Eldritch Cold Desert

Something from outside the world has touched this land. Angles are wrong, the stars sit in the wrong places, and the animals that remain have too many eyes or too few. Those who stay too long start to hear a voice under every other sound. Dry steppe and stony desert far from the sea, scorching in summer and freezing in winter. Saxaul and tough grasses hold the ground, and caravans and herders cross it from well to well.

Over the year it averages 5 °C.

Hear it

Shifting: Shifting Reality (On Patreon, Guardian tier)
Whispers: The Silence Is Whispering
Madness: Losing Sanity (In the album RPG Ambiences Vol. 6)
By day: Cold Desert (On Patreon, Guardian tier)
In the wind: Desert with Bursts of Wind (On Patreon, Guardian tier)
In a storm: Cold Desert Storm (On Patreon, Guardian tier)
On foot in a canyon: Walking in a Desert Canyon (On Patreon, Guardian tier)
Bitter cold: Strong Snowy Wind (On Patreon, Guardian tier)
Crushing heat: Windy Desert (In the album RPG Ambiences Vol. 1)

For the table

Ground: open, about 30 km a day on foot
Seasons: -10 °C in the heart of winter, 22 °C in the heart of summer
Water: scarce
Foraging: nothing

Hazards

Bitter cold. Without furs, a fire and shelter at night, the cold numbs, then kills. Frostbite takes fingers and toes first.
Crushing heat. At midday the heat wears a walker down far faster than the road. Those who know the land travel at dawn and dusk and rest in the shade.
Thirst. Water is far apart and not always where the map says. A day without drinking in the heat is enough to put a traveller down.
Strong wind. Steady wind tires walkers, blows out fires and, on sand or snow, blinds and buries the track.
Wrong angles. Paths bend back on themselves and distances will not hold. A ridge seen at noon is no closer by evening.
Whispers from beyond. At night a voice speaks just below hearing, in a language no one ever learned and everyone almost understands.
The glimpse. Sometimes, at the edge of the light, something shows itself for a heartbeat: too large, too many limbs, gone at once.

D&D 5e

Plays as: desert, normal pace at most
Checks: forage: Survival DC 20 · find the way: DC 10 · search: DC 10
Creatures are spotted at: 6d6 × 10 ft

Bitter cold. At −18 °C (0 °F) or colder, anyone exposed makes a DC 10 Constitution save at the end of each hour or gains 1 Exhaustion. Cold resistance passes automatically; sleeping in a bedroll does too, and a blanket gives Advantage.
Crushing heat. At 38 °C (100 °F) or hotter, anyone exposed without drinkable water makes a Constitution save at the end of each hour, DC 5 then 1 higher each hour, or gains 1 Exhaustion. Medium or heavy armour gives Disadvantage; fire resistance passes automatically.
Thirst. Each Medium creature needs about 4 litres (1 gallon) of water a day. Drinking less than half of it brings 1 Exhaustion at the end of the day, which does not go until a full day's water is drunk.
Strong wind. Disadvantage on ranged weapon attacks; open flames go out and fog clears; a flyer must land at the end of its turn or fall. In a desert it can raise a sandstorm: Disadvantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks.
Wrong angles. (House rule) Each day the guide makes a DC 14 Wisdom (Survival) check. On a failure the party covers only half the day’s distance, however long it walks.
Whispers from beyond. A creature that keeps watch alone makes a DC 15 Wisdom save, taking 3d6 Psychic damage on a failure, or half as much on a success.
The glimpse. Whoever sees it makes a DC 15 Wisdom save or is Frightened, repeating the save at the end of each of its turns.

This work includes material from the System Reference Document 5.2.1 ("SRD 5.2.1") by Wizards of the Coast LLC, available at https://www.dndbeyond.com/srd. The SRD 5.2.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.

Pathfinder Second Edition

Plays as (Pathfinder Second Edition): desert, difficult terrain, about 16 km a day at Speed 25
Checks: Subsist: Survival DC 30 · Sense Direction: Survival DC 20
Random encounters: flat check DC 17 each day

Bitter cold. Temperature bands (GM Core p. 95): at 0 °C to −11 °C (mild cold) travellers tire after 4 hours; at −11 °C to −29 °C (severe cold) they also take minor cold damage (1d6 to 2d6) every hour; at −29 °C to −62 °C (extreme cold), every 10 minutes. Cold-weather gear removes severe-cold damage and turns extreme cold into severe. A soaked traveller counts the band one colder.
Crushing heat. Temperature bands (GM Core p. 95): from 35 °C (mild heat) travellers tire after 4 hours; from 41 °C (severe heat) they take minor fire damage (1d6 to 2d6) every hour; from 46 °C (extreme heat), every 10 minutes. In high humidity the mild and severe thresholds are about 8 °C lower.
Thirst. Without enough water a creature is fatigued; after its Constitution modifier + 1 days without drinking it takes 1d4 damage an hour, which cannot be healed until it drinks (GM Core p. 43).
Strong wind. Wind gives a –1 to –4 penalty to Perception that relies on hearing and to physical ranged attacks, and puts out handheld flames; strong wind can call for Athletics to move, a critical failure pushing back and knocking prone (GM Core p. 95).

This product is licensed under the ORC License located at the Library of Congress at TX 9-307-067 and available online at various locations including paizo.com/orclicense, azoralaw.com/orclicense, and others. All warranties are disclaimed as set forth therein. Attribution: this rules layer is based on the following Licensed Material: Pathfinder Player Core © 2023 Paizo Inc., Designed by Logan Bonner, Jason Bulmahn, Stephen Radney-MacFarland, and Mark Seifter. Authors: Alexander Augunas, Kate Baker, Logan Bonner, Jason Bulmahn, Carlos Cabrera, Calder CaDavid, James Case, Eleanor Ferron, Steven Hammond, Joan Hong, Vanessa Hoskins, James Jacobs, Jenny Jarzabski, Erik Keith, Dustin Knight, Lyz Liddell, Luis Loza, Patchen Mortimer, Dennis Muldoon, Stephen Radney-MacFarland, Mikhail Rekun, David N. Ross, Michael Sayre, Mark Seifter, Kendra Leigh Speedling, Mark Thompson, Clark Valentine, Andrew White, Landon Winkler, and Linda Zayas-Palmer; Pathfinder GM Core © 2023 Paizo Inc., Designed by Logan Bonner and Mark Seifter. Authors: Amirali Attar Olyaee, Logan Bonner, Creighton Broadhurst, Jason Bulmahn, James Case, Jesse Decker, Eleanor Ferron, Fabby Garza Marroquín, Jaym Gates, Matthew Goetz, James Jacobs, Brian R. James, Jenny Jarzabski, Dustin Knight, Jason LeMaitre, Lyz Liddell, Luis Loza, Ron Lundeen, Stephen Radney-MacFarland, David N. Ross, Michael Sayre, Mark Seifter, Owen K.C. Stephens, Amber Stewart, Clark Valentine, Landon Winkler, and Linda Zayas-Palmer; Pathfinder Monster Core © 2024 Paizo Inc., Authors: Alexander Augunas, Dennis Baker, Kate Baker, Joshua Birdsong, Joseph Blomquist, Logan Bonner, Jason Bulmahn, James Case, John Compton, Paris Crenshaw, Adam Daigle, Darrin Drader, Brian Duckwitz, Robert N. Emerson, Scott Fernandez, Eleanor Ferron, Leo Glass, Matthew Goodall, BJ Hensley, Thurston Hillman, Vanessa Hoskins, James Jacobs, Jenny Jarzabski, Miko Kallio, Jason Keeley, Jeff Lee, Lyz Liddell, Luis Loza, Ron Lundeen, Robert G. McCreary, Philippe-Antoine Menard, Jacob W. Michaels, Dave Nelson, Jason Nelson, Tim Nightengale, Stephen Radney-MacFarland, Mikhail Rekun, Patrick Renie, Alex Riggs, David N. Ross, Michael Sayre, Mark Seifter, Chris S. Sims, Amber Stewart, Jeffrey Swank, William Thompson, Jason Tondro, Clark Valentine, Landon Winkler, Tonya Woldridge, and Linda Zayas-Palmer. If you use our Licensed Material in your own published work, please credit us as follows: Biomes, Pathfinder Second Edition rules layer © 2026 Michael Ghelfi. Reserved Material: the names of Biomes and its catalogues, its descriptions, sounds, art and code. Pathfinder is a registered trademark of Paizo Inc.; this site is not published, endorsed, or specifically approved by Paizo Inc.

Crossing it

Besides walking, depending on the era and the season (Biomes estimates of a day’s distance):

On horseback: about 45 km a day
By camel: about 40 km a day
By wagon: about 25 km a day
By stagecoach: about 100 km a day
By dog sled: about 60 km a day
By train: about 500 km a day
By airship: about 900 km a day
By bush plane: about 800 km a day
By 4x4: about 250 km a day
By motorcar: about 150 km a day
By rover: about 120 km a day
By hover sled: about 150 km a day
By yak: about 25 km a day
On a flying mount: about 150 km a day
By flying carpet: about 100 km a day
By bicycle: about 80 km a day
By car: about 450 km a day
By truck: about 350 km a day
By motorbike: about 350 km a day
By armoured buggy: about 200 km a day
By sand skimmer: about 150 km a day

Adventure hooks

A surveyor hired to map the land keeps drawing paths that close on themselves in fewer steps than it took to walk them. His guild thinks he drinks, and he wants a sober witness who can count to sign his maps.
A shepherd’s daughter has begun answering questions a moment before anyone asks them, and her mother begs the party to cure her before the priest hears of it. The girl is not possessed: she is translating the voice under every sound, and all it asks is to be left alone.
A scholar from the city pays a silver piece to anyone who can hum him the voice beneath the sounds. By now the whole tavern hums the same tune without noticing, and the scholar has stopped humming it, which frightens him far more.
A hunting party came back with one man more than it left with. Each hunter swears he knows the newcomer, and each names a different person; he is kind, helpful and tireless, and nobody has ever seen him blink.
A caravan bound for the eastern markets carries silk, tea and an iron box its merchant never lets out of his sight. Wolves have shadowed the caravan for three nights, and they howl only when the box is unloaded.
A herding family’s well has been fouled with a dead dog, and the next well is five days off. They suspect an uncle who wanted their grazing; the uncle is camped at the next well, waiting.
An old seller of saxaul wood knows every well and every grave on the route. He will only guide those who can sit with him through a whole pot of tea without saying a word.
Winter has fallen on the steppe in a single night, and a caravan of a hundred camels is stuck in snow up to their knees. The master offers half the cargo to whoever gets the other half to town alive.

What grows here

Pinyon Pine (tree). A small, slow-growing, drought-hardy pine forming open woods with junipers on the dry uplands of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona, mostly 1,500 to 2,100 m up and sometimes to 2,700 m. Its large wingless seeds, pine nuts, are gathered after the first frost; they are a traditional food of the Western Apache, Hopi and Tewa, and the Navajo and the Hispanos of New Mexico still gather them in quantity. A heavy crop comes about every six years, and the tree depends on the pinyon jay, which carries off its seeds. Gives: Pinyon Nuts, Pinyon Pitch.
Saxaul (tree). A shrub or small tree two to eight metres tall whose leaves are reduced to tiny scales, so that it looks almost leafless. It forms open woods on the sands, dunes and salty soils of the Central Asian deserts, from the Caspian to the Gobi. Its very dense wood, which sinks in water, is the firewood and building timber of the desert peoples, and it is planted to hold the dunes. Host of: Desert Broomrape. Gives: Saxaul Wood.
Utah Juniper (tree). A shrub or small tree 3 to 6 m tall, rarely 9, of dry soils at moderate heights in Utah, Nevada, Arizona and the neighbouring states, often beside the single-leaf pinyon. Its blue-brown berry-like cones take about 18 months to ripen; birds and small mammals eat them, and jackrabbits, rodents and coyotes spread the seeds. The Havasupai slept on beds of its bark and ate the cones fresh or in cakes, and the Navajo sweep their tracks with its boughs so that death will not follow them. Gives: Utah Juniper Berries, Utah Juniper Gum.
Big Sagebrush (shrub). A silvery grey shrub of 0.5 to 3 m with three-toothed leaves and a sharp smell after rain, covering the cold deserts and steppes of the Great Basin and the American West. It can live over a century. Its bitter oils keep most browsers away, but sage grouse, pronghorn and mule deer live off it; Native peoples burnt it for smudging, used it as medicine, and the Cahuilla ground its seeds into flour. Gives: Sagebrush Seeds, Sagebrush Leaves.
Chinese Ephedra (shrub). A low evergreen shrub of green stems with tiny leaves, smelling of pine, growing on dry highland slopes, dry riverbeds and steppes of Mongolia, northern China and Siberia. It is ma huang, used in Chinese medicine for millennia against colds, asthma and fever. Its ephedrine is a strong stimulant: too much brings racing heart, stroke or death, and it is banned in sport and in many countries. Gives: Ma Huang Stems.
Greasewood (shrub). A spiny shrub of 0.5 to 3 m with green, fleshy leaves among the grey-green shrubs of western North America, from British Columbia to northern Mexico. It marks alkaline ground: it grows on the flats around playas and in dry stream beds and arroyos, and in near-pure stands where the water table runs high. Sheep and cattle that graze it can die of oxalate poisoning, sheep first of all. Gives: Greasewood.
Rubber Rabbitbrush (shrub). A grey-green shrub with flexible, felted stems, of the arid regions of western North America from western Canada to northern Mexico, often beside big sagebrush; dense stands take over worn-out range, roadsides and abandoned fields. Its pungent golden flowers open from August to October. Mule deer, elk and pronghorn browse it in winter when nothing else is left. In Bayo Canyon near Los Alamos, shrubs whose roots reach a closed nuclear waste site hold 300,000 times the normal strontium-90. Gives: Rabbitbrush Flowers.
Sea Buckthorn (shrub). A spiny shrub of 2 to 5 m with silvery leaves and clusters of small orange berries, found from the coasts of Europe to Mongolia and China. It grows on coastal dunes, riverbeds and gravel slopes, in the dry semi-deserts of central Asia and above the tree line in the mountains. The thorns make picking slow; fieldfares and other birds strip the berries in winter. Gives: Sea Buckthorn Berries, Sea Buckthorn Oil.
Chinese Liquorice (herb). A perennial of 30 to 120 cm whose woody rhizome plunges deep into sandy soil, native from European Russia and Central Asia to Mongolia, Manchuria and northern China, on arid and semi-arid sands, dry riverbanks, loess hills and hill grasslands. Digging out a wild root means a big hole, and the gatherer may have to climb down into it. The root, gancao, is one of the most important Chinese medicines; wild stands no longer meet the demand, and most now comes from fields. Gives: Gancao Root.
Desert Broomrape (herb). A parasite without chlorophyll that takes its food and water from the black and the white saxaul, in the deserts of northern China, from Xinjiang, Gansu and Qinghai to Ningxia and Inner Mongolia. Its thick fleshy stem, shaped somewhere between a pine cone and a pineapple, carries large yellow flowers. Overcollection and the loss of the saxaul, felled for firewood, have made it scarce, and its trade is watched under CITES. Grows on: Saxaul. Gives: Cistanche Stem.
Syrian Rue (herb). A bushy, foul-smelling perennial of dry and often salty ground in temperate deserts and Mediterranean lands, from Morocco and Spain across the Middle East and Central Asia to western Mongolia and northern China, where it grows on salty sands near oases. Its roots go deep and it is near impossible to uproot. It poisons livestock, above all in drought. In Iran, Turkey and Azerbaijan strings of its dried capsules hang in homes and vehicles against the evil eye, and its seeds, esfand, are burnt at Persian weddings. Gives: Esfand Seeds.
Indian Ricegrass (grass). A tough bunchgrass of western North America, from desert scrub to pine forest, on sand or clay; it can hold shifting sand in place. Its seeds were a staple of Native Americans, ground into meal and baked into bread, especially for peoples who did not farm or when the maize failed; the Zuni lived on it before corn. Bison, bighorn sheep, elk, deer and rodents eat it, and cattle overgraze it first. Food of: Bighorn Sheep. Gives: Ricegrass Seeds.

Animals

Brown Bear (man-killer, alone, at dawn and dusk)
Argali (dangerous if cornered, in herds, by day)
Eurasian Lynx (dangerous if cornered, alone, at dawn and dusk)
Snow Leopard (dangerous if cornered, alone, at dawn and dusk)
Black-tailed Prairie Dog (harmless, in colonies, by day)
Bushy-tailed Woodrat (harmless, alone, by night)
Chukar Partridge (harmless, in flocks, by day)
Common Raven (harmless, in pairs, by day)
Pronghorn (harmless, in herds, day and night)
Saiga (harmless, in herds, by day)
Siberian Ibex (harmless, in herds, by day)
Vicuña (harmless, in families, by day)

Kept here

Bactrian Camel (dangerous if cornered, in herds, by day)
Domestic Yak (dangerous if cornered, in herds, by day)
Sheep (dangerous if cornered, in flocks, by day)

Creatures

Cultist (a threat to the unwary, Challenge 1/8-2)
Gibbering Mouther (a fight to fear, Challenge 2)
Grick (a fight to fear, Challenge 2)

Also met here

White Dragon (deadly, Challenge 2-20)
Mammoth (deadly, Challenge 6)
Remorhaz (deadly, Challenge 11)

To gather

Nothic Iris, Bactrian Camel Meat, Bactrian Camel Milk, Bactrian Camel Wool, Sagebrush Leaves, Sagebrush Seeds, Chukar Egg, Chukar Meat, Yak Hair, Yak Milk, Greasewood, Ricegrass Seeds, Pinyon Pitch, Pinyon Nuts, Prairie Dog Meat, Pronghorn Meat, Rabbitbrush Flowers, Saiga Hide, Saxaul Wood, Sea Buckthorn Berries, Sheep Hide, Sheep Milk, Sheep Wool, Utah Juniper Berries, Utah Juniper Gum, Argali Meat, Brown Bear Bile, Brown Bear Hide, Gancao Root, Ma Huang Stems, Eurasian Lynx Pelt, Esfand Seeds, Sea Buckthorn Oil, Ibex Hide, Ibex Meat, Wormwood Sprig, Argali Horn, Cistanche Stem, Saiga Horn, Snow Leopard Bone, Snow Leopard Pelt, Vicuña Wool, Beetle Wing, Datura Leaf, Garlic Clove, Giant Hyena Blood, Scorpion Venom, Vulture Throat, Ash Lizard Egg, Gnoll Fang, Henbane Leaf, Jasper Powder, Opium Extract, Pomegranate Wine, Selenite Sliver, Turquoise Powder, Jackalwere Fur, Lamia Nose, Leucrotta Jaw, Mirage Shimmer, Djinn Dust, Manticore Eye, Mummy Soul, Whirlwind Heart, Adult Dragon Tonsils, Dragon Tongue, Medusa Heart, Mummy Lord Heart Dust

Beneath

Near the surface the rock keeps the year's mean warmth, without seasons; it warms as one goes down.

At the surface: 5 °C
100 m: 8 °C
500 m: 19 °C
1 km: 33 °C
3 km: 88 °C

A town here

How large a town this land can feed, what it makes and what it must buy. Build it in Hearth

The same milieu, otherwise

Cold Desert, Crystalline Cold Desert

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