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The ninth FR-series supplement returned to the geographic format of the bulk of the series, this time heading northeast and covering the two countries that had been introduced through the four H-series adventures. The usual major editing goof this time occurs in the back cover blurb which states that this is the area featuring Icewind Dale, as well as Bloodstone Pass.
Icewind Dale had already been covered in FR5 The Frozen North. This product was, however, written by R.A. Salvatore, the author of the Icewind Dale books, which is where the confusion came from.
The introduction fixes the H-series position in Realms history; the four modules take place across two years, which are given to be 1357-8 DR (the boxed set was effectively set at the start of 1358, and FR5 and this module are explicitly set in 1359). So, the supplement assumes that the Bloodstone Pass series is over, and that the pregenerated characters for those modules are the ones that did it. This has the very good side effect of not needing to actually run those adventures to use this, and the less-desirable side effect of if you did run them, you may need to adjust quite a few things. But that last is the nature of making the world your own, and the book ends up making a lot of good suggestions about where to take veterans of the series next.
Physically, it is the typical 68-page book printed sepia-tone with a faux-parchment pattern, with detached cover, and a 30-mile/inch poster map of the region. The interior cover has a more detailed map of Damara itself showing its former constituent duchies/counties/baronies (the terms get thrown around a bit interchangeably here; perhaps in Damara they’re more a sign of seniority than rank). The introduction also explains the focus of the book—despite the area of the full map, attention is largely on the (former) countries of Vaasa and Damara, with secondary interest given to Narfell and Impiltur. The rest of the map is nearly ignored in the text. Since these books generally need more focus, this is good for the product, but since Ashanath didn’t even get a mention in FR6 Dreams of the Red Wizards, and Thesk got two-thirds of a page, these countries have been virtually ignored twice now.
Region the FR9 map covers, showing the overlap with the original boxed set and FR6.
You might also ignore the 2nd Edition logo on the cover. Obviously, a project like this takes time to write, and the big map to be drawn up. The NPCs section (9 pages) has magic-users running around, despite the recent name change to ‘mage’. (You might think it’d be easy to just find-and-replace that, but in the days of manual layout, those parts could have been physically done well before 2e came out….) Also, monks didn’t reappear in 2e until PHBR3 The Complete Priest’s Handbook came out the next year, and the Monastery of the Yellow Rose is an important location, that naturally, is an order of monks running under all the extra-special 1e rules, including limited access to higher levels. An interesting note is the book states that the land is harsh and dangerous, and anticipating Dark Sun a bit, anyone not otherwise classed is a 1st level fighter. (No o-level peasants, or just o-level characters from Unearthed Arcana, in this howling wilderness.)
Of course, as a setting supplement, rules hooks are pretty rare to begin with. There’s no new spells, monsters, or items to muddy the waters with. Characters are given with class/level, alignment, deity, and notable attributes (16+). Given the shifts seen in characters elsewhere, it’s a little surprising that there seem to be no attribute shifts in the Bloodstone Pass cast (presumably because they are adventure characters instead of novel characters…), though they’ve mostly gone up two levels since their appearance in H4 The Throne of Bloodstone.
The main hook used for the supplement as a whole is that while the Witch-King Zhengi is dead, Damara is still an ex-kingdom, having been split apart and factionalized by Zhengi when he defeated its armies a bit over two years ago. The best claim to the vacant throne was basically a willing lackey of Zhengi, and is looking to take over now. However, the head of the victorious adventurers who defeated Zhengi is now the Baron of Bloodstone in his own right, and is looking to put together a Kingdom of Bloodstone that would eventually cover most of Damara and Vaasa. This tension defines most of the book, and helps a lot.
The main geographic entry part of the book is fairly well done. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t feel as interesting as the similar parts of FR5, though it does read better than FR3 Empires of the Sands, even though that had the better idea of providing every place with a ‘hook’. It does suffer somewhat from a presentation split up by subject rather than geography, though not nearly to the extent that FR5 did. The other problem is that not all the entries are actually on the main poster map of the module. No, they only show up on the map of Damara from the inside cover.
Other than the main poster map, there’s the mentioned map of Damara on the inside cover. In the book, there’s a map of Bloodstone Valley (reused from the modules, but with a couple new settlements, and new gatehouses that are being constructed to block the pass added). There’s small maps of Impiltur and Vaasa (handier than the poster, but don’t show anything new), and a half-page map showing the distribution of tribes in Narfell. There’s maps of Ostrav (a walled farming village), and of Hillsafar Hall (a fortified dwarven mine entrance). If you want a map of Bloodstone Village itself, you need any of the first three H-modules (and it is growing rapidly now, meaning those maps are obviously out of date, though the major buildings will be the same). The nearby mines are only covered in H2-3, and the Svirfneblin and Duergar caverns are only given in H2. Now, most campaigns shouldn’t need most of that, but an updated Bloodstone Village (Town?) map would have been an intelligent addition. (Oh, and the interior map of the fortified manor in Bloodstone is only in H1, but it’s so awful you should just start over from scratch.)
Thanks to the Bloodstone/Damara tension, this one feels more like a Gazeteer, which always paid attention to the internal problems of the country under study to great effect. Sadly, unlike one of those, we still don’t see a lot of development on the cultural side, leaving it to feel more like anywhere else in the Realms, just a little colder. In theory, it’s a little emptier too, though the maps don’t really give a sense of where cultivated land and the such is, and the prevalence of city-states in much of the Realms tends to give all of it a somewhat empty feel.
Still, it has a basic “hook” for everything, and confines itself to a decently-sized bit of geography. It also avoids the Dreams of the Red Wizards mistake of wandering between presenting it straight as a campaign area, and trying to figure out how to get adventurers to go there. So this makes for one of the better entries of the FR series. Considering that, it is a shame that it seems the area has not been the focus any products since.
There’s a few things Miller’s book is about.
