Quote:
Originally Posted by patchwork
If it's genuinely Arctic, then it's overwhelmingly ranching - sheep, goats, yaks, musk oxen; reindeer if you want to get elfy and exotick. Dogs. Berries (blue, huckle, black, goose, rasp, elder, outside possibility of straw) are important because of scurvy (no citrus up there!). Peas, potatoes, and perhaps other roots (turnips, carrots, beets - beets are the other important source of vitamin C if it's not too cold for them). Barley grows fast enough that the short summer growing season can produce a crop. So - no wine and little salad for these elves; mutton, cheese, potatoes and barleybeer or "scotch" whiskey. Thyme and mustard are your spices. Possibly tea.
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Good to know! So maybe our Snow Elves are doing a fair amount of sheep-and-goat-herding (for wool and milk/cheese), along with a bustling business of using barley and/or potatoes to produce (and sell downriver) those classic Elven distilled spirits (very popular with the upper crust of... some society somewhere else, TBD).
Quote:
Originally Posted by SRoach
No. I don't think you're going to get any corn to grow up there, unless you're tweaking it with magic.
Potatoes, maybe, but you didn't day eyes.
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Well played, sir. Well played. =P
Quote:
Originally Posted by PTTG
You're definitely right, there. It's a fantastic looking system, thanks for pointing it out.
So far, I've had a bit of annoyance with tiny regions popping up frequently. I might tweak them to be 1d6-2 days long... but I should avoid tweaking too much. If I was building it, you'd end up rolling on a geology and erosive forces table or something like that...
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If I were left to my own devices and didn't just give it all up altogether, I'd probably wind up in the same boat and try to have a system that involved plate tectonics and wind patterns and blah blah blah. I even caught myself going down the "But there's no way a landmass would look like
that" route at one point, but managed to stop myself before I got too far down that rabbit hole.
The only bone I've thrown in that direction has been a small tweak to allow arid-climate regions to appear in central-latitude parts of the map—Joe's original tables pretty much confine arid land to sub-tropical regions, but considering that most of the continental United States between the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains would be considered arid or semi-arid (never mind parts of central Asia and elsewhere), I made a small tinker to let arid climes sneak into those parts of the world.
Of course, in order for that to even matter, I have to get out of this frosty alpine locale first.
I do agree that tiny regions might be a smidge too common given their "one day of travel" size—statistically they'll make up just over a quarter of all regions, after all. I might adopt a 1d6-2 or 1d6-3 "travel span" for them as well, just to let them have a bit of variety.