Small scenario in a tight situation, Interesting situation, but more ways to actually interact with the plot and background would have been nice. Yes, you can make those up, but scenario tips are very valuable. As it is, it is a little too straightforward, and investigating the situation isn't very rewarding. Its more do or die. The individual goals add an extra dimension, but the motivation to do them straight away is pretty weak - either you would do them before the main scenario begins (which there is scant support for) or after the scenario ends (when most of them become much easier to achieve. Overall, not very impressed. It it is a solid horror scenario, but the subgenre is action rather than investigation or intruige.

The art is generally pretty. There is an albeit pleasant picture of a Chinese garden house in there amid all the Japanese stuff, for anyone who cares about cultural authenticity.

The background story's identity twist is no surprise for those with elementary knowledge of youkai. It would be the equivalent of suspecting that a European kingdom's custom of sacrificing virgins at a cave mouth involved (surprise, surprise!) a dragon. That said, the twist isn't a requisite for fun.

In many Japanese ghost stories, the hauntings are the result of a previous tragedy, a woman wronged, a love never fulfilled, etc, two of the most iconic being "Yotsuya Kaidan" and "Banchou Sarayashiki." Some are instead monster stories of careless tricksters (tanuki, kitsune, noppera-bou) or people turned killers through obsession (“the Goblin of Adachigahara”). My point is that this adventure's themes of otherwise motiveless demonic power-lust and a monolithic "the forces of Jigoku" attempting to war with kami and humanity feels extremely "Devils vs Heaven" Christian Medieval European and "evil-cult-story" D&D in outlook and behavior, not like a Buddhist/Confucian/Shinto Japanese ghost story at all. Culture is in world-perspective and its resulting behavior, not in surface paint over the same old game.

For those who don't care what culture it is as long as it's fun, it's a standard find-and-defeat-the-pillagers'-boss scenario, but there's something of a countdown: things get worse the longer the party takes, adding some fun urgency. There is an appreciated chart included to track this.

I found the pregenerated character "Special Missions" the most interesting. Exploring is what solves them. Each one is different, some overlap, and two, though not opposed to each other, imply 2 player characters may secretly work for opposed powers. All readily suggest ideas for further adventures. This format of having a shared danger with each player character on a personal mission tangential to it promises some much-desired drama, intrigue, and future story hooks. I hope to see it in more adventures, maybe even as the focal tension.

Liked: Character Special Missions, the fact that the set changes as time progresses Disliked: The monsters' motivations and plot behavior felt very European, not Japanese.

I downloaded this adventure to run for my Legend of the Five Rings game, not Pathfinder. Aside from having to modify the monsters to suit the d10 version of L5R, I found this adventure to be very well written, immediately engaging, and a perfect match for the L5R setting. I really liked the back story in particular - the information is very useful. I also found the Three Act method of running the adventure to be very helpful in raising the tension for my players. I would strongly recommend this adventure for anyone interested in playing d20, Pathfinder, or L5R or another Wuxia-style RPG. Don't delay! Download today!

Frozen Wind by Rite Publishing

This product is 16 pages long. It starts with a cover, credits, and ToC. (3 pages)

Introduction (5 pages) This has the background, overview of the adventure and some rules of keeping score. Since the PC with the highest score is the winner. While there is other titles to be earned as well. You might be wondering about a winner. This is designed to be a one shot adventure for fun, sorta a zombie survival game. You can earn titles and stuff and the players can compete against each other in a friendly way to earn the titles.

Acts 1-3 (7 pages) This is a very sandbox style adventure. The PC's will be riding out a storm at a monastery. There is a full page map of the monastery. Each location has information for each act. The acts are based on time limits, once the time is up the next act starts.

Appendix 1 Monsters (4 pages) This section has full write ups for 3 new monsters. Ice Oni, Frozen Corpse, and Snow Woman.

Appendix 2 Pregen Characters (7 pages) There is 6 pregen characters in this section. They are just basic 5th level PC's, I would have liked if each one had a couple of paragraph history, a personality and description. Though I really liked that each one had their own side mission to accomplish during the main adventure.

Appendix 3 Gamemastering Aids (3 pages) There is 3 charts that can be printed out to help track the adventure. One for the cold as when the adventure first starts a unnatural cold happens with information on the effects of it and how long it takes and then two for scoring the adventure.

It ends with a OGL, back cover and ads. (9 pages)

Closing thoughts. The art work is mostly color with some black and white. It ranges from meh to pretty good. Editing and layout was not up to Rite Publishing’s standards I noticed a few errors. None that made the adventure hard to run though. This free adventure is designed to be used with the pregens but it could pretty easily be used in a main campaign. The concept of the adventure is very cool, I like sandbox adventures especially ones that have a time limit to give players that panic rushed feeling. Add in that is a Halloween influenced horror adventure and it makes for a good adventure. Even if you don't like Asian style adventures it would be pretty easy to tweak this to say fit Golarion and be perhaps the Irresin Witches behind it. The another thing I am sure the adventure is meant to do is giving people a taste of Rite Publishing new Kaidan setting. It is a solid adventure though not perfect. So what's my rating? If this was a pay product I would rate it between a 4-4.5 depending on price. But since it is free there is really no reason not to buy it.

Trust me, I'm a Succubus.

This adventure is 40 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page ToC, 7 pages advertisement, 1 page back cover and 1 page SRD, leaving 28 pages of content for the adventure, so let's check it out, shall we?

This being an adventure-review, the following contains SPOILERS. Potential players might want to skip to the conclusion!

Still here? All righty!

Frozen Wind takes place in Kaidan (though any monastery/Asian-themed setting will do) and offers what I've come to love from the series - a brand of Japanese Gothic horror we rarely, if ever, see in RPGs.

The PCs arrive at the monastery when the chill of winter/ice-cold temperatures catch up with them (or due to personal reasons) and are shown their sleeping quarters. The adventure wastes no time, as the PCs are awakened by gaps of the dying - frost-coated monks suddenly convulse as their souls are ripped from their body (which coats them in frost in this particular instance) and the PCs are left in a suddenly very cold monastery - all the fires have gone out. The PCs should probably look for firewood and a way to keep warm while figuring out what exactly has happened.

Essentially, the monastery is a huge trap as the supposedly benign Kami it is devoted to actually turns out to be a Yuki-Onna who made the founder pledge the souls of the monks to her before making him forget this whole deal. Subsequently, her Koori-no-Oni (Ice-Oni) are the first opposition the PCs will have to contend with in an otherwise rather silent monastery - after all, the monks are now all dead. Once they have concluded this first act, the monks rise from the dead as frozen undead and seek to annihilate the PCs, who should at this point not only be fighting against the dread creatures, but also against the growing cold - survival horror at its best. Somewhere in the monastery, the Yki-Onna awaits them for the first showdown and should they defeat her, she tries to escape and seeks to summon a dread ice-kami which (along round 2 against her) makes for the final showdown. The impending summoning of the dread Kami makes for an additional counter that urges the PCs to keep up the pace and not waste any time - if she manages to summon the huge ice-bear, the PCs will have a serious problem on their hands.

The pdf concludes with 3 new monsters (one of which is a template), 6 pregenerated characters (each on his/her own page - ready to just be printed out and handed to your players) and gamemaster aids, to be precise, a temperature tracker and a summoning tracker for the Kami as well as a scoring sheet if you want to run this a convention scenario.

Conclusion: Editing and formatting are ok - while I did notice some glitches and would usually detract half a star/a star, this adventure is free and easily usable as written. Layout adheres to the beautiful 2-column full-color, bamboo-lined Kaidan-standard and the artworks are mostly thematically-fitting, Japanese stock, but do actually contain some original pieces of gorgeous artwork - not something I would have expected in a free pdf! The pdf is also extensively bookmarked. Special mention should be given to the presentation of the monastery, as it continues to change during the course of the adventure - thankfully, the beautiful full-color map helps picturing the monastery. The pregenerated characters all come with special missions they can complete in the monastery and the gamemaster helps mean that you can run this scenario with a minimum of preparation. While this is a convention scenario, it does not feel like one, but rather like a full-blown, regular adventure, that does benefit from using the pregens, but could easily be run in your home-game. Personally, my sadism will make me reanimate all fallen foes after 1d6 rounds, making this adventure even more lethal, but that's just my preference. What can I say? This adventure surpasses many commercial adventures in quality and atmosphere and is free - essentially a no-brainer, especially at this time of the year. If you're still looking for a nice adventure for Halloween, dl Frozen Wind- it's worth the hd-space and if you like what you see there, check out the other Kaidan adventures - they're awesome as well! Kudos to Jonathan McAnulty, Michael K. Tumey and Steven D. Russell for giving this quality adventure away for free - my final verdict will be 5 stars. (If it weren't free, it still would be 4 stars, without glitches 4.5 or even 5 depending on the hypothetical price.)

Endzeitgeist out.

Overall Comments: This is a great single-evening adventure with a horror-centered plot, suitable for Halloween, a winter-horror themed event or whenever you want to scare your players. Yes, there are zombies, frozen creepy ones and much, much worse. It can be inserted into any oriental themed campaign; and is in fact specially designed to fit into any Kaidan-based campaign, per the trilogy of adventures from Rite Publishing.

I am not going into the details of this adventure to avoid spoiling this one for players. There are three acts and a sufficient quantity of different encounters to occupy any gaming group once the general feel of the adventure is realized. The adventure is run through the use of event-based acts, but is otherwise fairly sandboxy, at least inside the confines of the monastery. The GM might want to place a restriction upon simply leaving without first solving the mystery of this place to avoid players simply leaving. The weather limitations may not deter some groups; though a harsh GM dealing out frostbite to recalcitrant PC’s might do the trick.

Spoilers for my players: My own sense of hilarity wants to add humor to horror. So any delay by PC’s after killing a zombie or two would cause ones they just killed to reanimate and attack again. If they wise up and start to dismember the bodies, the arms, hands or bodies with legs would animate and probably be more scary (and/or laughable) than dangerous. Any player genius enough to try to burn a corpse would succeed in ending the reanimation. Obviously other GMs might not want to do this as it would defiantly delay the game.

Complaints: The existence of several typos, spelling errors and errors of usage indicate this product would have benefitted from another editing pass. But they don’t detract from the flow of the adventure and are barely even noticeable, unless you are like me. Plus this is free, a couple of typos can’t detract from the overall quality of this adventure, for free!

Cool Bonus stuff: For the players, there is a set of 6 pregenerated characters. For the GM there is a nicely illustrated appendix of adventure specific new monsters as well as several gamemaster aids; a temperature chart that helps the GM track the affects upon and times for saving throws, a countdown track to help the GM keep track of the time limit involved, and a score chart for those GMs who wish to reward the players.

Production values: As is typical of Rite Publishing and Kaidan materials, the appearance is standard and includes nicely drawn maps, original art, and some free domain art from old Japanese sources. Amazingly for a free product this is nearly all in color.

Did I mention this is free? Why haven’t you got it already? You will not be disappointed. I give this 4.5 stars due to minor editing gaffs, rounded up to five because it’s free!