I absolutely hated this. I spent the last half of it just wishing it were over. But keep in mind that I ran it solo. Even after buying it, I'm not certain I want to run players through it. However, I could see where some people might like it if they just wanted to use it as a spring board to come up with their own ideas.

I should also mention that this is the exact type of adventure I always say I would love to go through, arctic adventures and caving adventures, due to the beauty and especially the added challenge of the elements. But that itch wasn't satisfied with this one.

Basically, it's just a slog(grind) across an arctic wasteland where there is no food. It's essentially a cross country trek in a glorified RV for 95% of the "adventure" with only a couple planned encounters. It pretty much says that at best you can forage a bit less than you need to survive so that you're constantly moving towards starvation regardless of what you do. There's almost no way you'll make the trek on foot as the temperatures get down below -50 degrees C and I never saw them rise above freezing even on the warmer days. You're going across a distance of about half the United States (Dallas to San Francisco for example) and you're doing it in what is implied to be several feet of new fallen snow. Basically, if your vehicle fails you, you're dead because you'll never reach any place to find food assuming somehow you can manage to not freeze to death. Plus, on foot the journey one way (not counting repeating it coming back) would take months on foot, with no food may I remind you, and possibly no water since I didn't see a lot of fire wood to melt snow with. And there are several oppurtunites for the vehicle to be damaged.

The big boss fight at the end says a lot about the people who wrote this. You go up against a creature that can one shot kill you with a few points to spare if you have a 14 in STR, DEX AND END. So, the average character will be one shot killed every time. 8d damage per hit. Oh and it has an armor of +16 so any weapon that can't do at least 3d can't ever harm it. And it's going to ignore the first 16 points of any damage you do do to it! So, your average 6d weapon hit is only going to do a point of damage or 2 to it. You on the other hand are probably not going to have time to don armor for this fight. And it has 160HP. So, you're going to have to hit it something like 80 times while it's killing a party member every round. (Actually, it has poor aim which helps. So, you just lose a party member every OTHER round!)

You're clearly not meant to actually fight it but are supposed to somehow outsmart it. You're SUPPOSED to just tell your players how to avoid this thing because otherwise it's just a total party kill, period. The suggested ways to defeat it in the book are absolutely ridiculous. For example, you can dump fuel in it's way. Right! Because you just happen to carry a few gallons of gasoline in your pocket for your electric powered RV out here in the middle of a glacier (to really do this right you need about 50 barrels of gasoline to saturate the ground around the whole area so hopefully you're playing a wizard that can summon this). The GM is totally going to have to just make the impossible happen for them to avoid this encounter. You can probably drive it off with grenades as apparently it doesn't like vibrations, but you would have to throw a grenade to find this out because there's nothing that would suggest this is a possibility before you actually do it. And I'm pretty sure this creature can destroy your vehicle/way home/life line.

And keep in mind that this is #2 in the Marches Adventures. #1 was really made for new players just starting the game and this is suggested as their second adventure. Maybe you can convince these new players to never play again with a total party kill! It's relatively certain new players aren't going to last any time at all in this adventure unless you seriously dumb the whole thing down a LOT!

But a lot of what really annoyed me about this thing was that you're constantly having to roll for the weather and driving hazards which are in completely different parts of the book, and after doing it a few dozen times, I still don't know if I ever did it right. Complex rules like this that are the foundation of an adventure need to be spelled out clearly and on one page so you don't have to flip from one side of the book to the other every two minutes through the ENTIRE game over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.... I'm pulling my hair out just thinking about it! This stuff should have been in a flow chart. These rolls ARE like a third of the adventure by itself as they constantly affect what's going on! Not to mention that the weather rolls that I happened to roll were not "fun" or even challenging, but rather just forcing you to back track and lose a day of progress or more on a journey that was already long and monotenous and "where are we magically obtaining food from at this point?".

The whole thing is pretty much a basic premise and instruction telling you to "wing" the rest. I suppose if you want to use this as a foundation for an adventure you might make it into something, but do you really need to buy a module to tell you to create it all yourself? I really think most game masters would be better off creating their own adventure rather than running this one. You're going to have to dream up your own encounters anyway!