With winter upon us, it's the perfect time to embrace the chill in the air with a winter-themed adventure! Maybe you're excited by the snowflakes beginning to drift down in your area. Maybe you live in a warm climate, and the idea of seeing real snow is as much a fantasy as the D&D multiverse. Or maybe you're snowed in, and while the weather is frightful, your friends are gathered around the table, ready to play.

Whatever the reason, don your snowsuit because we're heading out onto the ice with some suggestions to inspire your wintriest D&D dreams!

• Choosing the Theme of Your Winter Adventure
• Icy Environmental Effects
• Creating a Wintery Settlement
• Frigid Foes
• Winter Wonderlands
• Wintery Adventures

Choosing the Theme of Your Winter Adventure

When deciding to run a game themed around a specific concept, it's good to zero in on what aspects of that theme most interest you.

Winter can mean a season of freezing weather and scarce food. But winter can also mean stories of communities coming together to face adversity and overcome the elements. Or it could mean stories of survival against extreme conditions or the horrors of isolation. Or it can be an epic snowball fight with hot cocoa after.

Are your players' characters bringing hope to an isolated settlement by guarding a caravan of much-needed supplies? Are they heading out into a windswept tundra to face down a monster? Are they trapped in an icy cave with a terrifying predator hunting them? Or have they wandered into a gregarious mead hall with music, dancing, warm hearths, and even warmer hearts?

There are many different types of winter stories to be told, so finding the right one for your group is key.

Icy Environmental Effects

Artist: Olly Lawson

If you're going to run a game embracing the elements of winter, an excellent source of inspiration is the Environmental Effects section of Chapter 3 in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide.

Here, you'll discover rules for running things like extreme cold, frigid waters, heavy precipitation, slippery or thin ice, strong winds, and high altitudes, like those of snow-capped peaks.

These challenges can truly make an adventure memorable, as they turn the environment itself into an obstacle that demands creative problem-solving to conquer. You can't fight frostbite with a crossbow, right?

Creating a Wintery Settlement

We've previously discussed winter holidays you can include in your D&D games and how they can provide seasonal warmth to your settlements. But how do you create such a town if you're starting from scratch?

The Settlements section of Chapter 3 can help you throw together a town for your winter adventures by perusing or rolling on the associated charts to find the vibe you want. As you consider the options, ask yourself what impact the extreme cold of a wintery region might have on the details you're selecting.

For example, on the Defining Traits table, rolling a 13 gives you canals and bridges. Does that mean your town is near the sea? Are the canals the only way to easily move supplies through the city? What sort of work must the residents do to break up the ice in the waterways to allow boats to pass? Have they found some way to heat the water so it doesn't freeze?

Frigid Foes

Artist: Zack Stella

Looking for a few wintery enemies to build adventures around? Here are some options for on-theme monsters to challenge characters of various levels.

Ice Mephits

Ice Mephits are a fun enemy to throw at your players' characters. These CR ½ Elementals have a Fly Speed, which makes them harder for your melee-focused characters to hit. They can disguise themselves as regular ice, so they make great ambushers. They've got a fairly low-damage Frost Breath, which affects creatures in a 15-foot cone, so you can teach newer players a lesson about clumping up in combat. Best of all, though, when they die, they explode and deal damage to nearby creatures.

Winter Wolf

Wolves are a classic choice for encounters that evoke the sense of being hunted in the wild. Winter Wolves are CR 3 Monstrosities that ratchet up the danger with their Large size and even stealthier nature than their smaller, CR ¼ counterparts. They also have Pack Tactics, making them formidable in groups. And like ice mephits, they have an area-of-effect attack, but their Cold Breath packs a bigger punch.

Frost Giant

Artist: Linda Lithen

By the hammer of Thor, Frost Giants are fun. These glacial marauders are the perfect creatures when looking for a furious force to lay waste to settlements along the ice. That said, they can also serve as peaceful NPCs for your party to aid or even ally with in their icy adventures. At CR 8, their ferocious Multiattack can wreak havoc, but a smart party that targets their comparatively low Dexterity or Intelligence can certainly come out victorious.

If you want to add variety to your frost giants' ranks, Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants contains a host of frost giant variants to add layers of difficulty and flavor to your game. For example, it includes the Frostmourn, an Undead terror that deals Cold damage with powerful attacks, or the Frost Giant Ice Shaper, which utilizes rune magic to freeze foes and summon elemental companions.

Remorhaz

If you want to heat up your game, have one of these multi-(and we do mean multi)-legged Monstrosities burst forth from the ice. The CR 11 Remorhaz boasts a potent Bite attack. Once in the rhemorhaz's jaws, a creature is in danger of being swallowed, a grisly fate that results in a slow, painful demise as the creature is digested if the remorhaz isn't slain or forced to regurgitate all swallowed creatures. If all of this isn't formidable enough, the remorhaz has Immunity to both Fire and Cold damage, a combo that might surprise players who see an icy blue creature and immediately cast Fireball.

All of this is to say that an encounter with a remorhaz will force your party to get creative if they don't want to be digested by a giant blue centipede-like Monstrosity.

White Dragon

From the CR 2 White Dragon Wyrmling all the way up to the CR 20 Ancient White Dragon, you really can't go wrong with these classic, ferocious winter predators. While other dragons boast a cunning intellect, white dragons are creatures of primal fury and bestial ferocity. These isolated, territorial beings make for perfect foes for adventurers to face off against as part of a long quest across the frozen wastes.

The Adult White Dragon and Ancient White Dragon stat blocks contain Legendary Actions and information about their lairs to help you run challenging confrontations for your epic boss battle.

Fizban's Treasury of Dragons further expands on these fearsome creatures by providing a trove of information for creating and running memorable white dragons in your adventures. You'll find everything from personality traits to adventure hooks and associated creatures, which can help you flesh out your wintery adventures.

More Winter Encounter Ideas

If you're looking for more inspiration for some frosty encounters, check out these random tables and resources:

• D&D Beyond Monsters tool: Allows you to filter monsters native to an arctic environment across the sources in your digital D&D Beyond library.
• Xanathar's Guide to Everything: Chapter 2 provides four rollable tables of arctic encounters suitable for adventurers of varying levels.
• Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden: Chapter 2 contains a section on wilderness encounters that can occur in Icewind Dale's vast tundra.

Winter Wonderlands

If you're looking for a good location to set your winter-themed adventure, here are some prominent settings in the D&D multiverse to consider. Taking a deeper dive into any of these will give you inspiration for settlements to explore, plot hooks to dangle, and beasts to battle.

The Sword Coast

Adventures set along the Sword Coast of Faerûn can easily lead to the frozen northwestern region of Icewind Dale, detailed briefly in Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide and in greater detail in its eponymous adventure, Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden.

Known for its frigid tundra, the region features a cluster of communities called the Ten-Towns who depend on their fishing and trade to survive.

Eberron

Beyond the recovering, war-torn borders of Khorvaire lay Eberron's north and south poles, which are briefly touched on in Eberron: Rising from the Last War.

To the north, Frostfell is believed to be the ancestral homeland of Eberron's dwarves, and rumors of untold treasures or world-freezing terrors abound. To the south is Everice, where some believe an ancient unending war is waged between frost giants and white dragons. Or perhaps it is the domain of an archfey called the Queen of Winter. Since no resident of Khorvaire has explored Everice in living memory, it's hard to know for certain.

World of Greyhawk

Plenty of wintery delights can be found on Oerth, in the Greyhawk campaign setting. The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide provides an overview of locations like the frosty fjords of the North Kingdoms, home to the clans of Cruski, Frutzi, and Schnai (“Ice,” “Frost,” and “Snow”). The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide also mentions rumors that persist of The Land of Black Ice, a landscape north of the Burneal Forest where the ice is a mysterious deep-blue hue, and arctic monsters prowl the tundra.

Ravenloft

The Domain of Dread Lamordia, featured in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, is a frigid wasteland of glaciers and frozen bogs. A cruel domain prepped for body horrors of starvation and gothic tales of desperation in smokestack-filled cities. A perfect setting for the harshest of winter survival stories.

Wintery Adventures

Artist: Bruce Brenneise

If you're looking for some already published adventures to dive into wintery fun with your players, here are some different options to select from, all of which are available in Maps, the official D&D VTT.

Frozen Sick

Frozen Sick is a short adventure that can be accessed for free on D&D Beyond. It was included in Explorer's Guide to Wildemount and takes characters from level 1 to 3. In this adventure, the characters must navigate the Greying Wildlands and Eiselcross—arctic regions of Critical Role's Exandria campaign setting—while they hunt for a cure to the frigid woe, a magical ailment that can't be cured by any known medicines or divine magics.

Dragon of Icespire Peak

Dragon of Icespire Peak was included in the D&D Essentials Kit. As such, it serves as a great introductory campaign for newer D&D players. This campaign takes characters from level 1 to level 7 and features a young white dragon that claims the titular snowy mountaintop as its domain.

Prisoner 13

Another free adventure on D&D Beyond, Prisoner 13 takes you to Revel's End, a fortress in Icewind Dale that holds the Sword Coast's most dangerous criminals. This high-stakes heist tasks players to infiltrate the icy prison and negotiate with a prisoner within its halls.

Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden

If you want to dive into a long-term winter campaign, Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden takes you to the Far North of the Forgotten Realms. Here, Auril the Frostmaiden has plunged the region into an endless winter where the sun never rises. This plot interweaves with other tales of intrigue and mysterious locations beyond the Ten-Towns, with a story that will take characters from level 1 all the way to level 11.

Beyond being a full adventure, Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden provides just about everything you'd need to run a campaign in the tundra of Icewind Dale, including a plethora of location descriptions, winter-themed mechanics, such as rules like dog sleds or snowshoes, and quest complications, from blizzards to monsters and avalanches.

The Tip of the Iceberg

This is but a sprinkling of the different elements you can bring to a winter adventure. Hopefully, these suggestions can help crystalize ideas of your own to bring a wintery story to your group. Once you start working on your arctic adventure, your frosty ideas will take on a life of their own, like a snowman you've found the perfect top hat for!

Riley Silverman (@rileyjsilverman) is a contributing writer to D&D Beyond, Nerdist, and SYFY Wire. She DMs the Theros-set Dice Ex Machina for the Saving Throw Show, and has been a player on the Wizards of the Coast-sponsored The Broken Pact. Riley also played as Braga in the official tabletop adaptation of the Rat Queens comic for HyperRPG, and currently plays as The Doctor on the Doctor Who RPG podcast The Game of Rassilon. She currently lives in Los Angeles.