This was written for the awesome Adventure Site Content III.

If you just want to read it, you can download it here. Bones of the Mountain

Design Notes

The core idea for this module came from the short story The Frost-Giant's Daughter by Robert E. Howard, which concerns Conan chasing the titular goddess across a bright frigid glacier. It might be delerium from his injuries and the blinding snow... or maybe it isn't.

I generally begin writing a module by setting down a couple cornerstone ideas, before starting on the map or content. In this case, the ideas were 1) a blinding snowfield that would cause visions of an icy goddess, 2) a cliffside fortress (I don't believe this needs much explanation, its just cool), and 3) tibetan sky burials (where corpses are left exposed to the elements).

These elements combined into a sort of haunted castle concept. I decided this was enough to draw a decent map, and sketched one out. The constraint of the cliff and thick walls really helped me pin down the geometry. I made the fortress two-storied, with an atrium-like chamber, so that the site had some verticality. Navigation becomes trivial if the room count is too low, so I aimed for ~15 rooms.

The first sketch is pretty different from the finished version, but the core building blocks are there.

Most notably, the "wight room" was originally accessible from the first floor, making the second story more optional. Secondly, the whole right side of the map is different, featuring a jagged chasm and concealed door to a locked room.

Keying was straightforward, but took a lot of iteration. Much was written, changed, moved, and cut. There are probably ~6 rooms of good content that went unused. I tried to consolidate the best ideas into fewer rooms.

In terms of writing, I try to write with terse, enthusiastic langauge. I only have a handful of sentences to A) describe what the players sense, B) outline the major elements in the area, C) set the tone that the GM should convey.

14. Moon Garden Thin windows light the room. The northern alcove contains a 30' deep well. The west alcoves contains a life-like, vine-grown statue of the Maiden wearing a silver flower-wreath (300 gp). The statue is a gargoyle.

Raised beds contains black earth and night-flowering herbs. Among the beds is a sprout of Moon-vision, a rare flower which is invisible except in moonlight. If the sprout is wound and worn as a wreath, it acts as a Ring of Invisibility (except in moonlight).

I generally followed the question: what would be in a haunted frozen castle? The answer was armor stands, spiders, skeletons, dark figures sillohuetted against a fire, great halls, libraries, moon gardens, cryo-tombs, a snowy cave, an auditorium of skeletons, a dark temple to Ymir.

15. Frozen Auditorium. A hundred skeletons sit on a raised stone bench ringing the chamber, and look down with hollow eyes. In the center is an obsidian bier, bearing a huge palled corpse. Freezing mist flows from the bier across the floor.

• Anyone entering the chamber suffers hallucinations of freezing to death and the howl of winter wolves. They must save vs fear to proceed.
• Opening the pall: a giant skeleton lies in blackened sheets, grasping a huge red-silver longsword (Bloodrime). The skeletons rise to defend their lords repose.

I had drawn alcoves into the large octagon chamber, and decided on an undead encounter. They stood in up-right tombs, facing towards a statue. This quickly became the focus of the site. It was a sort of open-air cave-tomb, with a statue of the icy goddess holding a magic pomegranite gem, where victims were sacrificed to maintain the sorcerors state of undeath.

16. Hawk-picked bones litter a snow covered courtyard of ice-blackened stone. Above is a 100' tall cave which narrows to a skylight. Wane sunlight falls on a white marble statue: a beautiful maiden holding a golden crystal pomegranate. The crystal has 20 HP and AC 16. If it is destroyed, the undead sorcerers are severed from undeath and disintegrate.

Vertical burial niches each contain the frozen corpse of a black armored sorcerer, upright and staring dreadfully at the statue. Sometimes, just in the corner of your eye, they are staring at you.

Undead Sorcerers (14): as Zombies (S&W, p. 127)

Zombies are a bit low level, stupid, and not intimidating, so they eventually got upgraded to Wights. I then realized that fourteen wights is a bonkers encounter, so halved it to seven alcoves and seven undead sorcerors.

I really liked the magic sword Bloodrime, and it seemed like a good reward for the site, so I ended up cutting the 100 skeleton encounter, but keeping the sword and moving it into the leader wights hands.

8. Shrine to Ymir The north wall is fully carved with a huge scene: Ymir, god of the frozen north, wages war. A pale maiden rides among dead soldiers, raising them from death. The other walls are lined with heavy black curtains, impressing a sense of deep gloom, and concealing the doors.

Two dozen skeletons lie prostrate on the floor, chained to an obsidian altar. The altar contains a secret compartment, which opens by twisting the chains anchor-loop, and contains TK treasure. Opening it causes the skeletons to rise and attack.

This temple was originally an empty room that provide some lore. I loved the imagery, and started adding and then cutting additional content, such as the chained skeletons in the second paragraph. It felt like an important location, which needed to be moved deeper into the site.

Every full moon, wights rise from their icy slumber, and ride down from their black fortress to raid the valley towns for young woman-folk. Their captives are left to die of exposure, before a golden statue, sacrifices to maintain an unholy spell.

The players arrive in the town of Hohwald on the night of the fullmoon. During the night, like shadows, the riders steal woman from the valley, perhaps a companion of the players. Regardless, they have a few days to rescue them, and maybe end the curse once and for all!

Around this time I wrote some flavor text to pique the adventure, and this single-handedly guided the rest of the sites development. I needed to add things to support the premise. Where were the captured women sacrificed? Where were they imprisoned, so that you could rescue them? Where were the black riders mounts kept?

Also, how were characters supposed to fight seven wights? I didn't want magic weapons to be a hard requirement for beating the site. This lead to creating the witchfire and forge room. It's a reward you can get for experimenting with the creepy green fire.

Hmm, seems like its time to redraw the map.

This is relatively close to the final version, except that the wight room is still placed quite early. I decided to move its entrance to the second floor, to encourage exploration of those rooms, and make it more of a finale to the site.

The stairs being removed, I added a cliffside path to connect the two floors of the shrine. This became the main route to the second floor. It also provided a good locale for the sky burials (theme) and to explain where all these damn zombies/draugr are coming from.

I then moved the forge room to a more concealed location, to fill out the map. If you get here and figure out how witchfire works, its a nice reward for exploring.

I took the oppurtunity to add a few more secret and concealed doors. This is a small site with tight rooms, so it was the best I could do for exploration challenges. There is no straightforward path through the fortress, you have to find a hidden passage or climb.

I added a big firepit full of witchfire to the wight room, which is an interesting hazard for the combat here. Good players can try to light their weapons or shove a wight into the pit. Otherwise it would just be turn undead -> attack -> level drain -> attack over and over again.

I also gave the wights thrones, because if I was going to sacrifice people to my evil goddess in exchange for unlife, damn right I'm sitting on a throne. The lanterns burning with witchfire is stolen from an homage to Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye

So we arrive at the final map design.

About here I ran out of time and had to submit to the contest. At 1/1/26, 4:10 AM to be precise. (I don't recommend this btw.)

Result

When I first read the results for the contest, and saw I hadn't made places 8-5, I was disappointed to see that I'd placed below the winners bracket.

Imagine my shock when I scrolled down to see I'd placed 2nd!

I hope the adventure lives up to the ranking, and provides a fun evening or two for your table. (Or atleast can fill out one of the those annoying empty hexes at the top of the map.)

What's Next?

There are some problems with the site.

First: the treasure is probably too low for level 5, especially considering level drain which I had neglected. This is an easy fix though.

Second: there are not many people to talk too. The thematic monsters are vermin and undead, which are nay too chatty. The werewolves are cool, I guess.

I think I may add some living cultists, who command the draugr, to the shrine and cave area.

The moon garden was also pretty cool. I think I cut it for page space, but I like it better than the icy kitchen (which might be the worst key in the site.)

Additionally, the captured sacrificee's are not developed at all. This was, again, to save page space, but it is a real missed oppurtunity to not add an ally to the module. An earnest, good-aligned cleric would be a welcome change of pace. It's also easier to sympathize with one developed character than dozens of faceless npcs.

So I will probably release a V2 soon-ish, making use of additional pages.

And that's a wrap. Thanks for reading; hopefully a useful idea or two was decanted into your brain stem.