D&D 5E (2014) The Arctic Campaign and 5th edition

[Minigiant]

I don't think it really makes too much sense (or, at least more sense than buying magical items otherwise). If you look at the native population of Greenland and Finnmark in Norway where you regularly get temperatures of around 40-50 degreese below zero in winter, they don't really have any problems. The traditional clothes where good enough to survive in these conditions.

The biggest problem with cold is if you get surprised by a sudden change in weather and don't have the appropriate clothes and don't know when it's about time to dig in. Usually it's non-locals who has these problems, but also younger locals that aren't old enough to respect the weather.

That's the life of normal people. Normal people who live near the poles don't sit outside for hours.

D&D is a game about adventurers. PCs are the people who leave the comforts of home and civilization to delve dungeons and brave wilderness to fight giants, dragons, or vampires. They might not have shelters to pop into every so often.

When you take the common D&D adventure and stick it into the cold, the cold can easily be a problem. At which point the DM must decide if it will be a minor background issue. Or a huge defining one and how.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I dug through old threads regarding this and found voices recommending "Frost & Fur" by Monkeygod Enterprises. It wasn't easy to find, but sadly the effort wasn't worth it in my opinion.

Perhaps Frostburn is better in actually making the hardships of winter, darkness, cold and wind come alive for the players.

What Frostburn has is a good amount of variety. It's designed with the idea of a cold-environment campaign in mind - class options, race options, varied terrain types, locations, plot ideas, all that noise. It's a nice resource when you're looking to include a lot of additional options and thinking about the arctic campaign as a whole, with cities and dungeons, rather than as a brief expedition to the frigid wastes. It's not perfect, but it is a much better starting point than the anemic DMG lists.

Cold creatures can lie in wait. They are sneaky and patient. Winter wolves chase their prey into exhaustion. Yetis and those furry bugbears lurk in the shadows and ambush.

Fire creatures are aggressive. Hellhounds and nightmares are relentless and easily provoked. They need to fuel their magic. Efreeti raid constantly and build magical boilers to heat their blazing cities in the frozen wastes, needing more and more fuel. Slaves toil at their mines for fuel to burn and are burned themselves when broken.

You've got a bit of an entropy/order thing going on here (cold is the natural state of things if you wait; fire consumes and might run out), which is pretty cool!

That's the life of normal people. Normal people who live near the poles don't sit outside for hours.

I wonder...herding caribou, hunting whales, ice fishing...these are all things that normal people who live near the poles do for hours outside. Clothes made of the pelts of arctic critters are pretty dang insulating, you rub some whale blubber on your skin, don a pair of snowblindness shades, and you're good to go for the day. Characters in this setting who know Survival probably know how to make igloos. Natives can probably get along pretty well in the wild, even at exceptional temperatures, barring disastrous weather or being unprepared.

Which isn't to say that hunting a yeti or a dragon would necessarily be an easy thing. I'd bet that intelligent aggressors would be well-acquinted with the various structures that those who need heat would have to erect -- if you didn't want to have to hop out of your seal-skin sleeping bag and fight steaming in your skivvies, you might need to make a few false igloos or figure out how to blend in perfectly with the night-swaddled snow.

 

[Kobold Stew]

I can't help but think of Robert Service:

...Talk of your cold! Through the parka's fold it stabbed like a driven nail.
If our eyes we'd close, then the lashes froze, till at times we couldn't see.
It wasn't much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.
And that very night, as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow...

 

[Krakenspire]

Frostburn is an excellent resource for ideas and interesting monsters and races. I also like their take on hazards such as razor ice and black ice.

As for winter living from someone who has worked and lived in the high arctic it's remarkable how with some precautions you can survive fairly well in the cold. Snow is a good insulator and you can dig yourself in pretty well in bad weather to get out of the wind. At the end of the day it takes proper survival training and equipment to survive though. However it's not a huge deal with parkas and muk luks, snowshoes, gloves and toques. However working with steel can be an issue. It freezes to exposed skin, becomes more prone to breaking. Any armour should have furs or padding under it so it doesn't touch bare flesh.

Monsters are the easiest part, black puddings become white, frozen undead types, dwarves in ebberon come from the arctic originally, all dire creatures, mammoths, smilodons etc... The eladrin have fey spires and the frost prince realms.

The main issue I have with arctic adventures though is no one ever considers where the energy in the system comes from. In the real arctic environments there is a summer, tundra grows lichen, caribou eat it etc... The oceans provide much energy as they are not always frozen over. The South Pole is actually a desert as no energy gets there or things live there, however the coasts of Antarctica are full of life due to the oceans. With DND you can hand wave Magic, but it makes things more real when something forms the base of the food chain.

 

[Gecko85]

We briefly had a homebrew arctic campaign back in the 1e days...it's been too long so I don't remember all the details. I do remember we changed the armor table. There was no plate armor, and "heavy fur" counted as an armor type. If you had high enough strength, you could even wear chain underneath the fur. We had something we called "heat points" (or were they "warmth points"?), which were based initially on your CON score, but could be modified by your armor. Leather armor gave a small bonus, while heavy fur gave a larger bonus. You lost heat points the longer you were exposed to the elements, so over-land travel was usually done in shorter bursts and you would either have to take time to build a shelter or find natural shelter, or you'd freeze overnight. Don't remember what all the monsters were, and I know we never encountered all of them...this was towards the end of this particular group (high school), so we didn't get too far into this campaign.

 

[steeldragons]

And what better topic for a snowy Sunday!

Possible Adversaries, besides the actual weather conditions which I would make a daily roll/concern with fast moving weather changes/blizzards a regular...maybe 1/week unless there is some known "stormy season" when it would be more than that...but besides fighting the weather and temperatures (freezing winds and deep negative temp's can be just as, if not more, deadly than actual blizzards or icy/sleet storms).

But some encouter/monster options:
The Obvious/Givens: White Dragons, Winter Wolves, Frost Giants, Remorhaz [sp?], Ice Mephits, White Ancestry Dragonborn &/or Half-dragons, Silver Ancestry (but more if there are mountains around) Dragonborn &/or Half-dragons...undead don't care about the cold, skeletons and zombies aplenty, wights, ghouls, will-o-wisps.

Reskins/fluffs: Arctic/Polar Owlbears, "Frost Orcs", "Snow Elves" (make them a snow-based Wood elf variant instead of a High elf type).
-Ice Trolls: an actual monster from the original Fiend Folio if you want some ideas on how to alter the 5e troll.
-Weretigers reskinned as Snow Leopards (or simply white tigers).
-I would like to rework a Green Hag or Sea Hag into an Ice/White Hag.
-There was that japanese mythological creature..kind of a vampire that appeared/lured victims away in snow storms...the White Woman? White Lady? I forget what she was called, but reworking a vampire with innate "Invisibility" [creating white out conditions] and Ice Storm casting.
-Arctic Selkies for the cold waters.
-In B/X, BECM "Salamanders" came in Fire and Frost (I think 6-armed/legged lizards instead of the 2-armed serpent-fre-type] varieties. Take the MM [traditional AD&D fire] Salamander and make it a cold-based creature.
-Medusa variant that freezes/encases you in ice, or simply turns you into ice, instead of stone.
-Use the Water Elemental, pretty much as is, as a ice/snow/blizzard elemental. Don't need to change attacks or anything.

 

[Blackbrrd]

That's the life of normal people. Normal people who live near the poles don't sit outside for hours.

D&D is a game about adventurers. PCs are the people who leave the comforts of home and civilization to delve dungeons and brave wilderness to fight giants, dragons, or vampires. They might not have shelters to pop into every so often.

When you take the common D&D adventure and stick it into the cold, the cold can easily be a problem. At which point the DM must decide if it will be a minor background issue. Or a huge defining one and how.

I don't get what you are saying here? Of course people who live in arctic or sub-artic places don't sit outside for hours. They either bring some shelter, build a temporary one or do the herding or hunting they need to do outdoors. My point was that you probably wouldn't need or produce magic solutions to mundane problems (except if it's a high-magic setting that is).

Snow is a really good material for building temporary shelters. Either igloos or snow caves (I spent the night in one, the temperature inside is just below freezing no matter the outside temperature). You can also use tents, but they are a lot colder. At the same time, they are way less time consuming to setup.

On polar expeditions like the one Amundsen (first man on the south pole) went on, the main problem wasn't the cold, but the food. You burn a lot of calories in an arctic climate, I think something like 6-7000kcal a day. This means you need atleast 1kg of food per day. In addition, you need fuel to melt snow so you get enough water.

Enough about the general arctic survival stuff, the above survival techniques works fine, but if you have a winter storm, marauding wargs, white dragons or whatever, it will affect the situation. Let's say the characters are forced to flee from an overwhelming force. This would probably mean leaving essential survival gear behind and overcoming nature as a second challenge in addition to losing your hunters. An attack during a fierce storm while camping in tents might mean some of your equipment gets destroyed. Disastrous. A second challenge might then be to track the attackers down after beating them and taking their stuff.

In other words. For a setting where the PC's are assumed to know how to survive in the cold outside, assume that the PC's have the appropriate gear. Then use scenarios as described above to use the cold environment as a central part of the adventure/campaign.

[off topic]This winter in Norway has had plenty of days with gale+ force winds up in the mountains. I was up there on one of those occasions (in a nice cosy cabin just below the tree line). It was pretty hard to go cross country skiing (near gale winds), and above the tree line the wind was just below full storm. You basically won't be able to do anything except to dig in. The day before it was sunny and nearly calm. The difference was quite spectacular. Snow blown by gale force winds feels a bit like ice needles on unprotected skin and if you don't have any protection for your eyes, you risk permanent eye damage.[/off topic]

 

[jgsugden]

A good foreign setting is 90% flavor, 10% function. If you add too many mechanics, you'll end up in the sad realm of Dungeons and Accounting that appears when you give the players too many chores while they play.

If you want to show them how harsh the artic world is, make them prepare for their first journey into the cold. This is the time to make them think about what they need to do to survive the bitter cold and storms - and then get past it by giving them a route to deal with the cold. Giving them low powered magic items that allow them to survive temperatures down to -50, access to rituals that protect them from the cold, etc... will do the trick. Then, let the PCs see how others suffer from the cold, but don't force them to deal with it in detail... Not only does this avoid the tediousness of dealing with this stuff, it makes them feel heroic and 'above the common person' because they have something that sets them above others.

 

[CapnZapp]

Let me reformulate the question, why do you as DM make them spew ice and snow whe everything around them is resistant or immune against cold?

Because that's their MM stats?

 

[Minigiant]

I don't get what you are saying here? Of course people who live in arctic or sub-artic places don't sit outside for hours. They either bring some shelter, build a temporary one or do the herding or hunting they need to do outdoors. My point was that you probably wouldn't need or produce magic solutions to mundane problems (except if it's a high-magic setting that is).

Snow is a really good material for building temporary shelters. Either igloos or snow caves (I spent the night in one, the temperature inside is just below freezing no matter the outside temperature). You can also use tents, but they are a lot colder. At the same time, they are way less time consuming to setup.

On polar expeditions like the one Amundsen (first man on the south pole) went on, the main problem wasn't the cold, but the food. You burn a lot of calories in an arctic climate, I think something like 6-7000kcal a day. This means you need atleast 1kg of food per day. In addition, you need fuel to melt snow so you get enough water.

Enough about the general arctic survival stuff, the above survival techniques works fine, but if you have a winter storm, marauding wargs, white dragons or whatever, it will affect the situation. Let's say the characters are forced to flee from an overwhelming force. This would probably mean leaving essential survival gear behind and overcoming nature as a second challenge in addition to losing your hunters. An attack during a fierce storm while camping in tents might mean some of your equipment gets destroyed. Disastrous. A second challenge might then be to track the attackers down after beating them and taking their stuff.

In other words. For a setting where the PC's are assumed to know how to survive in the cold outside, assume that the PC's have the appropriate gear. Then use scenarios as described above to use the cold environment as a central part of the adventure/campaign.

[off topic]This winter in Norway has had plenty of days with gale+ force winds up in the mountains. I was up there on one of those occasions (in a nice cosy cabin just below the tree line). It was pretty hard to go cross country skiing (near gale winds), and above the tree line the wind was just below full storm. You basically won't be able to do anything except to dig in. The day before it was sunny and nearly calm. The difference was quite spectacular. Snow blown by gale force winds feels a bit like ice needles on unprotected skin and if you don't have any protection for your eyes, you risk permanent eye damage.[/off topic]

D&D is mainly an adventure game with combat. And D&D rewards surviving adventurers handsomely. So they will often be fully prepared 90% of the time. They can afford the food, shelter, and tools needed. They can also afford to guzzle potions to magically fortify themselves.

But if an orc shaman lightning bolts your rogue and you have to retreat, you might lose the supplies he or she was carrying and maybe so or yours as you drag them off to safety.
And wights might pop up under the spot you choose to camp and you have to kill them too.
Then a snow fey might offer a boon and save the group some food in her magically sustained springtime oasis. Oops you did something wrong and are cursed as a snow wendigo.

D&D is an adventure game where PCs are heroes. Survival issues should be minor except when things go bad or when things started bad (typically that's why they sent the PCs). But how bad it could be should be informed early as it drastically changes how the campaign goes. You have to inform the players that they should avoid losing the gear at all costs.