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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Theo R Cwithin" data-source="post: 5583669" data-attributes="member: 75712">I could see fey connected to slumbering creatures, possibly as protectors or as an extension of their dreams.  There might be little feral fey-- toothy and fierce-- running around accumulating food for their charge, maybe in snares or pits.  These little buggers would trap prey, but keep it alive through winter so their guardian... dire bear, maybe?... can have a nice breakfast when he wakes up.Aurorae fey might be really spacey.  Maybe they're enamored of strange colors and express themselves in weird slow, undulant dance like the wintery lights that give life to them.  An encounter with them would likely be trippy rather than combative.A conclave of will'o'wisps might be a power center of the tundra, perhaps rivaling even the crystal dragon.  Perhaps they, too, read the stars... or maybe they use other means of divination: crystalmancy, casting of bones (but only adventurer's bones will do!), auroramancy, reading snowflakes like tea leaves, or the like.Sleepy bracken faeries might go scurrying when a horse steps into a moss-filled depression on the frozen moor.  Warmth faeries might slink through the night stealing the heat from sleeping adventurers' toes.  Ice fey might delight in pouring out and freezing PCs' waterskins-- or the innards of their mounts!As for the animals, you might just split them into four broad groups and run/anticipate just one or two encounters for each type.  First are the lone hunters, a very rare but dangerous breed-- likely something weird, such as an aberrant sabre-toothed cat/displacer-beast hybrid, a behir, a grumpy cave bear with indigestion (or night terrors!), and those sort of things.  The next group is the pack predators: wolves and the like.  They could easily becombined with a herd animal encounter, as well as being a menace in their own right.  You could include especially primitive or ferocious humanoid hunters in this group, I suppose.Next are the 'normal' herd animals (in tundra areas, this is probably going to be reindeer or something similar). These will be fairly common; on the rare occasions they're a threat, it'll likely be because they stampede or something.  Maybe tie a stampede to an attack by pack predators, just to complicate  things.  Finally will be the BIG herd animals:  the mastadons and the like.  Like their lessers, they might stampede when attacked by pack predators or hunters.  However, an interesting encounter might happen on occasion with just one or two of them: an abandonee, a sick baby and protective mother, or the like.  A cliche prehistoric encounter might be a mammoth caught in a bog or tar pit: trapped and scared and therefore dangerous.And of course, in fantasy land you can layer on oddball D&Disms to make more peculiar encounters.  A mastodon zombie might have been struggling to get out of its tar pit for a thousand years; heck, it might  be happy just to be out of it rather than interested in a fight, if the pCs should decide to help rather than kill it.   A stampede of incorporeal glowing reindeer pursued by nebulous ghostly hunters could be a fun wtf moment, as arrows go zipping through the PCs and animals tumble to their deaths around them.</blockquote>

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