I'm trying to devise a D&D adventure, but I need help with something.

Let's say you are a party of adventurers levels 4-6 using BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia/Dark Dungeons.

How would you prepare for an adventure in Antarctica?

I'm not trying to predict everything my party might do, but I'm trying to get some ideas so I can prepare appropriate challenges.

Clerics preparing Resist Cold is a given. Purify Food & Water is also going to be a very important one. Maybe Speak With Animals for dealing with the sledge dogs.
Cure Blindness is going to be a big one when I roll 'Snow Blind' on the encounter table.

Magic Users might want to prepare Haste or Fly so the party can make good time and clear the mountains. Light and Continual Light may be vital depending on what time of year the party chooses to embark. Floating Disc to carry more supplies without putting extra strain on the sledge dogs.

Fighters would be important for their survivability.
Not sure how thieves would contribute.

Any ideas or suggestions?

Why are they there, and what do you want them to find?

Plenty for thieves to do if you plan a Mountains of Madness/lost civilisation/lost ruins kind of thing. What else could they do? Manage the supplies, logistics, deal with suppliers pre-expedition, find maps, use maps, help uncover the hidden meaning of some random macguffin.

Speak with dead is another one. Perhaps there is a frozen corpse?

Dont forget to stock the random encounters table with Dire Penguins!

Ya gotta involve Dire Penguins.

Really, like BarefootGaijin said, it depends on what kind of adventure you're planning.

Magic is probably the only way they'll be able to survive for long due to the extreme cold.

Thieves can climb cravasses, search and loot ruins and such, pretty much all the stuff thieves normally do.

Unless you're planning some sort of survival theme where there is no cool stuff, and the PCs just trudge around until they freeze to death.

Quote from: everloss;793237Unless you're planning some sort of survival theme where there is no cool stuff, and the PCs just trudge around until they freeze to death.

That sounds cool. Cold even.

I have a big dungeon crawl laid out for when the party actually makes it to the south pole, but its intended to come as a surprise after a severe wilderness adventure.
For the wilderness portion of the adventure I'm taking inspiration from At the Mountains of Madness and from Green Antarctica (on the alt history forums.)
The map will be sparse and encounter areas will be few and far between but so far I know there's going to be:
A camp on the bay of whales to serve as a town and base of operations for the party.
An abandoned dwarf fortress in Mt. Erebus
A white dragon's graveyard on Mt. Terror
A Tsalol community
A crashed flying saucer containing a shapeshifting alien
A pyramid containing xenomorphs
Ancient ruins of the Elder Things now populated by shoggoths
A passage to Agartha/The Underdark
A wandering flesh golem
..and some other stuff.

And yes, before anyone asks, I have read Weird New World by James Raggi and that has been a huge help, but I'm doing some stuff a little differently.

Read the novel The Terror, by Dan Simmons. It is about two ships in the 1800's looking for the Northwest passage in the arctic. They become trapped in ice and the men must survive against everything nature throws at them, plus a mysterious monster. Good book, grim and sometimes ugly (it can read like torture porn) but good.

You might be able to grab some kind of inspiration from something like "Ryuutama"

I'm not saying "house rule the system", just look at it from another angle. Perhaps the approach Ryuutama uses could set off a train of thought?

Oh, and storytelling. What do the characters do in their limited down time? How do they keep their spirits and motivation up (apart from roasting the bard to keep warm!)? Get the players to think about their characters thoughts, feelings, and how they can support each other. Emotional character stuff. Do people do that? Mixed in with that could be a time-sensitive dilemma. Are the party able to go and do what they need to before X happens? Pressure comes in many forms.

Oh! Have the party being chased. Have them bravely running away...

Remorhaz and Snow Worms would be good threats to face since both are arctic monsters...also seriously Dire Penguins

Quote from: Doughdee222;793291Read the novel The Terror, by Dan Simmons. It is about two ships in the 1800's looking for the Northwest passage in the arctic. They become trapped in ice and the men must survive against everything nature throws at them, plus a mysterious monster. Good book, grim and sometimes ugly (it can read like torture porn) but good.

Will do! Thanks!

Quote from: BarefootGaijin;793311You might be able to grab some kind of inspiration from something like "Ryuutama"

I'm not saying "house rule the system", just look at it from another angle. Perhaps the approach Ryuutama uses could set off a train of thought?

Oh, and storytelling. What do the characters do in their limited down time? How do they keep their spirits and motivation up (apart from roasting the bard to keep warm!)? Get the players to think about their characters thoughts, feelings, and how they can support each other. Emotional character stuff. Do people do that? Mixed in with that could be a time-sensitive dilemma. Are the party able to go and do what they need to before X happens? Pressure comes in many forms.

Oh! Have the party being chased. Have them bravely running away...

I've been wanting to play Ryuutama forever! I've heard so many good things about it and I want to give it a try.


This expedition is being financed, and the party will have some equipment provided for them courtesy of various factions. This will include things to keep the party occupied during their downtime.
The University of Lomar is providing the party with 1,000 books on a variety of subjects. The winter-court elves of the far north are providing the party with musical instruments and toys. The dwarves are providing the party with copious amounts of alcohol.

I'm looking for a good sanity mechanic to tie morale and character relationships to.

As for time, the party is definitely going to have a deadline; the party is going to the south pole. If they don't get back to the ship within a certain amount of time, the crew has been instructed to leave them.

Real Dire Penguin

Quote from: BarefootGaijin;793476Real Dire Penguin

Well, that just seals the deal. Dire penguins are in.


I'm doing research now, trying to figure out stuff for scale, distance, and time.

Reading this:
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/amundsen/roald/southpole/chapter2.html

Learning a lot of interesting things.

Told you this forum was OK, Cave Bear

Also the insides of penguin mouths look like this: http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0ukloP8eG1r8vrhxo1_400.jpg

Quote from: Cave Bear;793456The University of Lomar is providing the party with 1,000 books on a variety of subjects.

I'm on the fence about the musical instruments, but I know I wouldn't haul 1000 books on a sled through the Antarctic.

Quote from: Doughdee222;793291Read the novel The Terror, by Dan Simmons. It is about two ships in the 1800's looking for the Northwest passage in the arctic. They become trapped in ice and the men must survive against everything nature throws at them, plus a mysterious monster. Good book, grim and sometimes ugly (it can read like torture porn) but good.

Seconded - it's a cracking read.  It goes a bit... mythical at the end, but you'll know when to stop if that's not your thing.

Interesting factlet - the wreck of Franklin's ship Erebus was discovered this year.

Right, Polar travel.  I'd read "The Worst Journey in the World" by Apsley Cherry Garrard, one of Scott's team.  You'll find it free on Gutenberg.  Also The Last Place on Earth by Roland Huntford, which is highly biased against Scott, but is good on the technical details and dangers of polar travel.

Search on t'internet for Herbert Ponting's photos - Scott's expedition photographer.  The British Film Institute also sells DVDs of Scott's and Shackleton's expeditions.

Right, some real-world stuff:

1) Regardless of whether you have it as an ice-bound continent or not, on any world with axial tilt, the polar regions are subject to several months of darkness in the winter, and light in the summer.  You know when you don't want to get stuck there... and in a fantasy world, who knows what comes out in the long months of darkness?  If the continent isn't frozen, how do the locals survive?

There are dinosaur and plant fossils from rocks whose magnetic signature indicates they were living in temerate polar regions - how did they cope with the extreme seasons?

2) The first danger after freezing to death for polar travellers is scurvy (well OK, after the total lack of food).  If they're not eating raw or lightly cooked meat (yeah, seal or penguin) and only living off dried or canned rations, they will get sick and may die.  It's a messy way to go - amongst other things, scar tissue breaks down, re-opening old wounds.  And the interior of Antarctica is as close to perfectly lifeless as you'll find on the surface of the earth - male Emperor penguins overwinter inland to protect their growing eggs from predators, huddled in a huge mass for warmth, but that's it.  In some places, even the bacteria required for decomposition have been freeze-dried, leaving the wind-blown husks of animals for centuries.

3) Of course, eat too much of the wrong bits (livers) and you get Vitamin A poisoning - several early polar explorers are believed to have died that way after eating their dogs.

3) Landscape.  The Antarctic plateau is a vast icesheet with elevations of 10,000ft+.  So altitude sickness is a problem too.

4) Katabatic winds.  The air over the high, flat plateau chills and descends, sliding off the continent causing katabatic windstorms of 200mph that can rage for days or weeks.  It happens to a lesser extent in all mountainous areas (around the Grampians in Scotland, for example), but the storms in Antarctica are awesome in their strength and duration.  Cherry Garrard spent weeks huddled in their sleeping bags in a storm after it ripped their tent clean away...

Extreme cold can shatter your teeth, and don't forget that at -40-41 degrees (it's the same in C or F), water can no longer remain as a liquid and freezes without having to nucleate on something (it can supercool below 0C in clouds, for example).

Whiteout in storms are terrifying.  I've been in them in the mountains of Britain, and you cannot see your hand in front of your face, cannot tell ground from sky.

5) Getting up on to the plateau - haul your sledges, up an unstable, crevasse-ridden glacier like Scott, or climb a mountain range like Amundsen?  In an avalanche, compacted snow has the consistency of drying concrete.

Here's where the thief comes in handy...

6)  The ice plateau is smooth and featureless.  It can be smoother than any ice rink (hey, add a storm in for fun!), and navigation is tricky.  If you're navigating by compass, it becomes even trickier the closer you get to the magnetic pole...

7)  Ah, sea ice.  It traps your ship and crushes it.  It's unstable and breaks apart or you fall through it (and again, in a fantasy world, what lives underneath...) and you will generally be hypothermic and dead in minutes in polar seas.

Then again, as the floes smash together again and refreeze, the flat featureless landscape turns into a jumbled maze of ridges, cliffs and ice debris.  After they lost the Endeavour, trapped in the ice and sunk, Shackleton's crew had to haul boats and provisions across such a landscape.

Of course, a lot of these problems can be solved by applying the right magic at the right time, but that's for the players to work out!

And of course, in a magical world, there's plenty that could live in such an environment.

Have fun and tell us how you get on!