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 Theria 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: (See Tsagoi for the land itself.) 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: the nomadic, mammoth-riding males outsiders call "Yeti" and the settled, spider-farming females they call "Hags." Both sexes regenerate, both carry Unseelie Fae blood, and the population stays small because the ecology can't feed more apex predators than this. See Ice-Trolls document for the people themselves: the males and their bands, the hags and their hamlets, and how the two halves of the species live together.
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 in Ice-Trolls document), 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 Ice-Trolls document, 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 Ice-Trolls document. 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 Ice-Trolls document.
Livestock: Ice-sheep and ice-rams, hag-kept — see Ice-Trolls document.
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 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.