D&D 5E meets Monster of the Week in Icewind Dale adventure Chilling Tales from the Whispering Winds
Beasts & Burrows.
Investigate a rogues’ gallery of dangerous creatures in Chilling Tales from the Whispering Winds, an adventure book for Dungeons & Dragons 5E based on RPG Monster of the Week.
Inspired by Icewind Dale - a wintry land found in the Forgotten Realms setting - Chilling Tales from the Whispering Winds is an adventure module featuring 17 different storylines focused around various monsters that terrorise the frozen north. The supplement for Dungeons & Dragons sees players attempting to survive the night in a haunted fort whilst a terrifying killer stalks them - aptly named The Horror at Fort Crystal Lake - or investigating the mystery behind a creature picking off the helpless residents of a village, amongst other adventures.
Chilling Tales from the Whispering Winds combines the fantasy RPG elements of D&D with Monster of the Week’s mechanics, with the DM able to use the motivation aspect from the roleplaying game to build their adventures. Implementing the motivation element of Monster of the Week enables the DM to give every location and non-player character a set function, providing a strong structure for the players to follow.
The dungeon master will also be able to use a feature similar to Monster of the Week’s countdown mechanic in the adventure module, which serves to create a sense of impending doom in the players. As the story advances with the players’ actions, the monsters progress their own plans, meaning that the more time players spend investigating, the more opportunities there are for the monsters to do terrible things.
Monster of the Week is a horror RPG built on the Powered by the Apocalypse system - which has also been used to create Zombie World and the upcoming Root RPG - that has players attempting to thwart the schemes of various nefarious beings. Players in Monster of the Week travel from location to location to figure out what the creatures might be doing and how to defeat them, with failed actions enabling player characters to improve their abilities.
Chilling Tales from the Whispering Winds was created by Clayton Whittle, Cassandra MacDonald and Lucas Zellers, who have all previously worked on other D&D 5E supplements including the Skullport: Shadow of Waterdeep adventure - written by MacDonald - and the Compendium of True Evil, a guide to creating immoral characters by Whittle.
The module for Dungeons & Dragons 5E was inspired by recent D&D campaign Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, which sees players exploring the icy wastes of the north as their paranoia grows and the secrets they keep cause rifts to form between their characters. The horror-inspired campaign was released in September.
Chilling Tales from the Whispering Winds is available to download in PDF form for $9.95 (£7.66) from the Dungeon Masters Guild right now.