I have been much less irked by the North since we entered 3e, when they replaced the Great Ice with tundra, so that there isn't miles and miles of frozen water in the far reaches of the direction of Air, but it still very much feels like it was designed to be "the North" first and "elementally and thematically Influence by Air" second.
As someone who lives in what could be reasonably be called Earth's own "North," the retconing of the Great Ice is a huge disservice, since the huge glaciers which stick around here all year and never melt are by and large the
most interesting feature of the landscape anywhere that maintains a steady lowish temperature. If there is too much Water in the North for it to be justified as Air-aspected, then there's also a claim to be made that 3 of the 4 outer-Directions also contain way too much
ground, with the Blessed Isle being both an
island and the Pole of Earth at the same time.
Looking at it all and thinking "ho hum, just ice and snow, nothing cool here" and replacing it with
tundra of all things as some kind of alternative is no different than replacing the majority of the Hundred Kingdoms with plains of arid, featureless scrubland in lieu of thinking up things to Be There. Because while I am far from an expert on the subject, buckling down and actually outlining a landscape shaped by deep-cold and eternal glaciers is a
vastly more compelling prospect we've lost now, as a result of someone not knowing the material any better.
Unlike what you might think, year-round ice is
always moving, whether it is a glacier or an ice-floe. Most of it moves so imperceptibly that you could be standing right atop it and never know until you return some time later and notice things seem Off.
Subglacial lakes inside the ice sheets could criss-cross an area for miles, populated inside by polar-adapted wyld mutants who emerge at night-time from their
moulins to hunt, the largest of these lakes eventually forming tremendous ice caverns like lava tubes where the outer crust breaks open from the continual movement and
floods the surrounding landscape unexpectedly. Imagine a landscape that slides around and away from itself in slow motion during the hotter summer months,
freshwater lakes that have existed for years or decades from thaw runoff which disappear overnight into cracks in the earth, and howling windstorms funneled by the ice and mountains into battering waves which kick up dirt and snow to make you doubt your senses and your memory of where your tracks have been.
The ice-scape might have moved so little for so long there might have grown whole forests across the soil and moss frozen to the glaciers top sides, giving lie it is even a sheet of ice at all, but nevertheless any major landmark or encampment will eventually begin to drift out of alignment, surging up to 300 feet in a day. And these surges are notable not simply for what they push aside and move around, but what they
preserve. Where most might hope for old technologies of the past, ancient cities and even traces of old societies might lie buried within the ice, piled under layers of unseen Northern landscapes
still locked in time from millennia prior. Some of these might be carried up inside the ice as heaving waves of displaced ruins, peeled from their foundations and suspended hundreds of yards in the air as though caught in a frozen tsunami, waiting for some brave expedition of intrepid scavenger lords to scale the cliffside and free it.
Snow-blindness from the bright summer sun becomes a brutal fact of life when the weather lets up enough to hunt or travel, and navigation by night and astrology regularly fails as the sky-spanning auroral lights drown out the stars with patches of
empty void between. Where the ice has left or retreated
looks like a blasted, alien landscape which heaves and buckles as the underlying permafrost freezes and thaws the earth, or like a
trench scooped up by a giant hand, every rock and boulder ground to fine sand and rocky debris by the process of being relentlessly tumbled in from miles distant. When the ice has been moving too much, far too fast,
Glacial Earthquakes rock the countryside, setting off chain-surges along with avalanches and landslides that reshape whole canyons and river flows, while sections of the landscape begin crumbling away where the ice-hollows and deep-ice lakes can't hold the strain.
Only the frozen fog rolling in with winter assures some margin of stability as everything slowly locks back in place, but this certainty and safety of a static world comes at the cost of the deadly cold. As the temperature drops, so does a dozen of feet of snow, weighing down everything not quick enough to outpace it. The few Northern societies which aren't nomadic must fortify against regular blizzards like bombing raids, reinforcing roofs and walls to prevent any standing structure from caving in under several tons of nearly-unmovable snow per year.
Stuff like that,
evocative stuff. Because while Creation might be a place where people live, it is also a world intended to Adventure In, which sort of demands a place to
find adventure. There is no adventure to be found out on the tundra, only ice bogs and caribou.
If you want
tundra, the North-East is the way better place to direct that intent, because at least that way you can have stunted
krummholz forests gnarling their way across tall hills and the steadily climbing mountains, which create a more foreboding transition to the land of perpetual snows.
