Frostburn

Frostburn is a sourcebook that provides a lot of details with regards to adventuring in cold places. It even coins a new term, “frostfell”, for these locales, which covers high altitude, outer planes, and magically-frozen areas too.

I have not yet perused the earlier Stormwrack and Sandstorm sourcebooks yet, so this is my first sourcebook with a geographical theme.

Chapter 1 starts off with information regarding cold weather in general: cold terrain, cold weather, cold hazards, cold-themed traps, and cold architecture. I liked that it categorises “how cold it is” - cold, severe, extreme - and provides rules on being protected from the cold. What's ridiculous about this is that the rest of sourcebook mostly ignores this categorisation and describes how cold it is using °F instead (completely forgetting that most of the rest of the world use a different unit).

After that it follows the typical formula, with chapter 2 showcasing races, classes, and feats. Aside from the fey uldra, the rest of the races are rather low on creativity. Dwarves, elves, gnomes, halflings, even goblins, just got slapped with a cold-variant (e.g. glacier dwarves work with “blue ice” instead of metal with “blue ice” being really nothing more than just metal doesn't made of ice - and no it won't melt).

The other fully-described race is basically the cold-variant human - neanderthal. They're exactly like the word they borrowed - prehistoric humans. Why are they still prehistoric in a world of fantasy? No idea. There's a monster entry for frostfolk - human-like beings whose ancestors have possibly made some of kind demonic deal - this one had more promise to be fledged-out as a race.

The class options and feats and almost all cold-themed. They're mostly ok, but I got irritated at flavour text of all things. The descriptions tend to not match the feat's actual mechanics. One metamagic feat in particular just halted my reading and I had to vent. This feat was Piercing Cold: it allows you damage creatures immune to cold. It's described as being so cold that it makes even cold-immune creatures feel it - but apparently normal creatures don't take any extra damage from oh-so-cold magic damage...

Chapter 3 contains prestige classes. Nothing much to talk about here as they're mostly not going to be played by PCs (one of them is meant for frost giants, for example), without significant tweaking. Of the few that might be playable would require a campaign dedicated to staying in the cold regions.

Equipment is next in chapter 4. A couple of primitive (but exotic) weapons, mostly just variants, with the exception of something called a “sugliin” - apparently it's a long staff topped with antler horns. It's so unwieldy that it takes a full round action to make an attack with it. They even added a feat specifically for you to wield it better. I'm baffled. Anyway, this chapter includes modes of transport as well, so that could be useful, although I'm not sure why an iceberg is considered a mode of transport. Of note is there's a sidebar about how freezing temperatures affect potions and scrolls.

Chapter 5 contains new spells and magic items. There's quite a few fun-sounding cold-themed spells plus ice variants of known core spells. Same with the magic items - rather creative variants. For example, there are skull talismans, basically potions that won't freeze. You use them by smashing them. There's another eye-rolling error here: one of the new prestige classes require a character to craft a magical item called an iceheart as a prerequisite. The prerequisite for crafting the iceheart requires the crafter to be of that prestige class first. Such an obvious chicken and egg issue.

Chapter 6 features cold-themed monsters, from animals to fey to pudding to undead to bigfoot. They're mostly just cold variants and some reprints, nothing much to talk about.

Chapter 7 is why I gave this a 3-star instead of 2. It provides two very detailed adventure sites. The first is a magical laboratory with an interesting backstory hidden inside a neanderthal dwelling. The second is the fiend-populated ciry of Icerazer, situated on an iceberg. This city has a lot of detail, down to full stat blocks for its nine fiendish/evil leaders, all dedicated to the imprisoned Levistus. The plot hook is a bit tame though - it describes the iceberg city performing hit-and-run attacks on coastal cities.

It ends with an appendix - about 25 pages of terrain-specific encounter tables. Really? Does anyone even use them? Meh.

Overall, it's not a particularly good sourcebook, except for the first and last chapters.