Cold swamps

[Desdichado]

Eh, I'm not looking for D&D standby's like trolls. Something more interesting, please. And lizardmen or the like don't seem very likely, as the climate is probably too cool for them most of the time.

As for the party level, I'm not asking this for a specific party, more for a setting that could be used at any level.

 

[Zaruthustran]

Read or watch The Hound of the Baskervilles if you want tips on northern swamp atmosphere.

Play up the environmental hazards, as others have stated above. Swamps are miserable, dangerous places.

As others have said, decomposition is slowed, almost halted. So for fun, through in a few zombie dinosaurs.

In real life swamps are sometimes giant pits where water collects, other times they're essentially very wide, very shallow rivers. In a fantasy world, a swamp can be created by some adventurer who left his Decanter of Endless Water open, going full blast. I've also had rivers and lakes created with that item.

Maybe the swamp is an ancient site where the forces of Earth and Water once battled. You could throw in a few leftover elementals here and there, and the swamp denizens could be squabbling tribes of genasi.

Maybe the swamp is where a vast Underdark ocean connects to the surface.

-z

 

[Hand of Evil]

Eh, I'm not looking for D&D standby's like trolls. Something more interesting, please. And lizardmen or the like don't seem very likely, as the climate is probably too cool for them most of the time.

As for the party level, I'm not asking this for a specific party, more for a setting that could be used at any level.

Slugs!
Will-of-the-wisp
Athach
Barghest
Belker
Chuul
Dire Animals
Ettin
Frost Worm
Frost Giant
Grey Render
Green Hag
Hydra
Kuo-Toa
Mimic (as logs, boat, old camp fire)

 

[Drawmack]

unpredicatable land.

In a swamp the water can go from inches to feet in the matter of a step. The swamp by my house if you don't know where your going you could easily drown as there are sink holes that are 10+ feet deep.

Swamps also have quick mud. I looks like regular mud but take a step into it and you sink upto your knees instantly and keep sinking. We did a test once, tethered the guy with a rope and he just stood there sinking. When we pulled him out he was upto his shoulders and said that he felt something warm moving around his feat.

Here is something that you might want to consider, it happens around here all the time.

There is a foot hill, at the base of the foot hill is a huge swamp. The terrain in the swamp is all messed up. Full of sink holes, streams that submerge and the emerge again. All kinds of wierd stuff. Then the foot hill is full of caves. This happens where a glacier stopped.

There is this one thing that grows in the swamps around here, we are not sure if it is a plant or an animal but it looks like a fresh water sponge. In a fantasy setting these things could be made really nasty. Maybe underneath they are all mouth with nasty teeth that eat anything that touches them. Maybe they are poisonous or filled with poisonous spores.

There are highly poisonious berrys that grow in the swamp which look almost exactly like edible berrys that grow elsewhere.

You could enlarge some of the swamp creatures. I know that I wouldn't want to me a giant (4 - 5 ft) craw fish or 100 lb. snapping turtle.

All of the trees are covered with vines and mosses, not hard to make these bad boys into something nasty in a fantasy setting.

What about the trees themselves, tree ents anyone?

The water could be a great place for slimes, molds and puddings to hide out.

Far as the reptilians, there are cold weather reptiles that hibernate in the winter they are mostly small and a descent amount of snakes. Maybe some naga's or some cold weather kolbolds would be believable.

What you have way more of in a cold swamp though are amphibians. Could you imagine a gigantic intellegent frog with a poison attack?

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

If you are looking for a setting dynamic to a swamp. I have three suggestions.

Firstly, undead should not be overlooked, and not simply as a mechanic of the fact that undead should be in such a place, but that the living shouldn't.

Second, bandits, rebels, exiles, and criminals are often driven to such places so that the swamp will take care of them.

That last one can be its own plot, lead to the first plot as a group goes undead, or lead to my third suggestion.

Third, Fey are often swamp creatures. Lots of them are aquatic, lots of them are nasty, and they have no specific nutritional requirements to make the place nasty. But the story I would build around them is that they were some sort of mortal or more normal group and that they did something or had something done to them that turned the land horrible around them. Now they live on the edges of the reality of it and are hostile to everything. Particularly mortal interlopers looking for their ruins or the undead they harbor.

Subservient to all of those is that as the new group moves in the wildlife becomes weirder in response. If I were a power or a wizard a swamp would be great since you can fortify your own tower to keep the creatures and swampness out, fill the surrounding land with utterly nasty stuff, and then just port out when you needed to go somewhere.

 

[Xeriar]

There is a huge swamp right by were I live (this is Minnesota) with all sorts of secret trails made by kids going through it. The tall grass is dense enough that (when I was 10-12 anyway) we could beat down solid trails through it. But if you weighed more than 70-80 pounds or so it would be a bad idea to run through there (much of it was solidish ground, but...). Even at our light weight we had accidents (and angry parents upon returning home if we didn't have time to dry off). Swimming in that muck makes you thankful for modern shoes (and swimming lessons!), ugh...

Of course, it was (still is) full of mosquitoes and other insects, and all sorts of weird (and sometimes posionous) plants. Including the famed "I have to go to the bathroom, get me some leaves..."

Noone ever got handed poison ivy that I know of, but it was around, and respected even at the foolish age of 10.

 

[Xeriar]

Oh right, just remembered one little adventure...

In the winter, of course, there is snow and ice, and on the marsh these things get even more deceptive. A friend of mine collapsed into the water once, all the way... Keep in mind he weighed all of 60 pounds or so. We had to get branches to get him out, a project on its own... and he lost his boots becuase they got stuck in the muck on the bottom.

His parents, I was told, were not very happy with him.

But, I can easily imagine a group of halflings or similarly sized creatures causing hell for the local populace, and groups of children going out and hunting them. You could make an interesting campaign out of it without ever invoking the Monster Manual, for sure

 

[hong]

Eh, I'm not looking for D&D standby's like trolls. Something more interesting, please. And lizardmen or the like don't seem very likely, as the climate is probably too cool for them most of the time.

Just about every plant creature in the MM and MM2 could be put into a swamp.

 

[Kilmore]

Three points pertinent to the topic but otherwise unrelated...

After one swamp adventure I ran, I have one player that absolutely FEARS giant frogs. You gotta have the frogs.

Does anyone know the name of that boggy area of China that has all the little ponds with the weathered rocky bits sticking out of it? You see it painted in all the Chinese resteraunts.

Refer to the movie "Southern Comfort".