Winter is coming...the trees groan now. Fill on the fatty fish of the sea as our (young) fathers once did, harden your spear by fire, cake your hovels in mud and grass, cower to all visitors!!

Last edited by Monkeydono (4/28/2015 4:04 am)

I think the most crucial element is the Celestial Cycle. In the years of near total and total darkness, it is going to be really cold. Rivers freeze, lakes freeze, you get your howling winds and ice and snow. As Helios gets stronger, things warm up, but Hyperborea is not a hot place (though, of course, you can always say *this* part is or *that* part is). In the mountains it is still going to be cold, no matter the year. I think of the coastal forests more as the temperate and sub-Arctic rainforests of Washington state and Alaska.

But the cyclical freezing and thawing is going to make a mark on every aspect of the landscape, from the shape of the watercourses to the kinds of trees. According to the Gaz, after all, there are no deciduous trees, only evergreens. And then you got your lotuses.

If they really are proper berserkers, they should be good down to 0 F (-18 C for godless heathens) buck naked.  Below that I guess they drape themselves in an animal skin cloak and are good to go.

nDervish wrote:

Aside from looking for naked savages to party with, this is of particular interest because my concept of swords & sorcery involves a lot of (hot, sandy) deserts and (hot, overgrown) jungles and few, or no, wind-swept snowscapes.

That's interesting.  To me one of the best things about Hyperborea is that it's not another Hyboria clone with a pseudo-Middle East and a pseudo-Africa and a pseudo-China and all the different real world climate zones carefully laid out to allow a full range of different terrain and vegetation.  Rather, it's a very distinctive setting with a certain limited range of weather, climate, and landscapes.  You have to really think about these limitations when designing adventures for the setting, and that can give them a particular flavor.  Instead of the blue millionth adventure with quasi-African headhunters and cannibals in a pseudo-African jungle, why not Keltic headhunters on a glacier?  Or Atlantean cannibals lurking in the Hyperborean equivalent of the Sargasso Sea?  IMO it's simply more flavorful to adapt adventures to the conditions in  Hyperborea, rather than the reverse.

That said, if you really want jungles in Hyperborea I think you should add some.  If you want to justify them with the prevailing conditions, you can use hot springs, magic, or divine intervention.  However, my personal preference would be to not explain them at all!

 

Last edited by Blackadder23 (4/28/2015 8:51 am)

I would posit that Vikland, Ullr's Isle, and Mt. Ymir area would be an abberation, being unusually cold for it's distance from the pole.  Owing primarily to the presense of Ymir himself, I would imagine.

Blackadder23 wrote:

To me one of the best things about Hyperborea is that it's not another Hyboria clone with a pseudo-Middle East and a pseudo-Africa and a pseudo-China and all the different real world climate zones carefully laid out to allow a full range of different terrain and vegetation.  Rather, it's a very distinctive setting with a certain limited range of weather, climate, and landscapes.

 
I agree with this statement as far as it goes.  It's just that, like I said in the OP, I grew up in Minnesota.  I now live in Sweden.  For me, at least, "snow as far as the eye can see, and then more snow after that" is the most ungodly boring landscape I can imagine, even if it's snow-covered forests and snow-covered mountains instead of a flat, snow-covered plain.

I have nothing against dumping the carefully arranged pseudo-real-world regions and replacing them with a limited range of weather, climate, and landscapes, so long as the limited range which is used is an interesting range.

DMPrata wrote:

The islands near the Rim of the World are near-tropical for the most part, averaging 75–85°F throughout the cycle. Even Port Zangerios generally remains above freezing in the dark years, with summer temperatures in the low 70s. The mainland is definitely colder, though, averaging around 15°F in the winter years and 50s in the summer. In the depths of the Spiral Mountain Array, of course, summer temperatures scarcely reach double digits and in the years of darkness can plummet as low as –45°F (with a wind chill equivalent of –85°F!).

Thanks!  That sounds roughly similar to what I was thinking, although I hadn't gotten to the point of putting numbers on it yet.

For a general guideline of latitudinal patterns, David is spot on, but anomalies are indeed widespread. Francisca points out a notable one, and NAJones makes a good point about geothermic valleys and supernatural phenomena being as prevalent as the individual referee prefers. And Rastus, yes, most deserts in Hyperborea are cold deserts. I think David's charts are going to be a very valuable addition to the next printing of the game; they've found immediate use in my own campaign.

i've generally gone with the islands further out from the mainland being warmer and the mainland being very influenced by the multi year climate cycle.