Frozen Bog

Bog
Roquai, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

An endless winter holds the land. Snow lies in midsummer, rivers are frozen to their beds, and trees stand cased in ice that never melts. This cold does not come from the sky, and fires give less warmth than they should. Wet ground of sphagnum moss growing over deep peat, acid and poor, spread with cloudberry and heather. It looks firm and is not, and people cut its peat for fuel.

Hear it

For the table

Ground
hard going, about 10 km a day on foot
Water
plentiful
Foraging
poor

Hazards

  • Sucking mud. Firm-looking ground opens onto deep mud or peat. Alone and laden, a traveller can be held until the water rises or the cold comes.
  • Getting lost. Under the trees, in the dunes or in the dark, every direction looks alike. Without a guide or a sure landmark, a party walks in circles.
  • Endless cold. The cold does not lift by day or by season, and a campfire only warms those who sit right beside it.
  • Glazed ground. Paths, roots and stones wear a skin of clear ice that the sun never softens.
  • Frostbite. Fingers and toes go white, then stop hurting, which is worse.

D&D 5e

Plays as
swamp, slow pace at most
Checks
forage: Survival DC 10 · find the way: DC 15 · search: DC 20
Creatures are spotted at
2d8 × 10 ft
  • Endless cold. (House rule) The extreme cold rule holds in every season, day and night: at the end of each hour outdoors, a creature makes a DC 10 Constitution save, DC 12 at night, or gains 1 Exhaustion level. Cold resistance or immunity passes automatically; furs and winter clothing give Advantage.
  • Glazed ground. Slippery ice is Difficult Terrain. A creature that moves onto it for the first time on a turn, or starts its turn there, makes a DC 10 Dexterity save or has the Prone condition.
  • Frostbite. (House rule) A creature that ends a day of travel with wet hands or feet makes a DC 12 Constitution save. On a failure it has Disadvantage on Dexterity checks and on attack rolls with weapons until it finishes a long rest beside a fire.

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)
swamp, greater difficult terrain, about 11 km a day at Speed 25
Checks
Subsist: Survival DC 20 · Sense Direction: Survival DC 20
Random encounters
flat check DC 14 each day
  • Sucking mud. Quicksand (GM Core p. 107): a hidden patch about 5 m wide (Stealth +12; Survival DC 18 to spot by disturbing it). Stepping in sinks a traveller to the waist, then one step each round (neck, then under); Athletics DC 20 climbs back a step, and allies can pull with Athletics DC 20.
  • Getting lost. Sense Direction (Player Core p. 246): a Survival check once a day, –2 without a compass; DC 15 in ordinary wild land, 20 in deep forest or underground, 30 in a featureless desert. Getting lost has no fixed penalty: the GM decides where the party ends up.

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.

Adventure hooks

  1. A smith whose forge no longer grows hot enough to work iron offers her best blade to whoever finds where the heat of her fire goes. It goes to a hollow nearby where, in the middle of the ice, a patch of grass grows green around a cradle someone has built there.
  2. A merchant has noticed that nothing kept here ever spoils and has opened a cold store for rich clients from the south. Business is splendid until a young lord comes to collect a crate laid down by his grandfather and finds the grandfather inside, alive and furious about the delay.
  3. Every evening an old woman walks out to talk to her son, who stands frozen in the ice where the winter caught him. She does not want him freed; she wants someone to promise to keep talking to him once she is gone.
  4. The village draws lots each year to choose who walks out into the cold to feed the winter. This year the lot fell on the headman’s son, and the headman has quietly decided that a passing stranger will do just as well.
  5. Peat cutters have struck a wooden trackway under the moss, laid plank by plank and running straight out into the bog where nobody goes. They want to know where it leads before the lord’s steward hears about it.
  6. A cloudberry picker swears that a little light leads her to the best patches every summer. This year it led her sister instead, and her sister has not come back.
  7. A merchant bought a keg of bog butter dug up by peat cutters, sold as a thousand years old and a cure for baldness. It worked far too well, and he needs another keg from the same spot to undo it.
  8. A farmer’s cow walked onto bright green moss and sank to the neck. Pulling her out is the easy part; finding out why the ground around her is warm, and smells of smoke, is not.

What grows here

  • Scots Pine (tree). A pine of up to 35 m with short blue-green needles and orange-red upper bark, ranging from western Europe to eastern Siberia and past the Arctic Circle, on poor sandy soils, rock outcrops and peat bogs. It gave building timber, rosin and turpentine, and in Scandinavia its stumps and roots were burnt down into tar. Gives: Scots Pine Wood, Scots Pine Resin.
  • Bilberry (shrub). A low deciduous shrub of 10 to 50 cm with blue-black berries ripening from July to September, found across the northern lands on acid soils of heaths, boggy barrens and open pine and spruce forests. The berries are eaten fresh or in pies, jams and syrups, and in Britain they once dyed food and cloth. Gives: Bilberry.
  • Common Heather (shrub). A low evergreen undershrub of Europe, under sixty centimetres, with tiny scale leaves and mauve flowers from July to September, the dominant plant of most European heath and moorland, also found on bogs and in acidic pine and oak woods. Grazing and light burning keep the moors in heather, and sheep and grouse feed on it. It dyed wool yellow, tanned leather, bound besoms, flavoured medieval ale before hops, and still gives a prized honey. Food of: Sheep. Food of: Willow Ptarmigan. Gives: Heather Tops.
  • Dwarf Birch (shrub). A birch shrub no more than a metre high with shiny copper-red bark and small round toothed leaves that turn red in autumn. It grows in arctic and subarctic tundra, rocky barrens and raised bogs, and further south only high in the mountains, where it survives as a relic of the last Ice Age.
  • Cloudberry (herb). A low herb of 10 to 25 cm with palmate leaves and white flowers, growing on acid bogs, wet meadows and tundra around the North Pole. Its amber berries, rich in vitamin C, kept scurvy away from Arctic peoples and are made into jams and liqueurs in the Nordic countries. Gives: Cloudberry.
  • Peat Moss (moss). The bog mosses of the genus Sphagnum, whose spongy cells hold many times their dry weight in water; they build the peat bogs of the north, and grow in conifer forests and moist tundra. Dried, they dressed wounds in place of cotton up to the First World War, and the peat they lay down was burnt as fuel. Gives: Peat Moss.

Animals

Creatures

Also met here

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.

To gather

Winter Wolf Eye, Yeti Glands, Remorhaz Flame, Bilberry, Common Adder Fat, Heather Tops, Peat Moss, Scots Pine Resin, Scots Pine Wood, Willow Bark, Willow Ptarmigan, Cloudberry, Common Adder Venom, Beetle Wing, Enchanted Iron Powder, Frog Lung, Giant Mosquito Wing, Orchid Flower, Wolf Aloe Leaf, Grung Venom, Hag Index Finger, Pitcher Plant Nectar, Sundew Tentacle, Will-o'-Wisp Spark, Corpse Flower Petal, Electric Eel Gland, Ghost Orchid, Hag Brain, Sea Hag Gill, Troll Bone Marrow, Will-o'-Wisp Trail, Catoblepas Eye Gland, Hag Moldy Heart, Naga Perfect Scale, Wandering Mound Mother Root, Adult Dragon Tonsils, Dragon Tongue, Froghemoth Tongue, Hydra Bile, Witch's Eye

To fish

Bog Lungfish, Swamp Leech Cluster, Black Lotus Bloom

The same milieu, otherwise

Bog, Cursed Bog, Corrupted Bog, Haunted Bog, Fungal Bog, Eldritch Bog, Toxic Bog

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