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The region known as the North is, as may be determined by the name, in the far north of the world. Or it might be south; keep going north and you'll find it eventually. It's a cold, harsh land to those unprepared for it, but people have made a life there, as they usually do, among the various kinds of horrific animal life there. Northern life is generally seperated into two distinct sections, though there are exceptions that I'll mention as well. (Any contradictions I accidentally make with something Niklas said in the past can be explained by Niklas being insane and misremembering things, as well as only having gotten a partial Northern education before he went running south in shame.)

The Ráyds
This is where many of the menfolk of the Northerners reside. A Ráyd is essentially a large endlessly-moving collection of sleds, toboggans, seal hide chairs pulled by tame animals, and other various ramshackle transportation devices and such. If a Ráyd is large enough it might even have portable buildings being dragged along with it. It consists of a large amount of people who essentially run around killing things and cooking them. They're usually men, but sometimes women as well - think Orks from Warhammer, but instead of building up to go to war, they bounce around the North collecting cooking ingredients and whenever they feel ready they cheerfully barrel toward the closest Home and spend a week or more cooking great feasts there, usually sleeping with whatever available and willing women they can find, getting into fights over said women, impressing the locals, bartering for rare mounts or pets/food/alcohol, etc. After their supplies are dried up they pack up and head off into the wilderness to gather more ingredients. Each Ráyd has it's own individual name, which in typical Northern fashion are long unpronounceable babble to most anyone else, and when they barrel into a Home anyone who wishes can join up into one of them and go gallivanting off on adventures. The primary reason they do this and are so successful at it are the Chefs, which is the colloquial name for their food mages. The real name isn't given to outsiders. While any member of a Ráyd may be an excellent chef, as Niklas showed in his first appearance, and can whip up a delectable ... thing with anything nearby, the Chefs are another matter entirely. In terms of magic, they're basically food mages, that become so skilled in cooking that they basically cast magical spells by cooking and can imbue food with magic properties, such as infusing a rabbit stew with such vitality that a few mouthfuls will sustain a man for a week or more. This can also be used offensively, to often hilarious results, such as a pie that's extremely explosive when digested but irresistible to those who smell it, and other such things. (If you object to any part of this, let me know and how you think it can be worked to fit in with LBAD lore and I'll try to fit it in.) On the rare occasion that two (or more) Ráyds meet, they challenge each other to a cooking contest, which is also essentially a magical duel for the Chefs in each Ráyd. The format for these is fairly simple: each Ráyd is given a day to construct food, however much they want - the members might all make their own dishes, or they might all collaborate or whatever. When the preparation period is done, they offer it to the judge, which is a supernatural being who's power level and such I'll leave to you - it's called different things by different Ráyds; Niklas' dad called him the Chairman, others call it the Judge, or the Evaluator, or whatever. Via a Chef ritual, it's summoned, eats the proffered food, then tells the Ráyds which food was best, second best, etc. The losing Ráyd is then incorporated into the winning one. Niklas' dad's Ráyd had never lost a competition until the ninjas showed up. Of course, a Ráyd's not solely about cooking - there are also axe enthusiasts, hunting parties, epic poem contests shouted at the top of one's lungs, etc. It's a menagerie of manly activities, essentially, with the main focus being on manly cooking. There is an informal rule of Ráyds that prevents them from growing into mongrel hordes: no kids in the Ráyd. Whether this is a consequence of the Ráyds mostly being made up of men or something else, kids are left in the Homes until they're old enough to join a Ráyd on their own. This has the side effect of spawning new Ráyds if one doesn't visit a Home for too long: the growing population of excited young men eventually reaches critical mass and they leave en mass as a new Ráyd. The father does generally stay and help raise the kid, entering a marriage with the mother. They might leave along with their son to a Ráyd once they're grown up, or they might not, depends on the man. Same with a daughter, though it's rare that a woman joins a Ráyd. That's about all there is to say about the Ráyd side of Northern culture - the other side is much more terrifying.

The Homes
While the menfolk and some exceedingly testosterone-infused women of the North gallivant around in Ráyds, the more sensible types decided to actually settle down and build some reasonable homes and such. These villages they founded are called Homes, due the fact that it was often one family which founded it. Eventually these grew into great communities of several hundred/thousand/whatever, with genetic diversity ensured by the Ráyds criss-crossing the land. A Home is of course made up primarily of women, as 99% of the men leave on a Ráyd once they're of age. A typical woman in a Home can perform many tasks to keep the Home up to shape, whether it be farming, animal husbandry, carpentry, blacksmithing in some of the more prosperous ones, etc. They're the type more likely to ogre an invading moose to death with a pike wall rather than singing it to death as a man might do or something equally ridiculous. A Home itself generally looks like a typical village in medieval Scandinavia - well-built houses with thatched roofing, a great hall in the centre of town where supplies are stored for the residents to hole up in if the winter gets particularly bad, some farmland, etcetera. There's also typically a large amount of animals hanging around the place, almost always of the same species. This is because of the hairomancer.
There's usually only one per Home, but if a Home gets particularly prosperous it might attract more. A hairomancer is a type of mage that some Northerners in a Home are born with the talent to be - or rather given that anyone could become a hairomancer with time and effort, certain Northerners have it come easy to them. They have stupendously long hair - often 40 feet long or more, and in LBAD terms they use this hair as their focus to do some very interesting things. Firstly, they wear it as their clothing, in a variety of different manners depending on the hairomancer. Secondly, they (obviously) use it to control all different manners of hair, whether it be growing it, creating it on otherwise hairless objects like rocks, or manipulating it - Niklas wasn't kidding when he said he saw a mammoth strangled to death by its own fur once. Thirdly, they somewhat allow the mass domestication of the normally hostile Northern wildlife that allows the Homes to thrive even without a Ráyd coming in. The way they do this is by aligning themselves to a certain type of animal hair. Some do the Northern rabbits, others the raven (yes the birds have hair here), sometimes the moose - it varies. They align themselves to that type of animal by going out into the forests/tundra/wherever they are, hunting down multiple copies of the animal they choose to align to alone, and building their dwelling place out of their parts. Of course, this being Northern wildlife they're hunting, this ensures that any aspiring hairomancers that survive are quite badass. (The reason Kruub lives in a cave of dung and is kinda made fun of by the community is this - he collected the dung of the common Northern Landfish and built his home out of that, leading him to be said to be somewhat of a coward, which is somewhat true in that he's a big pragmatist.) There's a magical aspect to the whole aligning ritual that I'm not touching on because I'm not sure if you think it works or not, but afterwards any hair the hairomancer produces will be of that animal. Generally, the more dangerous the animal they aligned to, the more dangerous (and rare) the hairomancer. You'd only find one or maybe two hairomancers in the entire North that aligned themselves with bears, for instance. Hairomancers are usually women as well, mainly due to the prevalence of females in the Homes, which is where it is instructed. After a hairomancer aligns themselves with an animal, they tend to attract that kind of animal to them, and the large amounts of animals hanging around the Home leads to a good surplus of meat and/or milk, or even battle mounts if the Home is 'lucky' to have a dangerously aligned hairomancer. For instance, one of the most powerful Homes in the North is home to a Hairomancer that has attuned herself to bears, and thus Ráyds come by frequently to plead/compete for the honor of a trained warbear. This'd be where our prospective bear came from, being traded to the Black Circle as an untrained example in exchange for something for the hairomancer - maybe instruction in life magic, maybe a magic item or something, you decide.

That essentially sums up the two main sides of Northern culture - the nomadic maniac 'do the fun thing' Ráyds, and the matriarchal, more sensible, and very hairy Homes. Of course there are still all manner of oddities you might want to inject in, and there are some weirdos that go wandering around in the deep woods for suicidal reasons known only to them.

Northern Language Facts
Northern language is as dense and unpronounceable as it is for two reasons: firstly, when the Northmen's ancestors first arrived there, it was so cold that a lot of their language was distorted by shivering - hence why so many of the oldest Homes are named things like Bbbrrvrbrtbröbbbtttrtrtrbbbbrgbrebga, which is merely an overly shivered 'Grega', the name of the founder of the Home. As the years passed and the Northerners grew accustomed to the cold, their stubbornness stopped them from changing their naming traditions, so they developed their language into an incomprehensible rumble.

Northern Wildlife
Northern wildlife, like most other aspects of the land, is batshit insane and rather more dangerous compared to most conventional wildlife. Not only are there more exotic wildlife things such as mammoths and landfish - fish with legs on them - everything is bigger than you'd expect them to be and also very hairy. Whether this is because of prolonged use of hairomancy or just the climate, everything has a thick coat of fur, even the birds and the fish, though this doesn't seem to affect their flight or swimming capabilities. There are many species that are justifiably feared in the North, including the Northern Badger, a creature so vindictive and stubborn it'll follow someone literally forever looking to bite and gnaw at them if bothered, to the Elkegent, a gigantic version of an elk that stands 15 feet tall at the shoulder and is very short tempered, but none more so than the Northern Bear.

On Northern Bears
Take an adult male Kodiak grizzly bear, around 1400 pounds of muscle, claw, teeth and hate. Now upscale it, so it weighs 3000 pounds on average and stands about 7 feet high at the shoulder. Now thicken it's already dense fur, and make it so tough that an axe errantly swung at it will be caught in the bramble-like confines of the fur. Then give it an ability that seems frighteningly similar to hairomancy in that it can manipulate it's steel-wool-like fur, growing it to make gigantic claws to swipe at unwary targets at, limbs to climb over obstacles with enough strength to throw it's bulk at a target, or maybe even just to envelop a man in the bristly confines of it's fur and shred him into gristle with nothing but fur power. Congratulations, you've got yourself an average Northern Bear specimen. Now you know why Mama Thrûûüžhkadnibœgrãāndran, or Mama Thrushka to outsiders, is so feared for somehow beating one of the things into domestication.
(In ingame terms, a northern bear would have natural armor from it's fur, which is so dense and tough it's more like a coat of steel brambles than hair, and the ability to form limbs and such out of it - giant claws, tentacles, additional feet, whatever. It could also grow this fur to an extent that likely gets bigger as it ages so as to make many extra limbs at the same time, resulting in one of them potentially turning into a literal blender of fur, teeth, and death.)

On the Differentiation of Northern Genders
It should be noted that the reason most men join Ráyds and most women stay at their Home isn't just cultural, it's actually somewhat genetic. Over the years, the practices of the Ráyds and Homes have become naturally selected for to an extent, so that a normal Northern man will naturally be exciteable, capable of getting quick flashes of genius in relation to things they like doing, have an unhealthy obsession with whatever it is they do like doing, and they tend to be very competent in that area as well. Women, on the other hand, are more stable compared to the manic men, more generally competent at a range of tasks, more grounded ... the more normal behaved gender. Of course personality traits do differ and there are some people who go against type (ie Torkel), but the general trends to tend to go that way.

Additional Thoughts On Hairomancy
Since mages require a focus, a haironancer would need to use either his/her own hair as a focus, or the hair of a companion mammal. Actually now that I consider it, that's more badass: hairomancers go out and beat a Northern animal into submission before using the hair of the animals as their focus. The other animals that hang around a Home are just the result of the hairomancer's 'familiar' becoming really badass as a result of having hairomancy constantly channeled through their fur, so they gather hangers-on.