Adventure Kit: Oath of the Frozen King by Absolute Tabletop, is a D&D 5e compatible adventure funded by Kickstarter. It is billed as being the middle ground between a full featured published adventure and your own table top notes, that they call Adventure Kits.

What’s An Adventure Kit?

The concept of Adventure Kits is a framework with the general idea and some main points for GMs that like to improv. Tables are provided to help fill in some of these pieces. It allows the GM to randomly generate, or use the ideas in the provided tables to take the general idea for the adventure and craft it to their own style and that of their players.

They use a die-drop table with the six standard dice to generate the relative position of each encounter location. The result of each die influences the specifics of the encounter in that location. For example, the d4 is the Hall of Bone and Ice and there are 4 different things that can be encountered there. The result is a six room dungeon, as is seen later with the battle maps.

If you don’t want the adventure set in the frozen tundra, they have a d8 table with how to re-skin it for any environment.

They introduce a new notation, such as d12³, which means roll a d12 three times. This is first seen on a table with twelve rows and three columns. The intent is to roll a d12 for each column. To yield more than the initial 12 options, there are 12x12x12 or 1,728 combinations of possible quests mixed in this adventure.

Next is a table of six potential twists to tweak things so it isn’t so cut and dried.

Then a d20 table of twenty possible motivations for the PCs to be here.

The Locations are defined by two sentences, then 3 bullet points for each of the sights, sounds, and sensations in that location.

The encounters are classed as: roleplay, combat, skill challenge, puzzle/trap, and environmental hazard. Each encounter has 3 or 4 bold type phrases to describe an aspect of the encounter. Until the encounters, there is no ruleset specific terminology. This makes it very easy to run this with any ruleset.

The NPCs presented are just descriptions and traits, no stats, again making this easy to use across various rules.

Monsters that are presented have some very basic stats related to HP & AC and damage.

Next are some things to think about for resolutions and rewards, with ideas to wrap up the adventure, extend the adventure into an ongoing campaign, and repercussions in the future. There are tables for repercussions and relations, treasure, social rewards, and ties that bind. These are all good ideas for things to keep in mind when adventurers do something, there are always unexpected and unintended consequences.

There are 18 pages of tables in what is called the Toolbox, which can be used to further modify the adventure. Various details, phrases, set details, loot, hazards, trinkets, locations, sights, sounds, sensations, encounters, monster generation, skill challenges, trap generator, and NPC generator, all of which can be used for modding other adventures.

The conclusion is a short story to set the tone and mood.

What I Liked:

• A loosely defined default setting, with encouragement to use your own, or another.
• The use of the die-drop table to configure the locations used in the adventure.
  • The page devoted to explaining how this die-drop table works.
    • It is graphical, so makes it very clear how to use it.
• The various tables to tweak the different aspects of the adventure.
  • One can read all the options in a given table and pick the one that is the most interesting.
• The tables in the Toolbox.
  • All of the tables they use give a lot of ideas for crafting your own tables, or using them to make your own adventures.

What I’d Like to See:

• Hyperlinks in the Table of Contents.
• More options for the die-drop tables.
  • There are only four options on each table, why not just use a bunch of d4s? I’d prefer to see one option for each possible number on a given die.
  • This is very minor. I know well the challenges of coming up with good options for tables.

Conclusion:

I find this to be a helpful way to build an adventure for sale to the masses. It has enough detail that you can run it without much effort, and you can tweak it to suit your style of play. Almost all of the tables can be used on their own.  This is a great example of how little information one needs to run an adventure. For those GMs that need all the details ready to run, this may not be for them.

The PDF is available on DriveThruRPG [Affiliate Link] for $9.95.