Frostreach

Arrival

Snow to the horizon, a glacier with a fortress frozen into it, pines black under white, a giant's footprint filling with snow. Inside the glacier, visible through the ice, a dragon curled around something, frozen mid-breath.

The feel

Glacial cold: snow and boreal biome, an ice vault, frost giants, the White Pack. The one realm where the environment fights you: cold is a bar, fire is life, and the dragon is a heater.

The story here

The tenth dragon. There was one Malachar never found: Vaelith the Frost, who fled north with her rider and froze herself into the glacier rather than be eaten, alive, mid-breath, and has been waiting a thousand years for another dragon to come and take her breath from her, as a gift. The frost giants guard her because their thane promised her rider. The Legion has finally found the glacier and is cutting toward her. Race, siege, and a gift given freely, which is the game's whole thesis.

The cast

• Thane Ulfra Coldseat. Frost giant, forty feet, matriarch, has sat at the glacier's mouth for three hundred years keeping a promise her grandmother made. Signature: she shivers, and does not care that you are cold too. Secret: the promise was to a human, the tenth rider, whose bones are in her hall, and she is in love with a woman a thousand years dead. She lets the dragon in. Returns at the Throne, and the giants come with her, and the Legion's outer wall does not survive them.
• Brenna Coldseat. Her daughter and the giants' smith, who works rimesteel, the metal the frozen dragon's breath made of the glacier. Signature: she bends cold metal with her hands. Secret: she wants her mother off the ice and would break the promise to do it. Teaches the last tier of smithing. The player can side with her and lose Ulfra's help, or not.
• Rimemouth. Leader of the White Pack, a Dire Wolf with frost in his coat that does not melt, who has hunted the glacier's edge since the Frost dragon froze and thinks the dragon is his. He is a rival, not a boss: he challenges the dragon at the full moon and, beaten, follows the pack behind you into the final act.
• Legate Ossory. The Legion's northern commander, seventies, the last of Malachar's original companions, a decent man in an indecent army who wants to bring the Frost dragon's heart home and end his service. Signature: he writes letters he never sends and reads them to you. Secret: he was the tenth rider's brother. He is the realm's boss and the saddest fight in the game, and he asks you to tell his sister's bones he came.

Underground and the boss

The Ice Vault: down through the glacier along the Legion's cutting to the frozen dragon. Dire wolves, frost giants gone wrong, Legion sappers, and Legate Ossory with his guard, a Bone Knight commander promoted, still alive, in rimesteel plate. Beyond him, Vaelith, who cannot be fought, only reached: the dragon touches her, she breathes once, and the ice comes down, and Wyrmsoul has a second breath and ten seconds.

Out in the open

Rimemouth and the White Pack. The Long Night, an event: for one in-game day each week the sun does not rise in Frostreach and the giants light the glacier from inside. The Frozen Fleet, a Legion barge fleet caught in the ice a century ago, with its crew.

The dragon here

Eats ice, and the frozen fish in it. Becomes a dragon, full grown, when Vaelith breathes. Takes back frost.