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Campaign Setting: Icehold (Economy and Threats)
Here are more Icehold campaign notes, which were my focus for this week. You can read the first entry and Icehold Index here.
Economy
For much of the year, the fortified town is cut off from any other civilization. Sitting n the far western spur of the Middle Kingdoms, during the summer traders can sail in from the eastern ports of that continent, but also the far western and southern lands of the Ivory Empires, ports in the Spice Gauntlet, and even the Realm of the Jaguar. In addition to sea voyages to Jokullnaf, a few mountain passes lead southeast to the Njor lands and other points in the Middle Kingdoms, though those are passable only in September, and only for a few weeks.
With a typical winter population of 5,000 people, Jokullnaf can swell up to 11,000 in the summer months as merchants flood the city to buy up as much Blue Iron and Firestone as possible, and service folk come with them to provide services the wealthy expect, but there is little need for when they are gone. Numerous Service Guilds exist, including cooks, courtesans, dancers, guards, musicians, and scribes, who own permanent buildings in Icehold which sit nearly empty 8 months out of the year, watched over by a skeleton staff until the work season arrives in summer and its rooms are full.
Though the region around Icehold is mountains, valleys, and tundra, there remain natural resources the locals have learned to harvest and grow. White spruce are common, many growing to more than 100 feet high, and offer nutrition in their needles, inner bark, cones, and seeds. This is most often accessed as various teas, but it can also be used to make beer, porridge, and even a flat bread. Fishing is plentiful and open sea ice fishing, though dangerous, allows that bounty to be caught year-round. Numerous shrubs and bushes flow in the summer, including crowberries which are used to make wines and jams. Other forms of lichens, mosses, and sedges, abound and wyrmlichen can sustain a person for months, though the taste is bitter, sour, and spoiled.
Some herders manage reindeer and musk oxes, and households often raise a small number of hares or clipped snow geese to provide meat in cold months. Insect farming is also common, and considered a fine way to turn lichen into something closer to meat (and, if dried and ground, a kind of flour). Pickling food is extremely common, as is dry freezing and deep freezing in cold pits. Even so, when the Summer trade begins, the desire for honey, flour, and non-local meats is high.
Threats
Though the First Vampire is long since destroyed by the Drakull Campaign, other undead still dwell in the tundra, and during the Long Nights are a significant threat. While some are restless spirits of local folk who died in anger or hate, powerful undead from around the world have moved to the far north to take advantage of their immunity to the cold, and the long stretches where no sunlight can reach them. Though none have built true kingdoms, some have created their own tomb complexes, in the style of their homelands, and created as many servants as they can. None of these major undead have lairs too near Jokullnaf, but they keep an eye on the largest gathering of fresh sapient meat and hot blood, and raid whenever they feel they can.
(Art by DM7)
Other threats include arctic cave bears, ice perytons, snow spiders, white chimeras, and the sparse but significant threats of boreal dragons, drakes, wyverns, and wyrms. A troll kingdom once existed in the lands around the town, driving out or killing most other humanoids, but its population is much reduced and has grown only very slightly over the past century. Some trolls trade with the people of Icehold, others seek its destruction. Yeti also exist in the hillier and rockier regions, apparently existing at a neolithic stage of technological development and with extremely simple language skills. These yeti are often seen by newcomers as nothing more than bipedal beasts, but natives to Jokullnaf are aware they are as smart as any other humanoid, even if their culture is less technologically advanced (at least in part because they do not need or trust fire). Most yeti groups see all other humanoids (even trolls) as interlopers in their lands, and eliminate small groups if they can while avoiding bands too big to attack, but as with any sapient creatures, there are exceptions.
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Campaign Setting: Icehold (Location and Environment)
Here are more Icehold campaign notes, which are my focus for all this week. You can read the first entry and Icehold Index here.
Location and Environment
Icehold, also known as Jokullnaf, sits to the farm far north, halfway between the lands of the Njor and the Northern Pole. Even the seas around it are frozen most of the year, and its harbor is typically only free of ice from June to September, and is always frozen sold from November to April. The average temperatures of those months reaches a high of 6° C (43° F). It is below freezing nearly all the rest of the year, with the coldest month averaging high temperatures of −15.5° C (4.1° F), but sometimes getting as cold as −39.1° C (−38.4° F). On the coldest days, a cup of warm tea thrown into the air turns to powdery snow before it hits the ground.
Snow and ice on the ground are nearly universal, which is just as well since rivers freeze and even the deepest wells hit ice rather than liquid water. Nearly every building and most camps keep firesburning nonstop, year-round, with firestone the most common source of heat (a single fist-sized hunk of firestone weighs roughly half a pound, 4 pounds of firestone can keep a typcial stove hot and warm a 20 ft. x 30 ft. house for 24 hours, making it roughly 10 times as efficient as coal). This both heats an area and allows snow and ice to be melted daily for fresh water. It also ensures new fires can easily be started from the burning firestone, should that be needed.
Those local to Jokullnaf know how to survive the deadly cold, and warming magic is common, but some nevertheless freeze to death every year. Buildings are well-insulated, so much so that in the short summer most activity is taken outdoors as the buildings can get uncomfortably warm with just the heat of people in them. Clothing and armor are almost always layered, and extremely thick hooded cloaks known as feldjar are common. Feldjar are made of two thick layers of furred hide, sewn with the fur facing inward to form a thick insulation, and are designed to be buttoned closed if necessary, but generally warn just draped around the shoulders to it can be thrown off if necessary for any detail-oriented work.
Conversely, there are a few regions of the lands around Icehold where massive heat rules. Several apparently-dormant volcanos are close enough to the settlement for their red glow to be visible on a clear night, and many have slow lava flows down into apparently-bottomless pits. Anyone coming close to the molten rock find the air goes from freezing to burning surprisingly quickly, and when snow falls the lava hisses and can produce steam able to scald skin, which may twist and shift suddenly in strong winds. Even beyond the volcanoes, a few of the old firestone mines have caught fire often the decades. The entrances to these are unknown, but occasionally a vent opens in the ground and burning smoke and cinders jet out… before enough ice falls into the crack to make the ground shale so hard it closes access to the burning mines as suddenly as it opened.
The deadly temperatures are far from the only regional challenges Icehold residents face. When the sun sets on October 28th each year, it does not rise again until the 15th of February (111 days later), and due to mountains cannot be seen from town until shortly after the first week of March. Conversely, when it rises on April 18th it does not set again until August 23rd (127 days later). For weeks at either end of these periods the is enough glow to see even though the sun does not properly rise, though the light is dim, in the times known as the Blue Nights.
Some nights, the sky lights up with Spirit Tides from the Ocean of Souls, the literal path (also known as the Low Road) spirits of the departed take to reach the afterlife from the mortal realm. When the Spirit Tides are green, they can be safely observed, and individual spirits cannot be visually picked out. But on especially cold nights they can turn blue, purple, red, or yellow, meaning the barrier between the Spirit Tides and the mortal realm are too thin for safety. Specific souls can be seen, or if you are high enough on a mountainside even spoken to. Such nights draw undead, necromancers, and grieving beloved of the recently lost, but anyone looking at the tides also risks a spirit possessing them, or breaking free to become a spectre or wraith. If work must be done during the nights of strong Spirit Tides, locals to Icehold wear wooden blinders over their eyes, keeping their vision restricted to a narrow band they focus down, away from the skies.
(Art by Jasper W)
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Campaign Setting: Icehold
All this week I’m going to be writing about a fantasy ttRPG setting I’m calling Icehold. I’ll give an overview of the main settlement, some notes about resources and trade, local threats, and even adventure seeds.
(Art by Cerafts)
Overview
The fortified harbor and trade town of Jokullnaf, also known as Icehold, is the northernmost walled city in the known world. Nestled in Jokull Harbor, it is surrounded by mountains, tundra, hyboreal forests, and ice. No other major settlement exists within hundreds of miles of it, it can only be accessed for a few months a year, it is under constant threat by undead, extreme weather, deathly cold, and monstrous threats of the far north. With the risk and isolation, however, comes a level of political freedom rare in settlements its size.
Icehold exists only because the Drakuul Crusade built the original fortress as they sought to find and destroy the First Vampire, and in those years rich veins of Blue Iron and Firestone were found in the mountains that stretch for hundreds of miles in all directions of it. Holy pilgrimages still bring a few crusaders to its walls every year, but it is the fortune that can be made mining that has maintained the town.
Though positioned far north of any humanoid settlement on its continent, it is also on the continent’s westernmost point, making it an attractive trade port for foreign nations… at least for the few months per year its harbor is not totally iced over. Even the extreme cost of the long travel and paying the high prices locals demand for labor in the harsh clime does not make it unprofitable for merchants to come to the Icehold every year, buying materials outright but also trading magics, foods, preservatives, and clothing to the icelocked settlement.
The local population are a hardy folk, descended from crusaders, the tradesfolk and servants the crusade needed to survive, explorers, and researchers, The population has a large percentage of elf, dwarf, gnome, goblin, human, ogre, orc, and gnimmocs (a gnollish ethnicity adapted to arctic environments). Less common, but noteworthy, are the numbers of halflings, logith (a humanoid species with elemental fire ancestry), lyricera (a tundra-adapted ethnicity of catfolk), and ice trolls (native to the region, predating the establishment of Icehold).
The year-round population of Jokullnaf hovers around 5,000, with another 1,000 or so living in small private settlements (based mostly in caves and defensible valleys). During the summertime Trade Seasons, the popular can almost double, as merchant ships and overland caravans rush to buy as much Blue Steel and Firestone as they can, before the surrounding sea freezes over and the long, winding mountain routes become impassible.
Ruled by a Council of Principals, Jokullnaf sets high value on privacy, individual freedom, and the right to be left alone. While there are laws dictating certain antisocial behaviors are criminal, no sect, ethnicity, ancestry, nationality, religion, or creed is banned or outcast, as long as they play by the rules.
The combination of great personal freedom, vast mining riches, a history of undead-destroying crusades, and access to the coldest places in the world attract a specific kind of person, who is willing to brave all the risks of Icehold’s harsh environment to reap its rewards.
More Icehold!
Here’s an index of additional Icehold articles, updated as they are written.
Support
I’m currently fighting cancer, and sadly even with insurance that’s extremely expensive. Right now, the main ways to offer your support are to join (or increase your pledge level to) my Patreon or, if you prefer, donate directly through my Ko-Fi account – https://ko-fi.com/owenkcstephens
Campaign Setting: Hellscape City
Just over 200 years ago, every major threat in the mortal world was defeated. every ravaging dragon slain, every tyranny toppled, every lich destroyed. Champions the likes of which had never arisen before, led by the Chosen Ones of the Goddess of Peace and Justice, sought out and cured every source of inequity, suffering, hunger, fear, bigotry, and poverty. They used nearly-deific powers to link their awarenesses and knew on one perfect silvery dawn, that total peace reigned in all places.
They sat back, sure that after the Silver Dawn, no pain or evil would ever exist in their reality again. By noon, they knew they were wrong.
No vast, continent-threatening evil arose. No hidden, secret source of vile intent had avoided their purge of all injustice. But, nevertheless, evils still occurred. People who did not need to steal, stole. People who knew better, chose to create and spread lies. The numbers were tiny, compared to the days before the Silver Dawn, but every possible crime still happened somewhere, to someone. Despite there being no remaining root cause of evil, some mortals performed vile deeds, from the prosaic to the murderous.
The Champions of the Silver Dawn could have used their powers to seek out every criminal and bully and ended or altered them, but to what end? If evil would arise even after every mortal cause for it was gone, what was the point? That meant the Champions could never eliminate all evils, unless the evil was coming from beyond the mortal realm…
And then the Champions turned their eyes towards Hell. The home of the tempters, deceivers, soul-buyers, and fiendish bargainers. Surely, though the Champions, it was not that some percentage of mortals would turn to evil no matter how idyllic their world. Instead, the denizens of Hell must be the true source of evil. And that meant that creating a world free of evil required that hell be conquered.
And so they set out to do just that.
The First Circle of Hell fell in a matter of days, its forces having never faced anything so mighty as the Champions of the Silver Dawn. The Second Circle took months, but its defeat was just as complete. Though it took years, so too did the Third Circle fall to the Champions, and after decades the Fourth Circle. But twixt the Fourth and Fifth Circle of Hell lay the mighty river Styx, the most deadly of moats. Further, the Lords of Hell had used their time to fortify well, and the Fifth Circle of Hell stood behind ramparts of unholy metals and punished assailants with siege weapons of fiendish design.
It’s been more than 150 years, and the Champions still have not done more than establish a bridgehead in the fifth Circle of Hell. The fighting literally shakes the pillars of existence, and the wise come nowhere near that battle.
(Art by grandfailure)
But… the earlier Circles of Hell are a different story.
Centuries of conflict mean supplies must be brought in to the Champions’ armies, and those come largely from the major cities of the mortal world, through permanent Hellgates built and guarded by the Champions of the Silver Dawn. In the First Circle of Hell, a major mortal metropolis has grown, Hellscape City, where mortals, angels, and devils who have sworn obedience to the Silver Dawn all dwell. Though literally a plane of Hell, the First Circle of Hell is now no worse than the most dangerous and vile of mortal cities was before the Silver Dawn, and many mortals swarm to that place looking for opportunities.
The Second Circle is of hell is under Silver Dawn control, but far less settled. Devilish bandits hide in its depths, and twisted mortals often seek to unearth fiendish powers here. Further, the nature of the place itself is untamed, and its otherworldly flora and fauna must be tracked down and either tamed or destroyed. Many mortals foray out from Hellscape City to hunt bounties and seek fortunes in the Second Circle of Hell.
The Third Circle is actively dangerous, as the Champions of the Silver Dawn find it keeps creating devils and devilish threats no matter how many times they pacify it. The greatest mortal warriors and warlocks are often employed by the Silver Dawn to scout and picket the Third Circle, to put down minor threats, and raise the alarm when major ones form.
The Fourth Circle is more dangerous still, with a few ArchDevil holdouts with flaming redoubts in its far reaches. The Champions of Silver Dawn themselves must grip the Fourth Circle in their nearly-divine iron grasp, for otherwise their crusade would lose this claimed land, and be pushed back, perhaps driven from hell itself.
Hellscape City and the lands beyond are not for the faint of heart, but they are realms where the secrets and wealth of Evil City have been hoarded since the dawn of time, and there are fortunes to be made, and power to be found.
Support
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Owen K.C. Stephens 