The Gaming Den

Hello forum dwellers. I'm preparing to run a campaign in a frigid, Ukraine-along-the-Urals-esque location but I'm from central Texas so I don't trust my instincts when it comes to ad-libbing that scene.

Basically, the region (then largely uninhabited) enjoyed a gold rush of sorts which led to many different races mining elbow to elbow. One winter, when most of the routes of travel were snowed in or iced over, the clouds grew thick and blocked out the sun... permanently. The area has been enduring a kind of ice age for about 300 years because some sky dwellers with weather control moved in upstairs (of course, the party on the ground won't know this). With that I'm wanting a number of towns to have survived thus far in some fashion and I'll need some help explaining how they've managed that. Also, I'd like any advice on what the actual dangers are in traveling through a cold, dry and mountainous region (snow blindness, thin ice, hypothermia, etc.).

I'm trying to run a campaign involving some of the less-developed sections of the rules and its going to be fairly low level and narrow magic (not low magic, just confined to fewer, less versatile classes). I'm having each town suffer language drift from centuries of isolation so probably the only character able to speak the language will be the re-imagined bard class I worked up. Another problem is just how inadequate the survival rules are; I plan on making a bigger deal out of the difficulty it takes to survive unaided in the wilderness within this setting.

Also, I've posted my home brewed character classes here so I can get some feedback regarding them. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks.

A lot can be done with some basic magic. I think there's a low-level druid spell--Goodberry or something like that--that can feed a person for a day on one berry. Clerics can make basic food and water. So you could say that the people have learned to adapt to the cold--mostly by dint of a lot of hunting--and what clerics and druids are there could help out by feeding who they can.

Come to think of it, you can make a deal over how Flaming weapons are incredibly prized--because they're instant heat, light, and fire. Groups might form around one person who wields a flaming longsword/axe/etc.

If you're looking at more non-magical stuff, I'll skim over Frostburn (aka "It's Cold Outside") and let you know what I turn up, but I can tell you a good survival tactic in the snow is to hollow out a snow-cave, because it protects you from the wind and, while it's cold, it's warm compared to out there.

A similar tactic is a snow-tunnel, if the drifts are really, really bad. It protects you from the wind and provided you pack the walls and ceiling in well enough, it's fairly safe.

As for towns, I'm willing to bet the towns survive because they have something other people want--maybe it's still fairly common for people to strike lucky for gold or mithril or even adamantine ores, and as such, this region is a fairly good trading stop. The inhabitants gladly trade bags of gold dust or chunks of black or silvery rocks to the dwarves for piles of food and tools and first-aid supplies. And the traders gladly do this because they're getting amazing value because valuable metals are so common here they're worth less than they are other places.

Towns may be centered around a communal building, because it's easier to heat and defend one big hall, and having everyone sleeping under the same roof encourages cooperation.

Just some thoughts....

If it's only been 300 years, language drift won't really be bad. While that is about 8 generations of humans, compare Old English to the modern version. I could probably understand someone from the 15th century without a great deal of problems. The main issue would be slang and I have words for things they don't (like computers) and they have to describe things that I don't. Throw in that dwarfs (who WILL be at a gold rush, unless you don't have dwarves) will have had some kids, but other than that, it's still the same people who showed up in the first place. Also factor in that there must be outside trade (if nothing else than to buy food and clothing), and you don't have an isolated enough community to have signifigant language drift. At worst, I'd just give a penalty to bluff, sense motive, and diplomacy to reflect differing slang.

I recently finished a campaign that divulged a lot of historic events with dates attached to them. This campaign will take place in the same world but it is so far removed geographically, that nothing has to "mesh" just yet. I do plan on having several seemingly unrelated campaigns eventually colliding and culminating into something bigger but its still early on so the continuity I need to stay true to is pretty loose at this point. That said, if 300 years doesn't sound like enough time than I'll simply make that number larger.

There are two main things I am unsure of, setting-wise that I'd really like advice on:
1) How people survive when they are isolated from larger society virtually indefinitely in a mountainous region experiencing permanent cloud cover. Bonus points if this survival doesn't require a heavy reliance on casters (arcane or divine).

2) What the actual logistical and environmental problems to be overcome traveling cross country in a cold, cold mountainous region. Think the Northern reaches of Canada or Siberia.


To make the whole thing differ even more from the norm, I'm excluding the usual assortment of "mining" races. Basically, in my campaign world, the dwarves are terribly isolationistic and haven't spread this far north and its too cold for the kobolds. The fact that a mountain range exists that is full of mineral wealth and isn't actively being hollowed out by either party has given the other, surface races (humans, orcs, gnolls, goblins, hobgoblins, halflings, etc.) a real rare opportunity. This formed the basis for the initial gold rush north and why a icy wasteland suddenly had major towns appear.

Now, after the boomtowns were founded, an environmental change occurred that plunged the whole region into permanent, cloud-covered winter. This change is magical and man-made but no one important knows this or does anything about it. The nations that were sending their second sons to go mine did the math and found it wasn't cost effective to keep major travel in and out of the region maintained. So, after some number of centuries have passed the only people remaining are the decedents of the miners who were either too stubborn or otherwise unable to leave. They have forgotten about the outside world and the outside world has largely written them off as well. And they've started talking funny. And consider mineral wealth to be cheap.

So there it is. No dwarves, preferably no cleric or druid maintained outposts, just a bunch of grizzled folks eking out a living in the frozen, forgotten North. The players will be from separate such towns and probably start off as Marco Polo-style merchants traveling from isolated town to isolated town on foot until the plot comes by and changes the status quo.


I do like the idea of a town making a big deal out of the one fire-enchanted ax. Since its never truly day and because the undead are almost universally cold-immune I'm going to have vampires and ghouls be a problem (though as top predators their numbers will be suitably low). In fact, I plan on having the party encounter a subterranean necropolis as one of the few sources of many manufactured goods (since an ice age wouldn't really affect their civilization). Anyway, if I have simply posed an impossible situation than I'll modify the setting. However, I'm confident there exist historic examples of settings similar to this; I'm curious if any of you know of real world or fantasy sources I can pull from for information and inspiration. Thanks again.

What about having the settlements get their heat from geo-thermal sources.

Game On,
fbmf

The only historical analogue I can think of off-hand would be the Inuit. They got by on hunting, fishing, and whaling. Maybe the peopel can get by on hunting and cultivating lichen.

I would suggest that this mountain range does, in fact, has a seasonal variation. Even if it's two seasons the natives call Cold and Colder. It gives the people living there a time to stock up for the times when there are not any other resources besides some meat from a deer or whatever. And it's sorta logical, if you assume there's practically no magic available that can cause a complete nulling of the seasons done over a local area.

I looked through Frostburn and they have rules for hypothermia, snowblindness, frostbite, and the like. If you say pretty please and provide an e-mail address, I'll shoot them to you.

Captured Remorhazi? heh

Or maybe even spells that duplicate that monster's ability, then placed on items.

Or hey, even simpler, Gate to Elemental Plane of Fire. No brainer.

So, what's the damage for throwing snowballs?

sigma999 wrote:So, what's the damage for throwing snowballs?

1d4 Annoyance if it's non-consensual snowballing. +1d6 Fun if it's consensual. x4 crit. A slushball in the right place can either make or ruin your day.

And that sounds so, so wrong.

And someday I am going to buy a keyboard that has keys that don't stick and make me edit stuff.

Make sure you invest in a spoogeguard for your new keyboard.

I think that Arioch left Shatner speechless.

Thanks again for the suggestions. I’ll have to do a wiki-crawl on the Inuit; I already mined the Wikipedia entry on Sherpas when I was designing the Mountaineer class. I hadn’t considered geothermal. What would the temperature be like in a fairly shallow mine (no more than a mile deep) in an icy northern climate? Would that be measurably warmer after you ignore the obvious shelter benefits? As far as plant life goes, I guess it would have to subside on UV light since the clouds would block the visible kind. Hmm…

In my campaign setting the druids are an elite group which polices the Prime and prevents any extra-planar force from rocking the cosmological boat. In the last campaign a disgraced druid tried to get a soul eating/zombifying abyssal plague to scour the world of all sentient, non-druid creatures so casters would stop being the tools for extra-dimensional forces (the players stopped his group, of course). They also do the Captain Planet thing of destroying dams and necromancers when need be but there’s seriously only 400 of them tops so they’re spread kind of thin. With that, no druids casting goodberry, using plant growth or weather control to sustain a population. They have bigger fish, with agendas and followers, to fry.

Maxus, I whispered you in an earlier post; any existing rules on environmental hazards within an artic region would be greatly appreciated. I can make my own but it’s nice to have a benchmark for comparisons sake.

One or two towns will have a Fire Binder at its center, making the whole region habitable. Actually, the Fire Binders are a kind of unusual phenomenon in the setting and I plan on putting heavy emphasis on how much they don’t belong. Basically, a civilization with a lot of fire sorcerers found out how to make
Tensegrity Spheres and took to the skies, dangling their people and buildings beneath the geodesic balloons. After enough time the engineers and fuel source became one and the same, the Fire Binders, so the glass they make and the heat they give off keep the massive cities aloft. Having it cold makes their Spheres more buoyant and having it cloudy directs more solar energy at them (necessary for supplementing the heating of the massive spheres), providing a denser water-vapor level they can “rest on” and keeping anyone on the ground from looking up and getting any ideas. So they have some means of weather control, probably Orbs of Storms, and no compassion for the people they’re screwing over below. Sometime in the past a craft of theirs crashed, stranding a few Fire Binders below which provided the genetic foundation for the Fire Binders that now walk around in the cold, melting everything around them and completely ignorant of their origins.

Maybe some sort of chemical reaction can be sustained to provide a source of heat for the villagers. They’re digging all sorts of things out of the mountains; maybe they can mix some magnesium, phosphorus and aluminum with some sort of animal fat to good effect.