At the moment I am sending my group towards the north pole to recover the memory of an downed survey satellite in competition with other teams.
What I am on the look out is interesting challenges beyond "roll perception/arctic survial, failed ? you fall down the rabbit err ice hole".

The group consists of 5 Aspected/Full Mages and one KiMage.

I am pretty sure that I am going to hit them with arctic storm spirits in normal and great form coming through an astral construct acting as a gateway, either that or hitting them with the mountains of madness .
Should give them plenty of spells to cast and banishments to do, with the splattered debris of another team to act as a warning (preferable the team they meet waiting for their plane).


Still, what neat ideas do you people got ?

ugh, thats a lot of magic...

The SAT lands on 'unknown' corporate property, that specialized in gene-slicing/tinkering.

Maybe they are geneslicing meta's making changlings- in the attempts to 'icolate and control the genes'?

Perhaps they are trying to make a gene-therapy that will make the recipient completely indoctrinated and subservient to the corporate handlers?

Little of both?

Regardless, if could be a very interesting twist to stumble upon (and have to enter) a corp security zone; and to possibly stumble upon two dozen 'freaks' and sickly meta-types begging to be free once they are in.

See if you can find an old copy of Target: Wastelands. "The Ends of the World" chapter is all about arctic dangers including information on how it affects implants, magic, weapons, gear, and most everything else.

there is also a bit about cold environments in arsenal...

From Target Wastelands
Dehydration and Warmth
Sunburn and Glare
Frostbite
Aurora Polaris
Inuit and Aleut Magics
Tupllak
Ice Snakes
Silap Innua

Much interesting things in there

WMS

How about the WW2 USAAF Arctic Survival Manual?

What about those magical storms that sometimes rage and play hell w/ the mana counts?

That paired w/ an angry polar bear & whiteout conditions could be a real challenge (they're mages... but the critter is big & mundane, and should need a hit or 3 to take down).

Kind of cliche, hitting them in a manner or way when magic is not an option.

Polar bear?
What about polar piasma?

or possibly the odd wendigo

hell, if i understand it right, the original wendigo myth is based on people driven to cannibalism from lack of provisions during winter...

these are also covered in arsenal (if briefly).

there is also:

foot travel
snowstorms
endless days and night
polar vehicles
sea travel
polar magic

I wonder if that chthlu mythis tale (and adapted adventure?) centered about an arctic (or antarctic?) expedition who find a proverbial Thing That Should Not Be... could be somehow incorpored there...

Werebears? Tentacled monsters? Pah. I give you: Nazis on Ice!
Even frostbite's got nothing on that!

Yes, I know, Antarctica is not exactly the North Pole. But I will not let minor geographical inconstencies get in the way of a cheap joke, the same way you should not let them get in the way of a kick-ass pulp adventure!

I am actually in possession of nearly every SR3 source book (and the group runs on that rule set thanks to inertia) .
I will definitly demand a couple of survival(polar)-test, but they spend some serious money on polar equipment, half the group also has the the survival skill, and, well, using the enviroment as the main opponent, I can´t pull that off without it becoming boring.
I will use it as a complicating factor, thats for sure.
I am increasingly tending towards turning this thing into a horror story.

Getting hit with a storm, caused by/strengthened by/strengthing angry storm spirits, hearing screams of another team throught the howling of the storm, and the after it quieting it down discovering the torn apart crawler of them, done by something alien

Mountains disappering and appearing from the horizon, and each time they stand on the horizon the temperature drops below what is thought probable or even possible

And they are forced to recognize that if they want the money they are going to have to enter the mountains

When they arrive the satellite is much to deep for it to gotten their just by rest momentum, and then, while they discuss how they are going to get it out of the ground, the astral construct manifests again, and they are lead deep into ground till they discover the city.

That´s the path my thought are taking me, at the moment.

The ubbergeek, the name of the story is (if you mean the one I think you mean) At the Mountains of Madness, and takes place in the antarctis, I am rereading it at the moment

Oh yes, that was it!

Probably would use Horrors, Shedims or something for the Chthulu feel, I guess...

Whiteouts probably won't work on everyone (IR and whatnot), but they're still pretty fun. And mountains of madness, well, you'll have to have good players to get that maddening feeling to take over. Alien artifacts sounds just like something elder being-ish ^^

Close to the site, have animal life get even scarcer, except for some horribly mutated and maybe agressive ones. That will raise paranoia.

Just say that the satellite was affiliated with Miskatonic University and rip off of Lovecraft for everything else.

Remember that the area is under jurisdiction of the Trans Polar Akut Nation. They may not care for outsiders to go hunting on there territory, or at least pay the fees etc for retrieving such.

WMS

Also, the US and the USSR had a number of bases on the poles. Don't ask me why, probably because the other one had some there. The movie adaption of the comic Whiteout, which you might want to read if you find the opportunity, will tell all about it.

Whiteout, sandstorm, etc... doesn't matter there's tons of particulate matter in the air. It's not smoke it's actual particulate. You're pretty much blocking anything except longwave radio, and depending on what the particulates are made of even that can get scattered (think chaff for jammers in this case).

IR is thermovision... you look in the blinding snow you see... a see of white (assuming black hot thermal vision).

The only people seeing through that are people w/ Radar, Ultrasound, or sonar scanner overlays. So that means targetting magic is going to be a real 'bear' if you pardon the pun.

Have the run occur at night. And by night, I don't mean those piddly nights that people have down south, but a real arctic winter night, the kind that lasts for several months. Leave 30 Days of Night lying around before the game starts so that the players know exactly where this is going and prepare accordingly. Do not begrudge them any metagamed vampire-hunting gear. The more they take the better.

And then have the primary antagonists be Yetis (essentially Sasquatches by another name). Not vampire Yetis, even, just normal Yetis, spear-wielding who happen to all be Twisted adepts with the Cannibalize metamagic, an assortment of dangerous Powers, and sufficient skill to go Lu Bu on the PC's asses. And some of them have firearms.

What could be more fun than being stalked in the dark by an isolated tribe of hungry flesh-eating arctic Sasquatches who all have superb hunting skills and a strong warrior ethos.

didnt that just describe wendigos?

Nope, wendigos are vampire orks. These dudes aren't vampires at all, and thus don't have any vampire weaknesses, which is the point since all of the anti-vampire stuff that the players would have bought when it became obvious that the campaign would be based on 30 Days of Night would be useless. They're just normal Sasquatches who happen to live in the arctic circle and, due to limited food supplies, are not above eating people. And they happen to be adepts. And they might possibly take a liking to some of the PCs in a Deliverance sort of way.

Essentially, its Deliverance in the snow, with added cannibal fun, against people powerful enough to pull a Deliverance on a bunch of magicians without themselves being magicians (though some of them can be, a straight on magician vs. magician fight would be boring). Throw in a Background Count, some allusions to The Thing, and WR's Miskatonic idea, and you've got a scarry little romp in the cold

Hyzmarca: You are one evil bastard.... I wish there were more of you to GM games all over the place.

The only thing which might be troublesome w/ at 'night' is services running dusk to dawn. I could see myself running around w/ a spirit of man casting a 4-5 hit improved reflexes for the duration under that circumstance.

But for awakened yeti's attuned to background count... get a bare handfull of them as mystic adept shamans w/ only a few summoning powers and that would be evil (yeah the yeti raiding party has a spirit on remote service concealing them). It would also provide some means to challenge the players should they resort to astral recon. Really what do you do if they hide in their tents and go astral to scout their surroundings. Adept yeti's would stand out I'd think on astral and would be very vulnerable to manabolting if astrally percieving by flying astral mages, despite the home turf advantage.
(low level-surged: astral vision (10BP), wierd glowing eyes when astrally percieving (-5BP) if you believe like me astral perception is way overcosted for a full point of magic. The glowing eyes is how they can tell who is 'gifted' by the spirits to be shamans).

The Yeti's aren't stupid. They know that they live in a barren world with harsh unforgiving spirits that would just as soon suck the marrow from your bones and the warmth from your blood as look at you, for that reason alone they would avoid astral perception as much as possible and set up their camps in areas with are naturally protected from incursion by the toxic spirits of the frozen wasteland. This means in warded caverns, preferably permanent ones of Earth but temporary ones dug out of snow will also work in a pinch (and make sense for a semi-nomadic people).

If they were smart, they would have used Shape Earth to create a network of tunnels and caverns under the permafrost, where astral spirits cannot easily reach. They're smart, by the way. This provides both protection from astral scouting, insulation from the cold, and the ability to pop up from apparently nowhere.


As for the spirit issues, it works both ways. The Yeti Shamans are also going to have spirits.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FytMNBUR2CQ

I have this weird picture in my head from this.
A bunch of Wookies on Hoth at night, who are also mages or adepts.

weird