Saqualaminoi

These towering humanoids are built for brutal cold. White or gray fur covers them completely, growing especially dense on their soles and even across their palms. Their heads sit low, seemingly sunk between the shoulders, and their small, flat faces resist frostbite. Prominent fangs show when they open their mouths, though they never bite in a fight. They are clever, but their culture is very primitive.

Saqualaminoi have never needed finesse, since they are usually the largest things on the mountain. Despite their frightening looks they are peaceable and fight only to feed themselves or defend themselves. They pound foes with massive fists, each blow enough to drop an ordinary man. A few carry crude clubs of bone, wood or stone that deal 2d6+4 damage, though a club-wielder gets just one attack per round.

Cold of any kind, mundane or magical, cannot harm them, although a falling chunk of ice still hurts. Their wide, clawed feet carry them over snow and ice without any movement penalty.

Ice caves and cracks in the frozen walls along the glacier fringes of the highest ranges serve as their homes. Life centers on the family: a bull takes one mate and the two raise their young together. Families living near one another form a loose community that cooperates only now and then, most often to hunt. Their quarry is mountain sheep, goats and marmots. They do not normally prey on other humanoids, and tend instead to be fascinated by anything that looks like them.

When storms drive off the game or food runs short, they range beyond their usual territory, and because those lean times usually come with foul weather, lowlanders know them as monsters that charge out of blizzards to raid and kill.

Their speech is a crude tongue of howls and grunts; they have no writing and make only basic tools of stone and wood. They have little in the way of formal ideas of good and evil, but their nature leans toward good.

These are primitive hunters whose coarse pelts, luckily for them, are worthless to trappers. Their treasure amounts to the odd shiny trinket that caught their interest.