I'm working on a 4e setting that is set in a perpetual winter or fall (fall would have been when normally there be summer).
The basic premise behind why it is like this is essentially:
[sblock]For a time the Spirit World and our World were connecting but only in that the creatures of the world had their spirits residing their and their bodies here (besides for Humans we were unique in having our spirits with us in this world) as well as some powerful spirits that resided in both.
Then the scientist, craftsmen, scholars and arcanist spirits that now resided in the Spirit World crafted a means to bind the two worlds together allowing communication, trade, exchanges of knowledge, etc. This generally bumped up the World's level of technology to Industrial-Era.
However, in time the Spirit Courts grew suspicious of the growing knowledge the World had gained and severed the connection. Not only did our technology and society seize to a halt. But many spirits either died, were severed, mutated, etc. The largest impact of which was on the spirits of nature, seasons and the world they became disrupted and left in their wake a endless winter.
Hundreds of years has passed since then.
There is other deeper reasons and plot-lines but that is what the common people believe.[/sblock]
Some of the unique winter-oriented elements I have include:
- A city carved into and bolted onto the side of a glacier, because of its constant movement however daily work must be done to shore up the connections between the glaciar and the city.
- Most cities are built against ice, stone, metal, natural barriers against the path of most blizzards. They also formed in man-made or natural holes or ditches in the landscape for protection from wind and snow and because of the warmer temperature.
- Everyone knows basic survival techniques like building ice shelters.
- Fashion is entirely based around usage specifically in the cold. There is little time or need for fashionable wear and is actually looked down upon as wasteful.
- Food is generally meat and various kinds of fungus found in caverns underground.
- A sea of black ice. The whole sea has frozen over and because very little snow deposits itself over this sea it has remained as black as coal. Though the ice is many meters thick various creatures are known for shattering their way through to get at prey above.