Origin: Cold Waste

Where the Northerner Tribes Roam

Northerners are anyone hailing from the Cold Waste and the various barbarian tribes that live there. Northerners are a tall people that possess pale complexions, red, blonde, or brown hair, and tend towards brown, green, and blue eyes. They are a robust culture, hardened by their natural environment and most Northerners are in prime physical condition. Northern barbarians make their living by hunting, trading, and pirating, and are both adept sailors and mountaineers. Matriarchal as a whole, women are both respected and feared amongst the northern tribes for the weird witchery they can wield on their menfolk.

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The Cold Waste

Not quite arctic tundra but certainly not far removed, the Cold Wastes are a region of skin-chilling winds, colossal mountain ranges and alpine and foothill forests, as well as home to wild beasts and monsters found nowhere else in the world of Nehwon. Ravines split the land like canyon-scars on the Cold Wastes’ icy skin, while ivory-white mountains pierce the sky on every horizon – snow-blanketed giants fencing in this inhospitable wasteland of tundra plains and forests.

To the north is the Frozen Sea and Rime Isle, beyond which the endless reaches of the northern polar ice cap stretch on as far as mortal man could ever travel. To the south, past the Barrier Mountains and the Trollstep Range where the temperatures rise sharply, the Great Forest and the Land of the Eight Cities reside in warmer climes. To the east, as the land slowly sinks with each passing league, the Great Steppes are home to the Mingol hordes.

This is the Cold Wastes, then – a place of oppressive loneliness and cold comfort, where life is rare in the endless desolation and what life does survive is rarely in human form.

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Trollstep Mountains

The range known as the Trollsteps is a craggy chain which marks the southern border of the Cold Wastes. The temperature here is at its highest by Cold Wastes standards, though the winters remain comparatively harsh to the rest of Nehwon. Travelling south over the Trollsteps brings a wanderer into the Great Forest and the Land of the Eight Cities. Illik-Ving, one of the eight city-states that comprise the nation, is situated near one of the most reliable and oft-used passes through the Trollsteps. Avalanches and rock-falls are common in most other passes through the range.

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Life among the Northern Barbarians

Each Snow Woman, usually with the aid of the rest, worked to maintain absolute control of her man, though leaving him seemingly free and it was whispered that recalcitrant husbands had been injured and even slain, generally by some frigid instrumentality. While at the same time witchy cliques and individual sorceresses played against each other a power game in which the brawniest and boldest of men, even chiefs and priests, were but counters. – The Snow Women

The matriarchal society of the Snow Tribes is an indirect presence in the culture. Many of the men fear their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters and this leads many of the more adventurous souls into a life away from the Cold Waste. The majority that stays with their clan tend to make frequent excursions, spending several months of the year pirating on the waters of the Outer and Inner Seas or adventuring across the world to experience much of what Nehwon has to offer a strong warrior. Fafhrd left, of course, never to truly return. This is likely not uncommon given the harshness of his experiences with the Snow Women of his tribe.

The northerners are prideful people, and their warriors and hunters are generally skilled in arms beyond the average city dweller and with a love of sailing and raiding. In this they appear to be based on a perception of the historical Norse of the real world. Though the cold climes limit the contact the tribal peoples of the Cold Waste have with the rest of Nehwon, the barbarians are rarely as unanimously hostile as the Mingols of the Great Steppes. Sea-raiders and barbarian brigands are one thing for Eight Cities folk to deal with but at least they never face the combined might of several Cold Waste tribes uniting to lay siege to cities.

Beyond the inner fear the northern men share of their women, the main reason for warriors to leave the Cold Waste to live elsewhere in Nehwon is boredom. This is closely followed by a dislike of the hostile northlands. If boredom drives a soul south into warmer climes, he is likely also driven by curiosity about the rest of the world which only fuels his dissatisfaction at living a life of hunting in the foothills of mountains, foraging for a living and seeing nothing more than the faces of mountains and endless white tundra. In the cases of those who take a dislike of their home, it is easy to see why: the Cold Wastes are dangerous and hostile to human life.

Fafhrd was described several times as wearing hammer-beaten metal jewelry and the furs of the northern animals he had slain. Though he was a relatively civilized fellow by southern Nehwonian standards, he still often ‘dressed the part’ of his cultural roots. Barbarians who do the same, turning up in the southern cities clad in the pelts of white wolves and wearing forearm guards and necklaces of beaten bronze, are likely to cause a minor stir wherever they go. Although the Eight Cities along with Sarheenmar see a small trickle of northerners come south or go back north every year, places like Lankhmar and Ilthmar are still rarely home to wandering barbarians. The most contact ‘civilized southerners’ have with the Cold Waste barbarians is in the Inner and Outer Seas, where southern sailors are likely to be the victims of barbarian raids.