The Northern Reaches
Working name. Abbreviated Poland/Russia analog — deliberately not scaled at the same ~50% ratio as the rest of the map. It's smaller than proportional, compressed rather than merely shrunk, but still large enough to matter: room the bordering nations would genuinely want to grow into, the same tension the dinosaur continent creates for the Confederacy and the Giants. See Geography document.
Draft-map note: on the initial world map, the wintry polar zone gets dragged south into the great eastern forest belt, so the Reaches are best pictured as that eastern woodland — taiga, tundra-steppe, and ice at its harshest edges — rather than as a strip of Arctic coast. See Geography document.
Where it sits: North and east of the Caldrian Imperium and the Dwarven ranges (Carpathians, Ostengebirge/Urals) — exact borders undrawn, consistent with the rest of the map. Cold, but not a monolithic ice sheet — a real gradient from pine/taiga forest through tundra-steppe to true ice and snowfields at the harshest edges. Without that gradient nothing grows, and without anything growing there's no ecology to speak of — see below.
Why nobody's taken it — the teeth, and why it isn't malice: The Ice-Trolls aren't evil, and they aren't mindlessly territorial either — they're naturalists, and pragmatic ones. They understand exactly what happens to their wooly mammoth herds' grazing land if nations move in and start carving up the tundra-steppe, and they defend it accordingly. Not quite as wild or unreasoning as the Lizardfolk, but plenty physically capable of backing that reasoning up in ways nobody else on the continent can shrug off. The actual deterrent is still biology, not politics — regeneration means nothing they field stays dead without fire or acid — but the reason for the fight is a completely legible one: this is territory a whole subsistence economy depends on, and they're defending it the same way any nation would defend its farmland.
The Ice-Trolls¶
One species, not two. What earlier notes documented as two separate peoples — "Yeti" and "Hags" — are extreme sexual dimorphism within a single species: males and females of the same people, not separate cultures that happen to cooperate. Both sexes regenerate; nothing about either one stays dead without fire or acid.
Fae-blooded. The Ice-Trolls carry Fae blood, as the Elves do — Unseelie, to the Elves' Seelie. The tundra is one of the few places left where the land is unblemished enough for the Fae to still be all right. See Elves document.
Naming, still loose: "Ice-Troll" works as the formal, unified species name, reclaiming "Troll" now that the two halves are known to be one people. "Yeti" and "Hag" survive as the common, sex-specific names outsiders actually use day to day. There's a good chance most outsiders don't even realize the two names refer to the same species — flagged as a genuinely fun, not-yet-locked option; a party piecing that together mid-campaign is a good reveal, if it's worth keeping as a secret rather than common knowledge.
Mechanically, until there's a proper unified stat block, Troll stats for males and Hag stats for females is a perfectly reasonable placeholder — and it's a nice coincidence that it already fits the culture without forcing anything: Trolls hit like brutes, hags are spellcasters in basically every edition, which maps cleanly onto "males hunt, females farm and work the old magic."
The Males ("Yeti")¶
Shaggy, pale-to-white fur, more Bigfoot than gray hide and warts. Nomadic — bands follow the wooly mammoth herds across the open tundra-steppe the way Plains hunters followed buffalo, for the same two reasons: mammoths are food, and mammoths are transportation. A yeti riding a wooly mammoth into a fight is a real, specific image worth keeping. There's no troll-hold to find and burn, because there isn't one — the whole population is always somewhere else by the time anyone organizes a response.
Older males stop traveling so much. As a yeti male ages, he ranges less far and less often, eventually settling back near a hamlet rather than staying fully nomadic for life — becoming something closer to a hamlet's elder and protector than a wandering hunter. This gives every hamlet a small, aging, extremely dangerous permanent guard, on top of whatever younger males are passing through to trade.
Population stays small on purpose, and this isn't just flavor — it's the ecology working the way it has to. Males are the region's apex carnivores. Enough of them to matter as a "horde" would strip out the predators and megafauna beneath them faster than those populations could recover, collapsing the whole food web under them. Rare, terrifying, and individually near-unkillable is the sustainable version of this people, not just the atmospheric one.
The Females ("Hags")¶
Settled, where the males range — small communal hamlets of roughly 6 to 20 hags, not large settlements. Farmsteads, not fortresses. Two things anchor a hamlet's economy:
Ice-sheep and ice-rams — cold-adapted livestock, worked alongside Ettercap help.
Spider farming — silk, venom, meat, and mounts, harvested and bred rather than just encountered wild. See "The Spiders" in The Ecology, below.
Active stewardship, not just extraction: hags raise rabbits deliberately in order to release them back into the forest — replenishing wild populations rather than just consuming them. It's the clearest expression of the "naturalist, not savage" framing above: a hag hamlet manages the land it depends on instead of just taking from it.
A hamlet is a fixed location, which in theory makes it more findable than a moving male band — but "findable" and "worth finding" aren't the same thing. A hag, alone, regenerates the same as any male, and is dangerous enough on top of that (see the Unbound tie, below) that rooting one out for whatever's on her land is rarely worth the cost.
Working idea, still live from before: hags are where the forbidden Unbound tradition (necromancy, binding, soul manipulation — see Magic Systems document) actually lives in the world, rather than being just a banned school outlawed elsewhere and practiced in hiding. Geas-bargains, soul-price wishes — very on-brand, and it gives the Unbound a real geographic home.
Life and the Hamlets¶
Males pass through a hamlet to trade, and to father the next generation — this is when and where mating and childrearing actually happen. A hamlet raises its children collectively, with Ettercap help (below), until sons eventually age out into a roaming band and daughters either stay or move on to found or join another hamlet. Older males settling back nearby, as described above, means a hamlet's population isn't purely "hags and children" — it's hags, children, and a small guard of aging veterans who've earned a quieter life without losing what makes them dangerous.
The Witches¶
Humans (or others) who've actually gone to learn from the hags, or fled Sigil-house control to practice magic on nobody's terms but their own. Gives the region a second kind of pull beyond land: some nations don't just want the territory, they want to know exactly what's being taught in it, and would very much prefer nobody else find out first.
What they're actually learning from, underneath the hags: hag magic — and by extension whatever a witch learns from a hag — isn't self-taught craft or a studied tradition the way Elven Primal magic is. It runs on the same kind of raw current the Lizardfolk's shamans draw on (see Peoples Unconquered document), but where the Lizardfolk arrived at their version independently, the hags answer to something specific: a single patron spirit of the frozen wild, working title the White Widow. Her name, and exactly what she lost, are a campaign-level reveal rather than front matter — but the loss is real, old, and the reason she's the way she is.
Character — pissed off for a reason, same as her people. She isn't a nature-goddess of balance, and she isn't evil for its own sake either. She's aggrieved: something was taken from her, likely well before the Long War, by outsiders who extracted from the north without asking and without giving anything back — which is exactly the grievance the Ice-Trolls themselves hold about their grazing land, just given a face and a personal wound behind it. That parallel isn't a coincidence to her — it's why the Ice-Trolls are the one people she doesn't consider prey. They live by the same rule she wishes everyone did (take only what the land can regrow — see the hags' active stewardship, above), and she reads that as kinship rather than mere tolerance. Everyone else — extractive nations, careless adventurers, anyone treating the north as a resource rather than a place — gets measured against a much harsher standard, and mercy is not the default outcome.
How she teaches. Not an institution — a relationship, one witch or hag at a time, closer to an apprenticeship (or a courtship, depending how it's playing at the table) than a curriculum. Every hag has some baseline taste of her power by simple birthright; going further — real spellcasting, and especially the Unbound-flavored binding and Geas work hags are known for (see below) — means striking an actual, ongoing bargain with her specifically. An outsider "Witch" has to earn that bargain entirely from scratch, with nothing but good conduct on the land to offer instead of birthright. She rewards loyalty, honored debts, and respect for her territory with real warmth; she answers a broken bargain or a wound to the land itself with the same ferocity the Ice-Trolls bring to a border dispute, just wielded with magic instead of teeth.
Why the Unbound lives here specifically: the hags' tie to Geas-bargains and soul-price wishes (see The Females, above, and the Unbound school in Magic Systems document) isn't incidental — binding is her preferred instrument. A patron whose entire grievance is that someone took something from her without paying for it has an obvious reason to be the one entity in the world most invested in making sure debts get honored, one way or another. This gives the region's signature magic tradition and its signature grievance the same root, rather than two unrelated facts sitting side by side.
Hags and Witches aren't bound by the school-and-temple access tiers that gate a PC-facing Wizard or Priest. Their power runs on a direct bargain with the White Widow rather than a catalogue or an institution, so the Long War's damage to libraries and planar connections never touched it — a hag's higher-tier magic doesn't need justifying in schooling or proximity terms. See Magic Systems document.
The Ettercaps¶
Live in the hamlets alongside the hags and help generally — farm work, herding, tending the spider broods — not narrowly limited to spider-shepherding. Kept through a combination of a lesser charm (mind-affecting, not full domination) and genuine care: fed, housed, and treated well. A soft, complicated bond rather than either outright slavery or a clean alliance of equals — which fits a people who are pragmatic rather than cruel. Not every ettercap band answers to a hamlet: some maintain their own wild broods well away from any hag, which gives the region an internal faction or two beyond "Ice-Trolls and everyone else."
The Ecology¶
The instinct that "things can't be total ice or nothing grows" is the organizing rule for everything below — a real trophic pyramid, not just a monster list.
Terrain and flora: pine/taiga forest grading into tundra-steppe grading into true ice at the edges. The forest and the steppe are what make everything else here possible.
Megafauna — the primary herbivores, and the male Ice-Trolls' whole economy: - Wooly Mammoths — vast herds on the open tundra-steppe. Food and transport both; see above. Herbivores, same as real wooly mammoths — grazers primarily (tundra-steppe grass, sedge, lichen), plus opportunistic bark-browsing at the forest's edge, the way real elephants strip bark from trees. That puts them in direct resource overlap with Pinebores at the tundra/taiga boundary — two herbivores competing over the same pine bark — rather than mammoths preying on Pinebores directly, which keeps the web clean. - Pinebores — huge, armored, beetle-like herbivores that methodically strip bark and needles from entire pine trees. Deliberately not a real-world animal reskinned bigger — the fantastic version of what bark beetles actually do in a real forest: thin it, manage it, keep it from choking on its own growth. Not as far-fetched as it sounds, either — real beetles already survive serious cold through antifreeze compounds in their blood, freeze-tolerance, or just shutting down for the winter, and real bark beetles already live in cold northern conifer forests. Pinebores are that, scaled up and armored, not a break from real biology. Also prey for Winter Wolves — see below.
Small fauna: Squirrels and rabbits round out the base of the food web — the reason Winter Wolves (and Ice Spiders, hunting the same small game where they aren't farmed) have something to live on between larger kills. Rabbit populations specifically get a boost from hag stewardship — see "The Females," above.
Livestock: Ice-sheep and ice-rams, hag-kept — see above.
Mid-tier predators — the male Ice-Trolls' actual bread and butter: - Winter Wolves — pack hunters, cold-breathing, living mostly off squirrels, rabbits, and Pinebores, with mammoth calves, strays, and ice-sheep as bigger, riskier prey. This is the alpha predator one rung below the Ice-Trolls, numerous enough that hunting them — rather than leaning on mammoths alone — is what actually keeps the whole pyramid from collapsing under Ice-Troll predation.
The Spiders — a guild of their own, not just mounts: - Fuzzy Giant Spiders — the common one. Hag-farmed for silk, venom, and meat, and the standard heavy mount/beast of burden for both hags and males alike. - Ice Spiders — smaller, faster, snow-and-ice adapted. Scouting and skirmish mounts, and wild ambush hunters of smaller game where they aren't farmed. - Phase Spiders — rare, flickering between the Material and the Ethereal. A genuinely elite mount, handed to whoever a hag or a male war-leader trusts enough to ride one. (Possible tie-in, not settled: their planar-phasing could be a consequence of the Long War's planar scars rather than an unrelated fantastic quirk — worth a look.) - Intelligent Spiders — rare, genuinely cunning, closer to people than livestock. Not herded or farmed. When one partners with a rider, it's a relationship, not ownership.
This roster is deliberately not closed — more can get spun into it as the region develops.
Trollkin, maybe: The Ninth Race slot went to the Kuwaffri, not Trollkin — see Kuwaffri document. That doesn't necessarily kill Trollkin as a concept. If this region develops the right way, a smaller, more sociable troll-kin living alongside the Ice-Trolls is still on the table, just not committed to as a player option right now.
At the Treaty of Tallas¶
The Ice-Trolls have no sovereign nation, so they were never eligible to sign the Treaty of Tallas. A yeti was present at the signing anyway, as the invited guest of the King of Himmelreich, the Dwarven kingdom of the Himalayas. He witnessed the signing but signed nothing, and the other powers in the room were left to work out what his presence meant.
Open here: who the yeti was, why the King of Himmelreich wanted him there, what the two of them owe each other, and whether the other signatories ever learned the answer.
Open: exact size and borders; whether "Yeti" and "Hag" being the same species is common knowledge or a discoverable secret; whether the hamlets trade with the outside world at all; whether the Phase Spider/planar-scar tie-in is worth making canonical; the actual mechanics of a unified Ice-Troll stat block versus the Troll/Hag placeholder split. The White Widow's true name and exactly what was taken from her are deliberately unwritten campaign-level reveals — worth deciding before she ever needs to speak for herself in a session, not before.