You succeed in a roll?
You are the boss, yet you control only one character. The other members of your team are not subservient muppets. There might be friction and disagreements, you might help one another, you might turn against one another, always under the supernatural’s heavy shadow. The endings make things personal. This is not about the end of the world. This is about you. Will you prove your point, getting utterly mad, die a horrifying death, or live forever in obscurity?
Chaosium went all-in when it comes to the feeling and the attention to detail. Exhibit one: the four members of your team are not expendable even though they do not occupy the centre stage. They die, and when that happens your options will start diminishing. Exhibit two: each of them gets the full player character treatment, with a proper character sheet. I am not talking just about the stats, but about the few lines of background information that rounds out the character and makes you care. If you want to incarnate one of these characters in a future adventure (or if you bother to rework this solo adventure into a multiplayer one), you actually can!
With some work (which is more than expected, due to the naturally fragmented position of the entries), the adventure can be turned into a multiplayer one. Deconstructing the adventure towards this goal is further facilitated by the insertion of the entry numbers that lead to an entry. I would be more than interested in seeing the adventure’s progression tree. I would be grateful if Chaosium even released this as a gesture to its fans.
The pdf is excellent. Everything is linked, and I do mean everything. I wish Chaosium adopted this approach in all its pdfs when one page references chat avenue aplicacion another. I am a hardcore dead tree here.
The adventure is more expensive than Alone Against the Flames and Alone Against the Dark. Yet, it is also bigger and better in practically every way. Even if it weren’t, it would have still been a good value for money irrespective of format.
As much as I love books, and as much this is the easiest solo adventure I have run from a book, it is even easier to run it from an electronic device
The weak points: In order to avoid misunderstandings, this is not an introductory scenario nor a stand-alone product. The adventure utilizes the full gamut of 7th edition’s rules. The Introduction provides some of the rules that the adventure uses, but not all of them. This is totally normal, of course.
I didn’t spot anything particularly out of place in Alone Against the Frost. This does not mean however that it doesn’t suffer from most of the issues solo adventures suffer from. You proceed. You don’t? You may die. In some entries you are not let to decide; the adventure decides randomly for you. I don’t find this necessarily bad, even though at times I wish things were different. What is annoying however is that there are choke points you might repeatedly stumble upon, and a check, and then another check, will be required, and any failure will lead you to your doom. I am not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand I like it since investigators cannot be prepared for everything; this goes squarely against the concept of the Mythos. On the other hand, this is an adventure that requires dedication, honest bookkeeping, and a chunk of your time. Random results can become counterintuitive and lead to frustration when they keep appearing in structural choke points. It is no secret that most of us will restart the adventure just one entry prior to our group’s death, and even more so when Lady Luck keeps on taunting us at the exact same entry.
