“What’s Down There?” - The Story Behind “A Snowman in the Cellar” by Brunehilde Marie Hjertaas for Shadowdark RPG

What began as an elaborate set of maps for an online game became a Shadowdark adventure about a town in crisis, an abandoned farm and the history hidden beneath it. We spoke with Brunehilde about writing A Snowman in the Cellar, the latest release in Seidmann Games’ Shadow Delves series.

Angerbru is running out of time. A deadly illness is spreading through the small town, and mysterious riders have abducted its healer, Ragnhild. The adventurers are hired to find her before the town’s situation becomes hopeless. Their trail leads to an abandoned farm in the forest.

That is the premise of A Snowman in the Cellar, Brunehilde’s adventure for Shadowdark RPG and the latest entry in Shadow Delves, Seidmann Games’ series of adventures by northern writers and designers that make out The Dark North Conglomerate. Its origins, however, go back to a very different game.

From Dungeons & Dragons to Writing Adventures

Brunehilde has played tabletop roleplaying games for more than thirty years. She started running games and writing her own adventures nearly a decade ago, and now GMs for friends, at Norwegian roleplaying festivals and at her local game store. Her collection of RPG books keeps growing.

Her first encounter with the hobby came when she was six. While visiting someone, she spotted a red book with a warrior fighting a dragon on the cover: Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rules.

“I asked what it was, and that was the first time I heard about roleplaying games,” she says.

A few years later, she got to try Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. It was only one session, but she wanted more. In secondary school, she finally joined a regular group playing Rolemaster.

How A Snowman in the Cellar Began

The path from those early games to A Snowman in the Cellar runs through the pandemic. Brunehilde had already begun playing online because some of her regular players had moved away. During the pandemic, online play became a much bigger part of her gaming life.

The shift took some getting used to. Her group talked over video chat and used virtual tabletop tools for character sheets and dice rolls, but being alone in front of a screen felt different from sharing a table.

“As an online player, I found that my imagination and sense of immersion started to fade when the other players weren’t there around the same table,” she says.

When she began GMing online, she looked for ways to make the world feel more present. She used maps, tokens, illustrations and music. Eventually, she grew fond of making increasingly detailed maps.

For a short campaign with friends, the group held a session zero and created both their characters and the cosy village where those characters lived. Brunehilde then set to work building places for them to explore online.

“I needed enough maps for many, many hours of play. I added an enormous amount of detail: colours, rugs, furniture, rooms, floors, kitchen utensils and so on. I thought the maps I’d drawn were incredibly cool.”

As the campaign went on, she realised she had spent too much energy on getting players to move their tokens through those maps and discover every detail, and too little on making the campaign itself work for them. It was a valuable lesson.

Years later, she was invited to join the Dark North Conglomerate and write a Shadowdark adventure. She immediately thought of those old maps.

“I realised they weren’t actually as amazing as I’d thought when I drew them,” she says. “But I still found the story they told interesting.”

She reworked the story, its characters and the maps extensively. The players’ original village was removed. In its place came Angerbru, a town facing a deadly disease, inspired in part by the crisis that had surrounded the project’s beginnings.

An Abandoned Place With a Past

Asked what kind of experience she wanted to create, Brunehilde returns to the idea that the past shapes the present. While working on the adventure, she watched documentaries about old buildings and the layers of history left by the people who had lived in them. One generation renovates. Another builds an extension or tears something down. Then the building is abandoned, and someone eventually returns.

A childhood memory helped give that idea its sense of danger and discovery.

On walks through the forest, Brunehilde often passed a large fenced-off hole among the moss, stones, old roots and tall pines. An old staircase descended into the darkness, though its lower half had rusted away.

“One day I stopped and wondered: What’s down there? Why was a staircase built in the middle of the forest? Is that furniture I can make out in the dark?”

She wanted to recreate the excitement and curiosity she felt looking down into that hole. As an adult, she knows it was a remnant of mining, and that the fence was there for good reason. In an adventure, though, players can choose to go down the stairs.

That curiosity sits at the heart of A Snowman in the Cellar. Brunehilde is especially pleased that the characters’ actions have consequences beyond the place they explore.

“In many ways, it’s a dungeon crawl,” she says. “But what the characters do has real consequences for the world around them. I like roleplaying worlds that feel alive.”

Writing Dark Nordic Fantasy for an OSR Game

Turning the idea into a playable Shadowdark module brought a different set of challenges. Brunehilde had to make its many parts fit together, explain them clearly to both players and GMs, and work out the stats and abilities of its characters, monsters and magic items.

She also had to find a way to convey dark Nordic fantasy within the compact style she associates with OSR, or Old School Renaissance, adventures.

“I have a tendency to write too much,” she says. “OSR modules are often economical with descriptions of places, characters and backstory. I had to put myself in a ‘less is more’ frame of mind to make the adventure work for Shadowdark.”

For Brunehilde, Shadowdark RPG is particularly well suited to adventures about old buildings and forgotten places. Light sources burn out after one hour of real time. Darkness is a constant threat, and characters have limited room to carry the food, weapons, armour, torches, rope and other supplies they might need.

“Exploring becomes something very different from a walk in the park,” she says. “The characters have to make hard choices. Do they take the things that give them the best chance of surviving, or the things worth the most gold?”

Brunehilde’s Advice for Running A Snowman in the Cellar

Brunehilde’s first piece of advice for GMs is familiar, if useful: read the whole adventure before running it. If time is short, she says, read the introduction so you understand the story.

Then tell the players about the task Earl Geir of Angerbru has given their characters. Make it clear that the town’s fate rests in their hands, and begin with the party in the farmyard outside the abandoned farm.

“Follow the characters wherever they go,” she says. “The module and maps give you short descriptions of what happens in each place, so you don’t need to memorise everything beforehand.”

If the game slows down, she suggests using the adventure’s random encounters to encourage further exploration. GMs can also adjust monsters’ Armour Class, hit points, attacks and damage to suit their group. And if the players want more social roleplay, the adventure’s rumours can become flashback scenes set in Angerbru before the journey to the farm.

What Comes Next?

Brunehilde hopes to write more adventures. She has loved writing stories since childhood, but says this is the first time she has felt confident enough to publish one. She credits the encouragement of friends, family, playtesters, the roleplaying community, Dark North Conglomerate and Seidmann Games.

She would like to return to the world of A Snowman in the Cellar: not necessarily with a direct sequel, but by exploring more of the places, people, factions and phenomena mentioned in the adventure.

For now, she has started another Shadowdark adventure while taking a break from Snowman’s themes. This one concerns an author who needs help recovering her stolen life’s work. Brunehilde hopes to bring a little more humour into it. She is also interested in writing Norwegian stories for Liminal Horror, an OSR game set in the modern world.

Ready to explore the abandoned farm? A Snowman in the Cellar is available now for Shadowdark RPG.

A Snowman in the Cellar, On the Ledge of My Seat and Dawn of the Goat are available on DriveThruRPG. These are the first three issues of Shadow Delves, Seidmann Games’ Shadowdark RPG modules, made by northern designers and writers making out The Dark North Conglomerate. The adventures are often built for a single session. Easy to run, difficult to survive. To get updates on all of our releases and happenings, subscribe to our newsletter.