I found that was one of the only cool things in the default Pathfinder game setting. Amid all the generic fantasy tropes they had nomadic badasses in the frozen north who rode with mammoths and shiz. So fucking metal.
Need more biome-themed videos. Here's my suggestion. CAVES. They are in every adventure and are often grossly missunderstood by world-builders and they have so much cool stuff in them that isn't even used. Teach. Us. About. Caves.
Just some notes on a few minor mistakes. -the Inuit did not build teepees, they used a similar tent called a tupiq in the summer months. -for winter they used a more permanent shelter in the winter called a qammaq. This may or not be made in a depression/hole, used a stone base, and would use bones for the frame, and a combination of sod, skins, and moss for the walls and roof, and use snow for additional insulation. -the Inuit are not actually native to North America, they are descended from Siberian colonists who wiped out the native population who are now referred to as the Dorset. They arrived in North America in the early medieval age, and arrived in Canada around the same time as the Vikings.
Also, Inuit is plural (they don’t say Inuits) & you started by referring to them in present tense, but switched to past tense (see 12:53). I’m not Inuit, just a Canadian who had an Inuit college buddy, & I’m pretty sure they’re still expert navigators of their tundra (I certainly would feel safer if they’re navigating my expedition 🤓).
Fun fact: the Finnish word for Aurora is "revontulet", which still carries that old mythological vibe because it literally translates to "fox's fires" Though the fox part is a really old word for a fox, "repo", that I don't think anyone still uses in regular speech.
Also, pohja can mean bottom or North. Midnight sun shows clear connection. Etelä, South, is derivation of stem ete meaning front. That is, setting the doorway of the teepee like tents called Kota south ward to keep warmth.
You forgot about the Sami, they're a sister culture to the nenets and live pretty much the same way but they live in northern Fennoscandinavia instead of Russia.
0:19 you guys dont find moss interesting??? the different types are truly fascinating, especially with how diverse it can be, at my cottage, the moss on one of the islands on the lake is completely different than the moss on the mainland,
13:19 woaw, WOAW!! show it more than 1 second please! To my western eyes, this looks almost extraterrestrial yet also so undesrtandable. This is so awesome and fascinating!
Also, Native Alaskans prefer to be called that, as Inuits named the entire region after themselves and the Native Alaskans had no say in the matter over in Canada.
Huh! As a Latvian it's always really interesting to hear how other nations celebrate midsummer, and the Finns especially do it very similarly to us! Singing, dancing, finding love, bonfires to await the sunrise (because this far South the sun does set, the night is just much shorter), drinking, even Johannes sounds like Jānis/Jāņi. Fascinating!
Tundras can be interesting to build fantasy civilisation. For exemple, you can deside that elves are unable to digest starch and most folklore give them magic powers that can help plant and animal life, making them a far less destructive species than humans, and they do have equal intelligence. Which means that they could form a refined, sedentary civilization up in the tundra if they can build special structures for fungiculture and their nature healing powers can be used to not deplete sources of lichen. Berries could be either cultivated or gathered around the sites. Raising some kind of land animal and water species would complete the diet.
Yesss! I love the geomorphology of tundras and it was a shame I couldn't really find any videos on it. Note: pingos, patterned ground, and palsas are inherently tundra features caused by the annual melting and refreezing of permafrost, but kettle lakes are formed during glaciation. Therefore, if your world did not have any ice ages during the previous 50,000 years or so, then the kettle lakes will most likely not be present.
Can we get a video of you dissecting the geographical/topographical nightmare that is Louisiana? The bridge that goes right through a lake The town that exists on a razor-thin spit of land The river that just keeps going despite numerous opportunities to end
Aye cool shit, loved the vid. Wouldn't really say Scandinavians are have a lot of tundra though, unless you mean the more northern parts where the Sami live. Edit: this is coming from a Norwegian dude btw
@@DaDunge Iceland and Greenland aren't Scandinavian though. By sub-arctic islands I'm guessing you mean Svalbard, which I don't know much about other than that it has a tiny population and was settled around 1400 or something by Russians. But yeah, that one might very well qualify.
@@fdumbass The subarctic islands are The Orkeneys, the shetlands and the Faroe islands. Svalbard and Jan Mayen are Artic not subarctic. And yes but we weren't talking about Scandinavia the geographical area we were talking about the Scandinavians, by which he clearly meant the Norse.
@@DaDunge I assume that if he'd meant Norse he'd have used the name. Besides, we're discussing terrain, so using the Nose ethnicity as opposed to Scandinavian will just complicate things, it would mean having to include the settlers in Ukraine, England and France. This would obviously be ludicrous to include in a discussion on tundras. I'm open to the idea that he was mixing Scandinavian with Nordic though, since that's something few foreigners know the difference between.
@@fdumbass He's an englishspeaker, they always use Scandinavian for Norse or Nordic. No we are talking about which peoples who settled Tundra terrain and yes the norse did. They also settled loads of other types of places but they did settle areas so far north that it is above the tree line. The island groups I mentioned all have very few trees if any. And it's obvious we're talking peoples because he said Scandinavians Nenets and Inuits and Nenets and Inuits are peoples not geographical areas.
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Another interesting thing about Iceland is that once upon a time, it wasn't quite as barren-looking. It was actually forested quite well in places, but over the centuries the Icelandic people basically removed every tree on the island for building materials or fuel. That sort of thing could be interesting to weave into the history of an analagous, fictional island society.
funny because in the world I'm making the mountain people use the mountains as their main city because it allows for good insulation as well as protection from the dangerous creatures living in the cliffs like the Dragon-Eagle (a giant eagle with around an 18 foot wingspan and sometimes eats people). They also use the little valleys and plateaus to protect their goats and reindeer.
The night above the arctic circle is not dark and scary. It is brighter than the dark further south. One of the reasons might be because the sun is closer to the horizon all the time. But one reason which is definitely true is that all the ground is white and sparkly. And that makes everything brighter. I'm a Swiss guy who made an exchange semester in Finland from August to December. And when I came back home in December the days felt way brighter and the nights felt darker. Also the air and plants in around middle/south Finland felt exactly the same as the swiss alps in the altitude of around 1500 meters above sea level in Switzerland. And I can confirm that if you travel from Helsinki to the North Cape, it is pretty similar to a hike from 1500 MASL to 2500 MASL in the alps. It's just slower and you don't have a nice view. But it is interesting to be hiking around what feels above the tree line and behind the next hill you see the sea where you expect some trees :) And on the week of midsummer even cities like Helsinki are empty in Finland. I haven't personally experienced it, but almost everyone goes to their huts in the north. One thing that is also interesting to know is that in the north part of Norway _(and perhaps the entire Scandinavia)_ people put candles and other lights into their windows during winter. I think it is to show warmth and human presence in the long and cold winter nights. Fun fact: Do you know how you know if you are on Finnish ground or on Norwegian ground when you encounter a hut in nature? When the hut is at a lake then it is Finland, because of the sauna and when the hut is on top of a hill then it is Norway because of the view.
I live in sweden, and when ever I travell north, the mosquitos get insane. I have a relative who lives in the country side, they have even more. Once, I got there with 3 mosquito bites, stayed for 2h, and left with 26.
Here in Birmingham we've got Warstone Lane. Originally Hoarstone (as in Hoar frost), the big old rock got dropped off during the Glacier's retreat and was subsequently utilised as a boundary marker between Warwickshire and Staffordshire. It now sits on a plinth in the Jewellery Quarter Cemetry .. Just a fun little bit of Tundra-adjacent IRL worldbuilding!
The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness books (set in stone age Scandinavia, 6000 years ago) actually have several different interpretations of the Northern Lights The one that comes up most often, because it's the one believed by the Forest clans and the main characters are from the Forest clans, is that the lights are the First Tree, which is involved in both the creation myth and the afterlife The clans of the Far North don't exactly see a lot of trees, so instead they believe the lights are the fires their ancestors light to keep warm And the Otter Clan lives on a lake, so they see it as a cosmic reed bed that shelters the spirits of the ancestors All different interpretations that depend on the environment that the people who believe it live in (and the way that cultures are shaped by their environment and how this leads to differences is actually a big theme of the books), although each belief has some connection to the afterlife
This is a really well made video. This had to take a lot of work and its appreciated. I got to learn some new things about tundras and your friend's balls
Mountaines regions and features are called alpine because english is a germanic language with a lot of romance language influence. The latin word for the alps is alpes. It would be weirder if english used a japanese derived word
I'm from Alaska. We have legit rainforests in some areas like Girdwood. One of my favorite places to go hiking in the summer as it's cool (65 ish) enough to counteract overheating... and it's fucking beautiful
Remember brothers, never use helmet with horns on battle, this is unpractical. People from Skandinavia (and not only them) were use horned helmets for rituals (:
Norwegian here, the sami oftened feard the northern lights. They would try to stay inside when it happens as it was a sign of bad omen and could kidnap or kill you.
Really good comprehensive video! I have been working on a campaign setting that's pretty much late medeval high fantasy Californa the size of Europe that has an artic area just above it. And this video gave me some things to think about what the artic terrain will be and I think my original idea of Tiga still works. Also, it has a world edge type mountains range going on that are snow-capped so now I know to think of them as now in terms of animals. And what airship bases might be like as the setting is about to be invaded by a steampunk nation from over them.
Don't worry what he said about why the vikings went raising is complete and utter BS. Most vikings weren't even raiders, and slaves they bought or captured weren't brought back to Scandinavia they were sold in Byzantium or the muslim world. There is almost no evidence of large scale use of slavery in scandinavia. And the genetic evidence does not support the idea that loads of women were brought in from elsewhere. To this day Scandinavia suffers from bad genetic diversity.
@@DaDunge Exactly. There was no single main reason for the increase of Scandinavians venturing out at that time, but a combination of several. Here are the 2 that seem most credible to me. 1: The weather had been warming slightly, which lead to an increase of available food and thus an increase in population, and not enough land to go around. Some went out and raided and/or traded to amass wealth so they could buy what land there was in their homeland, others went out and settled/conquered/colonized other lands. 2: There was an increase in hostility towards the non-Christian people of northern and central Europe by the Catholic kingdoms in the late 8th and early 9th century, at least partially spurred on by the actions/attitudes of Charlemagne and his descendants. This included the invasion of the kingdom of Saxony and massacre of Saxon men that refused to convert, and also many Frankish and Anglo-Saxon merchants refusing to trade with the Scandinavians unless they converted. The response was that if they couldn't get what they wanted through peaceful trade, they'd get it through raid and conquest.
You should’ve mentioned the pomors of the White Sea, they built special ships that could navigate Ivey waters en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_(boat) en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomors
It would be cool if much of this was actually implemented in the MC servers themselves. Realistic latitude-based biomes and biome specific plant growth and such.
We don't use "alpine" in the biome name because Europe likes to think it's the entire world, we do so because "alpine" is a synonym to "mountainous" because Europe likes to think it's the entire world
How can it be a mystery why the Vikings started raiding? The Christians had destroyed the pagan temples in Germany and christianized the people by the sword. Many who resisted the forcefull conversion had fled northward and spread the word. Then the Frankish Empire and the British kingdoms banned Norsemen from all trade. Is it a surprise that the first raid happened a few months after that?
Cause none of the sources say that, they usually focus on acquiring loot and individual prestige. If it were a revenge thing against other kingdoms, we'd probably see more of a unified norse response to this, but the viking bands were mostly small groups with some loose organization that grew larger as the raids proved successful.
Hey stoneworks, if you see this, I have a dnd setting where a part of the continent was magically cut off from all rainfall and any kind of precipitation, with the exception of one massive, month long season of torrential rain every year. Can you offer any insight on how this may effect the northern tundra in this region, loosely? Directly north of this region is a very tall mountain range that suffers the same curse, and north of that is arctic desert.
I always love when people shit on cold environments as being boring, it really tells you they come from a northern environment where they grew up hating the cold, snow, and all that. Meanwhile they say deserts are beautiful and engaging. As someone who grew up in the desert with 9 months of 120F every year, I can honestly say: NOPE. Better to shovel snow than to suffer mild heatstroke annually. And while the desert *can* look beautiful in certain ways, I'd rather have months of no sun with beautiful starry skies and the occasional aurora. The beauty of the desert is also completely diminished by enduring the heat. "Look at that beautiful sunset, as I'm chugging down my fifth gallon of water today because sweating bullets is a norm here." The temperature won't drop to a comfortable level until about 3 AM, and it will only last for three hours. Once the sun rises at 6 AM, the heat will immediately pick back up. Yeah, I'd rather bundle up and enjoy a tundra. With global warming, people should really embrace the beauty of cold environments before they're completely gone. As per my experience growing up in a searing environment, I can tell you that a post-globally warmed world is not going to be nice.
I am not sure where you got your info about the Scandinavians but a few things got me lifting my I brows (as a Scandinavian viking nerd): 1) Lack of females were not a major factor of the viking raids - never heard of that theory nor that there was a targeted female infanticide (on the contrary females were cherished and played a crucial part in the social and political fabric of the society). I would hardly say it is the most accepted theory. Fact is thought that the Scandinavians had raided their neighbors for millennia (both the archaeological record and historical sources supports this). One factor to a wave of expansion and new settlements was political unrest (read war) and the fact that only the oldest son would usually inherit land combined with a population explosion. So younger sons would have to gather their own wealth in order to buy an existing real estate or pioneer a new one, both needed to start a family and both needed to gain a say in local politics. An "quick and easy" way to get said wealth would be to plunder. Plunder was also a established way to exert political dominance over the neighbors. Vikings though had better ships and their counterparts (who also plundered) and as such had an advantage. 2) The old Norse did not have anything in their mythology about the Northern Lights - which is very weird! At lest until one take a look at the placement of the actual north pole at the time and the axial tilt (both which moves around over time) and realize there were very little Northern Lights in Scandinavia during the first millennia CE - it is not my theory, it is a establish explanation in academia. Anyhow I have never come across any Norse the belief that the Northern Lights would be reflection in the Valkyries chain mail. Valkyries by the way did not choose who would die but would choose the who of the slain that would get a hero's afterlife. Bifrost is said to be the rainbow not the Northern Lights. 3) I understand why you chose northern Norway as an example. However it might be interesting to know that all over Scandinavia the building pattern of settlements were very similar even thought the landscape varied. Scandinavians mainly lived on the shores of fjords and along river valleys, often with a heart land a bit up from the coast, accessible through a river of fjord, that was flat and could support a bigger population. You can see this pattern all over Scandinavia not just Norway. And yes, Scandinavian culture were, and partly still is, maritime in nature and have been so since the first coastal hunter gatherers moved in and hunting seals in the area in the stone age. Waterways were the highways and dense forests, mountains and mires/bogs/swamps made travel over land slow and tedious. 4) Regarding midsummer: you could swap the "Finns" with almost any other circum Baltic culture and the info would still fit with like 95% accuracy. I think Swedes are the only one that do not ritually light bonfires during midsummer (but they do light fires and do bbqs) but Swedes do that ritual at the first day of summer instead. Basically the same ritual but on a different day.
What's going to happen to Alaska when sea levels rise? Is the peninsula tall enough? Would it obstruct currents even underwater and keep things the same?
www.floodmap.net/ set it to 70 to see what the maximum projected sea level rise looks like. Seems like the big peninsula would be more of an island chain. But yes, it would still obstruct most global currents because most currents are very very big and deep. I don't think 70 meters would make much of a difference regarding what could block massive global currents.
