There are many treacherous creatures that lurk In a landscape as harsh as the arctic. Is your party ready for them?

Exploring frozen lands in Dungeons & Dragons can bring many challenges to your players. Environmental challenges can make the trek a harrowing experience, and arctic monsters that hide in the snow can be the end of unaware adventurers.

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Your party can encounter various creatures on their journey through frozen lands, and D&D has a lot of options for such monsters. Knowing some of the best choices for these settings can help you design fun and memorable encounters for your players.

While goliaths are one of the most popular playable races in D&D, their affinity for cold and their tribal nature can make them into intriguing NPCs in an arctic setting. These tall humanoids can create exciting and intimidating encounters from a friendly tribe to groups of raiders or bandits.

While there is no official stat block for goliath NPCs, you can easily modify bandits or berserkers to create your homebrew goliath raiders. With their natural resistance to cold and their shared ancestry with giants, they can also be used as minions in more challenging encounters.

While traversing frozen landscapes and freezing storms, nothing can be more horrific than the ice itself coming to life and attacking you. These small elementals can be easily hidden in a frozen environment and surprise your players while they are struggling with the harsh weather.

Ice mephits only have a challenge rating of 1/2, but with their frost breath, and their ability to cast fog clouds they can pose a real threat to low-level parties. Even if your players can easily destroy them, with their death burst feature they can further damage nearby players, making them especially dangerous in higher numbers.

The big foot of snowy mountains, yetis, are popular monsters in folklore and pop culture media. One of the greatest joys of playing D&D is bringing these iconic monsters to life using our imagination, and yetis are a great option for your players to encounter in arctic biomes.

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Yetis can make challenging encounters for low to mid-level players. With a challenge rating of 3, they are relatively tanky. And with a special ability called the chilling gaze, they can deal high amounts of cold damage and paralyze their target, making them capable of knocking characters down very quickly if they fail their saving throws.

These huge elementals native to the elemental plane of ice, sometimes find their way into the cold climates of the material plane in their hunt for warm-blooded creatures. Frost salamanders are dangerous creatures, and when one finds their way into populated areas, they can wreak havoc on the world.

With a challenge rating of 9, frost salamanders are one of the strongest elementals your players can face. Even though they are vulnerable to fire, dealing fire damage to them might not be the best idea. Whenever a frost salamander takes fire damage, they immediately recharge their devastating freezing breath, which deals 8d10 cold damage in a large cone.

While there are many beasts that roam the frozen lands of D&D worlds, non can be as iconic and as dangerous as mammoths. These wooly elephants are not predators and probably won't attack your players unprovoked, but if a fight ensues, it can be a deadly one.

For a challenge rating of 6, mammoths have an impressively large hit point pool, and with the combination of their trampling charge and stomp attack, they can easily deal upwards of 50 damage in a single turn. While not an evil monster, a mammoth can be a challenging hunt for mid-level parties.

Hags are iconic evil fey who inhabit a variety of different biomes, and the ones who are most likely to be found in arctic environments, are the pale blue bheur hags. These hags have a very creepy appearance as their skin looks like the frozen skin of humans, and like most hags, they love to make the lives of those around them as miserable as possible.

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They can cast the spell control weather each day to make the climate of their surroundings even more extreme. In combat, they have access to powerful spells and abilities such as cone of cold, ice storm, and 50 feet of flying speed. Even among other types of hags, bheur hags are one of the strongest opponents for your players.

There are many types of giants in D&D, and they have a considerable range of difficulty based on the biomes that they live in. Frost giants are not the strongest of the giant kin, but combined with the extreme weather and dangerous creatures that they can ally with, they can play a major role in an arctic setting.

With a challenge rating of 8, even a single frost giant can be a threat to mid-level parties. But a small group of them, perhaps with mammoth mounts or other arctic creatures as their allies, can make for an epic battle for high-level players.

Undeads are horrifying monsters to face in any environment, but when they roam the caves of a snowy mountain, you know that they're particularly dangerous. Boneclaws are not necessarily an arctic monster, but with their cold resistance and their appearance, they fit really well into the biome.

Boneclaws are liches that were not strong enough to achieve lichdom, so they have to serve another evil master in their form. As long as the master lives, the boneclaw will be reanimated within hours if it's killed, making it a strong and challenging recurring enemy for high level players.

A variety of different creature types are included in this list, but if you want to add some fiendish flavour to your icy world, ice devils are the perfect choice. In the hells themselves, these large devils would be some of the most dangerous creatures that your players might face, and if you bring them into your arctic setting, they can be the main villain of the story.

With high intelligence, challenge rating of 14, a variety of damage and condition immunities, and decent damage output, ice devils can be a memorable boss fight for your characters. Considering their hellish origin, the reason for them being in the material realm can be an epic adventure on its own.

And finally, the apex predator of the frozen lands, is no one but the white dragon. Nothing is scarier when the storm clears, only for the adventurers to hear the wing claps of the most brutal and animalistic of the chromatic dragons.

White dragons vary in their difficulty based on their age. The young ones can be a great fight for a low level party with a challenge rating of 6, but an ancient white dragon in its own lair can be the final boss of a campaign for high level characters.

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A gamer since childhood, Nima studied Architecture in University of Tehran, and wrote his first gaming related article in an student run zine, NAAM. After graduating, he decided to actually follow his passion, and began writing game reviews on a personal blog. Soon after, he started working as a writer with gaming websites and outlets, and now, a List Article Writer for thegamer.