Ice-Trolls

The people of the frozen north: nomadic "Yeti" males and settled "Hag" females, one species behind two names. Non-playable — monstrous humanoids rather than a player race. See The Northern Reaches document for the land they hold, the Witches, the Ettercaps, the ecology, and the Treaty of Tallas. This page covers the people themselves.

One People, Two Names

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, and 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 of Tsagoi is one of the few places left where the land is unblemished enough for the Fae to still be all right. See Elves document.

Naturalists, not monsters. The Ice-Trolls aren't evil, and they aren't mindlessly territorial either. They're pragmatic naturalists who understand exactly what happens to their mammoth herds' grazing land if nations move in and start carving up the tundra-steppe, and they defend it the way any nation would defend its farmland. Not quite as wild or unreasoning as the Lizardfolk, but plenty physically capable of backing that reasoning up.

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. That's a fun, not-yet-locked option: a party piecing it together mid-campaign is a good reveal, if it's worth keeping as a secret rather than common knowledge.

Mechanically, the males and the females get separate stat blocks, which fits the culture without forcing anything: males hit like brutes, and hags are spellcasters, which maps cleanly onto "males hunt, females farm and work the old magic." Both regenerate. First-draft stats for both are on the GM's Creatures pages.

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 ages, he ranges less far and less often, eventually settling back near a hamlet rather than staying fully nomadic for life. He becomes 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. 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 Northern Reaches document.

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 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.

Hag magic. Every hag has some taste of the White Widow's power by birthright, and real spellcasting means an ongoing bargain with her. See "The Witches" in The Northern Reaches document for the White Widow herself.

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 and soul-price wishes are very on-brand, and they give 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, until sons age out into a roaming band and daughters either stay or move on to found or join another hamlet. Older males settling back nearby 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.