Hi, guys!
How people survive there in Irrisen? I mean what food do they eat? If they hunt beasts what food beasts eat then? I mean what plants are there suitable for eating?
Irrisen seems to me it's not like tundra. There are no seasons of the year.
Help me out to answer these questions.
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There's a lot fewer non-monstrous inhabitants. Plus White Throne has some magic enhanced farmland. Also, they import food.
There's a pathfimder tale called "Winter Witch" that gives a lot of background information.
But outside the Whitethrone. What people eat in Walsby? If there is a rabbit in a forest then that one rabbit have to eat something as well. I really do not enjoy that authors put something like food is hard to find so +5 DC to survival for hunting and nothing specific.
Think it should be like Mark Watney from The Martian. Greenhouses and tilling. I have funny feel about this.
I can't treat Irrisen as tundra or I risk to lose unfriendly environment feel.
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But outside the Whitethrone. What people eat in Walsby? If there is a rabbit in a forest then that one rabbit have to eat something as well. I really do not enjoy that authors put something like food is hard to find so +5 DC to survival for hunting and nothing specific.
Think it should be like Mark Watney from The Martian. Greenhouses and tilling. I have funny feel about this.
I can't treat Irrisen as tundra or I risk to lose unfriendly environment feel.
Not much. Monsters. Traded food. Each other. Magic food.
Take your pick. Some plants grow in winter. It's a minimalist ecosystem at best.Beyond the above answers I'm not really sure what you're asking.
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There's a tree mentioned in one of the books that grows in winter and has edible bark.
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They also eat a lot of fish. See the Fishcamps in The shackled hut.
Found about bark:
Frequent hunting parties scour the tundra, bringing in what little they can find or kill, but most peasant meals consist of winteryew gruel: a thin, tasteless concoction made from boiling bark and seeds gathered from a small grove of winteryew trees outside the village.
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Every herbivore in Irrisen either eats winteryew bark or plants that survive in the rivers & lake.
Something else you'll need to figure out if you want to keep verisimilitude is where all the snow goes.
If there's no snow melt, then the frequent Irriseni snows will create massive snow drifts that will bury towns. Even if everyone shovels it out, towns that aren't next to a river/lake (like Waldsby) will be in a valley that grows every year. Unfortunately, this isn't something that's covered in any of the source material other than "it's magic".
My solution was to decide that winteryew roots actually produce enough heat that the bottom layer of snow can melt into the ground, and eventually find its way to the rivers. This also allows for the winteryew to actually absorb water and minerals, and therefore not be in a state of permanent hibernation (which would kill the trees as their reserves eventually deplete).
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I feel there are lichen and moss that lives under all the snow. Elk, rabbits, and other herbivore dig for these and live off of it. These provide the basis for the Food Web.
Like many feudal society, only nobles and monsters can hunt these herbivores.
I can see mushrooms and other fungi forming the basis of commoners food. It can be grown inside using wastes from daily life.
Don't forget the Bonemill for bread
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Thinking on this more. I food is control. It is how the Jadwiga stay in power. They have access to magic and magical items that allow them to grow and provide food to the 'masses.' If you cross them, you starve. If you are obedient, you get enough to stay alive and work. It is like water in the desert.
Every herbivore in Irrisen either eats winteryew bark or plants that survive in the rivers & lake.
Something else you'll need to figure out if you want to keep verisimilitude is where all the snow goes.
If there's no snow melt, then the frequent Irriseni snows will create massive snow drifts that will bury towns. Even if everyone shovels it out, towns that aren't next to a river/lake (like Waldsby) will be in a valley that grows every year. Unfortunately, this isn't something that's covered in any of the source material other than "it's magic".
My solution was to decide that winteryew roots actually produce enough heat that the bottom layer of snow can melt into the ground, and eventually find its way to the rivers. This also allows for the winteryew to actually absorb water and minerals, and therefore not be in a state of permanent hibernation (which would kill the trees as their reserves eventually deplete).
Wind blows snow around also.
Those trees have to grow new bark at a pretty fantastic rate. ^^
Bark doesn't solve problems. Big monsters do not eat bark so they become bigger and scarier. Honestly, this questions bugs me most in this AP.
I have to roleplay Irrisen differently from now. In Irrisen is plenty of food I say, but people are poor and weak and have to fight for feed. Have to fight with soil and some kind of greenhouses, have to fight with witches for rights, have to fight with monsters so people could tame them. Not scary tundra, but hard to live taiga.
I think of Irrisen more like Wild West with deserts, where people manage to cattle and crop in better lands. So like people have to find solutions.
Have to make Irrisen environment less scarier than it's sounds in the book. People will only eat a bark only if they can't produce decent amount of food.
Made some fantasy tamed animals like crossbreeded camel and moose or crossbreeded giraffe and lama. This is fun way to make new animals. We all saw Avatar: The Last Airbender.
And Nadya Petska is not just a hunter in my games, but hunter and ranch owner and breeder.
It's a magical world.
Why not have a herbivore that eats snow to survive off of, but whose flesh can be eaten by others? Have it be a fairly common animal, which other animals prey off of. It could even be a somewhat small animal, like a snow-hare, so you don't exactly get a huge amount of meat off them but it gives smaller carnivores like foxes something to go after.
You could even have a couple different snowvores out there of differing sizes.
Those trees have to grow new bark at a pretty fantastic rate. ^^
Baba Yaga specifically introduced them to Irrisen to act as a good source. I would guess that they do.
I'm running a campaign using Reign of Winter AP and the characters are in the cross-Irrisen portion of the adventure. I don't really buy an ecosystem completely dependent of eating bark. I prefer to assume that there are a variety of plants that have evolved to process the meager amounts of energy available from sunlight and perhaps the very magic that perpetuates the winter so that there is grass, moss, lichen, and other varieties of plants that grow year round, providing forage for larger creatures that can then be hunted.
I would also suggest that the temperature is not always below freezing, allowing for modest summer snowmelt and a chance for this vegetation to regenerate. The landscape will still be bleak with snow covering the vast expanses most of the year. But if you have an ecosystem capable of supporting some of the top of the food chain predators like wolves, bears, and the like, you have to have creatures for them to hunt and eat, and these creatures need plant food to survive.
More creative solutions than tree bark could be imagined. Just off the top of my head, there could be crystalline organisms that repurpose snow and ice into support structures that then convert sunlight and CO2 into edible stalks of protein and carbs that grazing animals can eat year round. These could also generate heat that would melt snow which could answer the issue someone raised above about why the land is not one big glacier as ice and snow pile up without any seasonal melting. Such a food supply might not be edible by humans, so they would still need to live near supplies of fish or trading routes and the repressive rule of the Jadwiga would still have leverage to control the population.
File this issue with the other FRP tropes that defy the science of ecology, such as underground tunnel complexes that have no plants and yet somehow are lousy with all manner of predators who presumably eat something besides adventurers on a daily basis.
I made this problem a lot easier by just not knowing the canon! We were a few sessions into Irrisen before I noticed a reference to conditions of eternal winter; I had described it as a harsh alpine climate with only a couple months above freezing each year. The Waldsby locals agreed that winter was lingering on notably this year (a product of the same rituals that were spreading it to other parts of the world) but weren't so "winter all year every year ugh" bleak as the canon.
It was a good mistake, because a couple of my players would have gotten completely derailed by investigating the food webs of the region if I'd said it had been frozen for 1400 years.
(One of my players reads the rulebooks and wiki and may or may not know the canon, but he's good with "the GM's version of canon overrides published material", and none of the others really read setting stuff.)