Snow, Ice, and Mountains

[delericho]

I wasn't very impressed with Sandstorm or Stormwrack, but I did find Frostburn to by very good. And it featured quite heavily in my most recent 3.5e campaign.

There's also some material about avalanches and similar hazards in the DMG, of course.

Beyond that, you might want to try "Frost and Fur" (which I don't have, so can't comment), and also the Pathfinder adventure "The Hungry Storm" (Jade Regent 3), which centres around a caravan trek across the top of the world (though it's been a very long time since I read it, but again it did inspire part of the campaign mentioned above).

 

[Samloyal23]

All of my books that I am using are 3E or 3.5E, I flat out cannot afford the Pathfinder tomes, let alone the new 5E books. I am surprised D&D has not priced itself out of existence. That said, what I have seen of Pathfinder looks excellent. I would love to be able to convert all of my campaign content to PF.

The lack of rules for different types of wilderness in recent editions is sort of shocking to me, it seems like an obvious part of world-building. How do you NOT have rules for traveling and moving on ice, sand, snow, and through bogs? How do you NOT have classes and feats for adapting to extreme environments?

 

[delericho]

You know, I assume, that most of the Pathfinder mechanics are (legally) available for free online?

 

[RUMBLETiGER]

Races of Stone Peregrine Runner PrC has 1st level abilities that help moving thru rubble and slopes.

Complete Adventurer's Highland Stalker has mountain movement abilities.

Frostburn's Cloud Anchorite PrC gets snow-and-everything-else movement based abilities. Some are pretty cool.

Perhaps these can be starting points to building something you want.

 

[delericho]

The lack of rules for different types of wilderness in recent editions is sort of shocking to me, it seems like an obvious part of world-building. How do you NOT have rules for traveling and moving on ice, sand, snow, and through bogs? How do you NOT have classes and feats for adapting to extreme environments?

Well, there are little bits of such things here and there.

But the bottom line is this: they don't exist because most of the customer base just aren't all that interested. Handling snow and ice is a fairly niche topic, and handling movement on snow and ice is a niche within that niche (and doing the same for sand, or bogs, or whatever is a different, albeit closely-related, niche). They just don't justify putting in a lot of work.

And you can add to that the criticisms that WotC themselves make of their own environment rules in the "Rules Compendium" - when they do provide the rules they are often over-complex, not a lot of fun, and very seldom see actual use at the table.

So we're talking about a topic that's already of limited interest, and one where even people who are interested don't use the rules that are provided. It's not a huge surprise they've started to de-emphasise such things!

(For what it's worth, I actively dislike the "Rules Compendium" precisely because of those sidebar criticisms - to a large extent they read as the designers actively rubbishing* the prior art in 3.5e in advance of their work on 4e. But part of the reason I dislike them is that while I like 3.5e a great deal, I have to admit there is significant truth in those criticisms - the environment rules in "Sandstorm", in particular, are far too complex.)

(Oh, and also for what it's worth, 4e generally took a better approach to this: environment rules actually were defined, but they tended to appear where they were needed. That is, if an encounter featured icy and snow, then the relevant rules would appear in that encounter description. That was one of the very few benefits of the unlamented Delve Format for adventures. It also meant that two encounters in icy areas could actually use different rules for ice if it was appropriate to do so, which is actually a good thing - not all ice is created equal!)

* I'll freely admit that my impression of that book may well be unfair. But that was indeed my impression.

 

[Samloyal23]

Basic survival skills, movement and cover modifiers, and overland travel rates should be included for different settings as part of defining an environment. How hard is that?