant Everlasting One from Volo’s Guide to Monsters to create a full-fledged frost giant legion. You can even add the earlier elementals, controlled by a winter herald, to their ranks (and frost giants love to prove their strength by wrestling summit elementals). Perhaps if the winter heralds controlling the elementals are slain by clever adventurers, they might turn on the frost giants compelling them to fight!
The frost giant winter herald isn’t the only thing in the compendium to make use of the new ice and cold spells. Among the new magic weapons and staffs in the compendium, there are a few legendary staffs, including the Staff of the Glacier. This magic staff is perfect for any high-level character that specializes in ice magic, but anyone can make full use of its damage bonus by casting spells and cantrips from the staff. If desired, the staff can even be sacrificed to create a permanent glacier in an area. That ability offers many narrative possibilities, but it comes at quite a cost. You should remember to reward such a sacrifice of a legendary item with actual changes in the narrative so that the players to feel their choice made a real difference.
With all these icy-cold options from The Elements and Beyond combined with the official content, you can easily unleash your own arctic game of D&D!
This sample was from The Elements and Beyond, a magical exploration of the four elements and the various energies of creation — minus those dark forces that belong in forbidden tomes — powers such as light, thunder, lightning, acid, frost, and the magic of nature! It’s entirely free and you can download the pdf here!
This 246 page compendium contains 23 subclasses, 8 spellcasting feats, 134 spells, 213 spell variants, 85 monsters, 30 magic items, 4 races plus 12 new subraces each with racial feats, and even more goodies for both players and DMs!
