Solstice

And, just to put a bow on it, I've wrapped up Heart of Winter, the ancient expansion to Icewind Dale. In some ways this feels similar to Tales of the Sword Coast in that it's an expansion that can either be played as part of the main campaign or at the end. But this experience is a lot more locked-in, and tells a focused story while you're in it as opposed to the more wandering feel of TotSC.

 

On the whole, it feels like a literal "expansion" to Icewind Dale, in that it continues forward the feel and gameplay of the main entry as opposed to changing flavors. You're still in the icy North, visiting tiny hamlets, exploring large lairs and fighting enormous armies of baddies.

 

One thing I neglected to mention in my previous post is that these games have reminded me of just how much I love (and miss) 6-person parties in RPGs. It makes the game feel much more tactical and not just strategic: you can build a proper front line, need to manage your space, try to block out encroaching enemies, and scramble to adapt if you get flanked. I went with a pretty standard loadout for these campaigns with three frontliners, two missile fighters and one useless bard. I know from experience that you can run many other types of parties - in Baldur's Gate 1 it can be fun to run with six archers and nuke down all the enemies from range. I do really think we lost something when RPGs moved to smaller parties; each character gets to shine with more powerful individual abilities, but we've lost the sense of space and positioning and the "shield wall" from those older games.

 

 

I was fairly impressed by the graphics in this expansion, which seem really good for the era. There's one particular cave where creepy eyeballs appear out of nowhere, blink ominously and then fade away. Throughout the game we get various ghostly apparitions, along with the very colorful spells that Infinity Engine did so well.

 

 

For my playthrough, I chose to start a new Heart of Winter campaign from the main title screen, importing characters from my final save from Icewind Dale.  This proved to be slightly tricky, as the Level 1 NPCs I rolled for the start of Icewind Dale also appeared in the party-selection menu and it wasn't very easy to differentiate the inexperienced from the veteran versions. It took just a little trial-and-error to get the whole party set up. Everything imports pretty cleanly, including inventory and spells, with the notable exception that all containers are removed: gem bags, potion bags, Bags of Holding. For the most part I didn't miss the items in those containers, but losing the containers themselves was slightly annoying as I had to do some old-fashioned inventory wrangling. One thing that did bum me out was losing my Potions of Wisdom that I'd been carefully stocking; in the expansion I eventually learned the Limited Wish and Wish spells, but never found any Potions of Wisdom for loot or sale and so my high-level mage wasn't able to safely cast them.

 

MEGA SPOILERS

The specific reason why I disliked losing my containers is because I got zapped to the Luremaster's castle almost immediately after starting the expansion. This is just random bad luck, if I had happened to wander east instead of north I would have hit some shops before visiting the tavern and been able to get new containers.  The Luremaster segment is good story-wise but mechanically it felt rough to be immediately thrown into it without any option to back out (short of loading an earlier save - if I had been underleveled and hadn't kept multiple named backups, it could have been a permanent game-over for me). The Luremaster section seems to have harder enemies than anywhere else in the game. Besides not having access to things like Gem Bags for managing loot, it also doesn't sell many consumables like magic arrows and bullets, and despite coming into the expansion with a huge armament I was nearly empty by the end with no hope of restocking.

 

 

 All those gripes aside, I did really enjoy how unique the Luremaster experience was. It's easy to compare it to Durlag's Tower and Watcher's Keep in that it's a fairly large, optional, stand-alone crawl with its own separate story. But Luremaster brings some big differences: unlike the others, you're locked into the experience from the start and can't dip in and out. The antagonist is especially interesting, and it's cool to gradually get to learn his story: he's an adversary but not necessarily a villain. The puzzles feel decent for this era and game engine.

 

 

By the time I beat the Luremaster, I officially had a Very Powerful Party, and didn't feel very challenged for the whole rest of the game. A big turning point had been getting Iron Skins and Stoneskin on two of my front-liners. There's some magical attacks in this game, so they don't block everything, but the vast majority of attacks are physical and your ranged attackers can usually interrupt enemy spellcasters, so while I wasn't reckless I also didn't feel much need to buff before fights. Looking back, I think the hardest fight in the whole game for me was Yxunomei near the end of... Chapter 2, maybe? That was the only battle where I really needed to do a lot of buffing and laying out some cheese.

 

 

The actual story is cool, though. The backdrop is a tense standoff between the native "barbarian" tribes of the North and the Ten Towns, settlers from the south who have built a small set of trading villages. I think the game pretty overtly references real-world tensions with indigenous people's ownership of land being usurped by powerful outsiders, and how that gets more complicated many generations in to a dynamic.

 

 

As you eventually learn, there's an even older dynamic at play: the great ice dragon Icasaracht  originally ruled these lands before being defeated by humans, and has seen descendants of those same humans being displaced by invaders. The sword that originally killed her kept her soul from being reborn, but the sword was removed at some point. Her spirit merged with that of Wylfbane, a respected chieftain of one of the northern tribes, and brought him back from the dead. Due to the ancient animosity between the tribes and the dragon, the hybrid Wylfbane claimed to have been possessed by the spirit of Jerrod, a legendary hero we've learned of from the original Icewind Dale.

 

 

Wylfbane calls the tribes to a council. The Ten Towns are nervous, anticipating an attack. As traders and craftsmen, they don't have a military to defend against the tribes should they choose to fight. You enter the game around this point to try and negotiate a peace with the tribes. You eventually learn Wylfbane's true identity and reveal it to the tribes. Most of them rebel against her, though the Dragon Clan remains loyal. You eventually hunt down the dragon and kill her. Along the way you've met a woman known as The Seer who helps you, and you eventually realize that she's the one who is narrating the animated scenes between chapters, much like Belhifet narrated the main campaign.

 

 

END SPOILERS

Heart of Winter ended up being longer than I expected, I got nearly two weeks of gameplay out of it. I was going to say that I recommend picking it up, but I think it comes for free with any copy of Icewind Dale you can buy in 2026, so definitely play it as part of the game. For me it worked well as an expansion past the end of the main campaign, and I think the difficulty is tuned to this level, but in the unlikely event I replay Icewind Dale I'd at least try it during the course of the main game. More snow, more ice, more monsters and weapons and XP, along with some juicy Level 9 Mage Scrolls: What isn't there to love?