Tsagoi

The frozen north. The Ice-Trolls who hold it, and the region's full ecology, are in The Northern Reaches document. For the world map and scale, see Geography.

Name. Tsagoi (TSAH-goy), the Ice-Trolls' name, run together from tsagaan, "white," and oi, "forest": the White Forest. The Reaches are taiga more than ice, and outsiders use the name too.

Northeast of the Imperium and the Dwarven ranges sits an abbreviated Poland/Russia analog — compressed well past the usual 50% scale, but still sizable enough to be territory every bordering nation eyes and none has taken. The Ice-Trolls make up its "teeth" — one regenerating species, sexually dimorphic into nomadic, mammoth-riding males ("Yeti") and settled, spider-farming females ("Hags") — a biology-beats-army deterrent in the same category as Theria's dinosaurs, not a political or military one, and not malice either: they're naturalists defending the grazing land their whole economy depends on. See The Northern Reaches and Unconquered Peoples documents.

On the map. The wintry zone that sits up in the polar north gets dragged south, out of the Arctic fringe and into the great forest belt in the east. The Reaches are best pictured as that eastern woodland — taiga, tundra-steppe, and ice at its harshest edges — rather than as a strip of polar coast. The snow runs on east past the Himalayas (Himmelreich, of the Dwarven Kingdoms) to the open sea.

Open: exact size and borders, and what lies in Siberia beyond the Reaches.