Snow Devil
Hollows
Hollows
‘That ice is hungry, friend. It will swallow you up and hold you inside until you are nothing but a warning to future fools who have come this way after you. There are no maggots, no crows, no vultures here…here you remain forever entombed a trophy in the unforgiving cold of the Snow Devil’s gullet.’
Terrain Type: Tunnel/Mine/Catacombs Total Subterranean Area: 250,000 square feet Depth Below Surface: 50 feet
Spatial Distribution Information (in square feet):
125,000 tunnels, 125,000 chambers
Important Terrain Elements: Unstable, 90% Smooth/
Slick Flooring, Tombscape, Sunshafts, Burial Chamber
History
Five hundred years before Conan took the throne of Aquilonia, a major battle took place between the frost giants of Ymir and their own descendants, the
Nordheimers. The battle raged on the snowy surface of the bitter cold Snow Devil glacier. The fi ghting was fi erce and bloody; so much gore was spilt that the collective warmth sent a mighty
split down into the ice. Ice and frozen stone
exploded upward, knocking most of
the warriors
on both sides to the ground – many of them swallowed up by the welling waters from inside the glacier. Already the freezing winter wind was turning the exposed liquid to glass while the unfortunate souls thrashed about. The glass became crystal, the crystal quickly becoming as hard as stone around them. Fifty men and 10 giants were entombed within the Snow Devil that day, marking the end of the battle and the beginning of centuries of searching the ice for the fallen.
The glacial eruption left a large area of its surface pitted with numerous hollow chambers joined by icy tubes and tunnels, some open to the surface or glassed over by very thin ice created by the wind. These are the Snow Devil Hollows; a tomb of frozen remains that has too many centuries of legends wrapped around it to be left safely. Instead, the snowy catacombs devour more souls every year like some hungry beast made of stone and ice. Over the many long centuries the Snow Devil Hollows have supposedly been the fi nal resting place of over 1,000 different known people. This number is only partly due to the natural dangers of the Hollows; the ice shelves, the thin water layers, the brittle ceilings. The rest is due to the presence of certain glacial predators and scavengers that have claimed the Hollows as their home or at least as their hunting grounds. Explorers of the area have needed to look out for their personal belongings because of greedy raiders that might discover an envoy headed to the Hollows as well; they raid the explorers and leave them for the wilderness to take care of.
There is no question that there are numerous frozen dead remains in the walls, ceiling and fl oor of the Hollows. Exactly how many have been dug out, looted or even eaten by the wildlife is unknown, as is the number of remains that might have been pushed down by the motion of the glacier beyond the visibility through the ice. No matter what has happened in this fi eld of cold, empty tunnels throughout the years, it still remains a dangerous place where the inhabitants are nowhere as deadly as the ice and snow around them.
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Layout
The Snow Devil Hollows are a series of small chambers linked by twisting tunnels, few larger than 10 feet wide and 30 or 40 feet long. There is no discernable method or pattern as to how these tunnels and chambers match to one another and many of them shift and bend slightly over time as the glacier around them moves. Minor cave-ins are frequent but new tunnels always open up to replace the collapsed ones in just a few months’ time. Too long for anyone to survive being stranded within a chamber but relatively short, geologically speaking. There are six surface entrances that all lead down into the hollows but no more than two are ever recognisable at any given time from the surface. Between the prolifi c snowfalls and icing over from wind-drifts, it requires a sharp eye to see the Hollows’ open tunnels – and to avoid the thinly veiled ones!
Once inside the Hollows, the fi rst 25 feet or so is white and crusted with packed or frozen snow. This makes these few dozen paces easier to traverse but not much to look at. The echoing crunch of snow under boots reverberates down into the tunnels, alerting anyone or anything inside to the presence of new arrivals.
The tunnel fl oor and walls will lose their snowy covering quickly enough to give way to clear and slick ice fl ows. This is the number one facet of the Hollows’ existence that claims the most explorers – falling down and losing traction. Most of the tunnels have a slight decline into the nearest chamber, so a single icy misstep could mean tumbling 20 or 30 feet to land on a hard, icy, stone- covered fl oor.
The chambers are mostly just former tunnels that were widened when a quick burst of unfrozen water depressurised with a load of deposited rock in its path. They are most often cylindrical and shallow in nature, no more than 40 feet in length before they give way to another tunnel. Depending on the clarity of the ice in any given chamber, onlookers can see the frozen remains of past explorers, beasts or possibly even
giants.
There is one chamber that has somehow stayed more or less intact and untouched by the erratic behaviour of the glacier
– the initial burial site of the entombed leader of the
ancient Ymirish giants. Frozen in place by
500 year old
glacial pressure, this 15 foot tall monstrous thing is perfectly preserved; eyes open, veins blue and bulging, teeth clenched within purple gums. Some claim that it could awaken with the next great thaw but scholars say that can never be the case. Aesir shamans are not so quick to downplay the return of Jarle Ymirsson; he who would have his revenge upon the men and women of Nordheim.
Exploration Notes
The Snow and Ice
The surface area surrounding the Hollows is as much a part of the location as its tunnels and chambers and requires commenting on. The Snow Devil Glacier is a wind-whipped snowy fi eld of ice and churned up stones from the thousands of years of dragging that the glacier has done across the face of Asgard. The entrances to the Hollows are often covered up by snow and thin layers of blown ice, turning the area into a dangerous series of pitfalls. Trying to fi nd the entrances to the Snow Devil Hollows is a DC 18 Search skill check that results in a 15 foot fall into the tunnels on 50% of the failures.
Tunnels Upon Tunnels
The tunnel map of the Snow Devil Hollows is only accurate for a few years at a time, as each cave-in or glacial shift alters the existing pattern. Sometimes these shifts are dramatic in nature but it normally takes years to alter the map enough to make it erroneous. The tunnels are all erratic and jagged in their directions, making it extremely diffi cult to maintain a sense of navigation. Between the random paths and turns these tunnels make and the unremarkable similarity of the icy walls and fl oor there is a constant -2 penalty for any Survival or related skill check used to get a sense of direction when within the Snow Devil Hollows.
Frozen Remains
The clear blue ice that makes up the glacier is cloudy and white for the fi rst few feet of the surface, stress cracks and trapped snow disrupting its clarity but the farther you go down into the Hollows the clearer the ice gets. This allows explorers to see the eerily frozen remains of those who were swallowed up by the glacier. Animals, equipment and men can be found locked in strange positions, the ice as hard as stone around them. Many look as though it was a terribly painful way to die – being drowned and frozen alive. Some remains have not been treated too well by the glacial shifting, creating fractured bodies that strangely do not have any blood around them; it is frozen in their veins.
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walking in a frozen tomb; fi lled with perfectly preserved remains that they could join at any moment, is a bit disconcerting. Any living character that spends more than an hour in the Snow Devil Hollows will suffer a -1 penalty to all Will saves due to fear for the fi rst 24 hours of exploration.
Bursting Flows
Although a glacier is hundreds of thousands of tons of ice and stone sliding slowly across the land the Snow Devil Glacier contains several pockets of pressurised water deep enough under the ice that it is not frozen. Decades of shifting and squeezing has kept tracts of cold water under enough pressure to retain its liquid state instead of becoming more ice. These fl ows of pressurised water sometimes lurk silently and invisibly behind thin points in the tunnel walls, ready to burst outward to shower unsuspecting spelunkers with life-threatening temperatures. Anytime that someone or something makes a hard contact with a tunnel or chamber wall, there is a 10% chance of cracking into a water fl ow, spraying a 10 foot cone with impossibly cold water. Anyone hit with this liquid suffers 1d2 nonlethal cold-based damage for each minute that they remain in their wet clothing.
Jarle’s Tomb
The leader of the frost giants that fought in the mythic battle over the Hollows, Jarle Ymirsson was heralded as one of the direct descendants of the great Ymir himself. He claimed much of northern Nordheim under his banner before falling into the Snow Devil Glacier, becoming entombed in the sucking ice and waters of the frozen abyss. One large room at the near-centre of the Hollows is where the local exploring Aesir found the remains and polished the ice enough to see the huge monster’s face. Although surely dead, Jarle’s eyes remain open and unchanged from when he walked the world – begging the question of whether he is actually dead or just hibernating.
People of Note
The following is one of the most important individuals found in or near the Snow Devil Hollows. The entry has the character’s statistics, important information for interacting with him and a few good storyline hooks to do so.