Location from Icewind Dale by R.A. Salvatore / Wizards of the Coast / Black Isle Studios
A vast frozen tundra north of the Spine of the World — one of the most inhospitable settled regions in all of Faerûn, where survival itself is an act of defiance.
The wind is the first thing — a ceaseless, keening pressure that numbs exposed skin in minutes and drives snow horizontally across the flats. Beneath it, the creak and groan of shifting ice provides a bass note that seems to come from the earth itself. The air smells of nothing in the deep cold, but near the towns it carries woodsmoke, fish oil, and the faintly sweet rot of tanning hides. In the long winter darkness imposed by Auril's curse, the tundra becomes a sensory void — travelers navigate by wind direction and the faint luminescence of snow. Sound carries strangely across the flat terrain; a wolf's howl five miles distant sounds intimate, while a companion's shout ten feet away can be swallowed whole. The landscape transforms between seasons: summer brings weeks of midnight sun, wildflowers erupting from permafrost, and clouds of biting insects that rival the cold for misery. Beneath the snow lie cairns, frozen corpses of unlucky travelers, and the buried remnants of civilizations that tried and failed to tame this place.
An endless expanse of white and grey stretching to every horizon, broken only by the dark shapes of the three lakes and the lone peak of Kelvin's Cairn. Drifting snow obscures the boundaries between land and sky. In winter, the aurora dances in ribbons of green and violet above the tundra. The ten scattered settlements appear as clusters of warm light against an overwhelming darkness, their chimney smoke torn sideways by winds that never truly stop.
Also known as: The Dale, The Frozen North, The Far North