Before totally accepting your premise, of avoidance of cliches, I'll note that use of parallels is only partly laziness. It's also shorthand, abbreviations, symbology. If your story (game, whatever - you're telling a story one way or another!) is focused on, say, politics, or interpersonal relationships, or anything other than the revealing of an imaginative setting, well, the setting becomes just support material. Put another way, if you make the reader think too much to piece together all the unique elements you're stringing together into a plausible whole, he won't have energy left to follow the plot.

The best alternate worlds and unique settings I have read have been *background* for a good tale. Maybe over the course of multiple stories or an arc of books there will be enough explanation to fully show the inventive genius of a setting, but maybe not.

Now, it's a decent idea for the AUTHOR to have a good picture of how his world hangs together -- that drives all manner of detail, of interesting twists, of things happening that maybe wouldn't happen on Earth. That's delight; long drawn-out explanation of the myriad uniqueness of even a welll-thought-out world can be instead drudgery.

Now, if you want a polar civilization that's not merely predatory, but can at least stand on their own better than Earth's Norse raiders could, then you just tweak the basic necessities. Everybody's got to have food... maybe there are some fairly *easy* ways to get food in the frozen north on your planet. Millenia ago some since-fallen civilization stored its surplus food for later in hermetically sealed containers in the natural icebox of high latitudes. Your northerners could literally mine food, as they dig up the ancient c-rations and MRE's. Maybe as they dig for food, they stumble across valuable minerals that fuel their industrial development. Maybe the planet has scads of necessities fairly easily mined in the northlands and the tropics and temperate zones are geologically poor... instead of mule teams pulling borax out of a desert where otherwise people would choose not to live, you have musk-oxen teams pulling wagonloads of anthracite. Or copper. Or asbestos... Maybe your mid and low-latitude folks are beset by hyperactive lightning storms or active volanoes, and fireproof cloth is worth its weight in... wheat?

One need not be totally self-sufficient to not be parasitical; way too many fantasy nationbuilders want their people to have every advantage - kind of a misplaced parental prosperity wish for one's offspring. Rather, storytellers and worldbuilders should impose limitations, should create deficits, and should plan shortages - the better to force trade, conflict, smuggling, inventiveness, and all manner of goodness in the repertoire of a storyteller. So maybe your northerners (or polar southerners! Don't leave off the south pole!) do have the logical lack of agriculture -- they could be wealthy in other ways, and able to trade with myriad warmer peoples for necessities.

Agriculture need not be fields of waving grain. Tunnels of fungi could provide either human food, or a base link in a food chain that gets your people some animal protein. Think "what would bring food toward poles?" Well, how about polar waters being spawning grounds? Pick your species from herring to whales - seafood could well swim right up to your kitchen doors. Birds... penguins maybe? All the animal based diets you think of DO have plants at the base somewhere; in the Arctic it just might be algae and plankton in the depths, instead of tree leaves and grass like in my neighborhood. How about a religion that has shrines in the frozen wastes - make travel easy enough, and hordes of pilgrims bringing offerings could supply a fair bit of food.

Slip a little further from human-based systems, and you could postulate races literally mining food in the Arctic. A petroleum-eating race would have cut short any discussion of an Alaskan pipeline from Prudhoe Bay... coal definitely has stored energy; maybe the evolutionary stage of your cyberfolk is a steampunk-ish level of coal-fired automatons with difference-engine brains?

Maybe ALL your planet's middle latitudes lack trace elements essential to your people's well being; by bitter experience they've found out that those comfy warm regions are *death* in a few short years (decades, centuries, whatever). Maybe your planet has virulent diseases or insane amounts of insects, which the cold of the poles is the only defense against. Maybe all the mid- or low-latitude land is low coral atolls, and typhoons regularly wipe mankind from those delightful vacation spots. Or maybe the only slightly sub-arctic lands are the ONLY places things like mosquitoes and gnats thrive, and those are part of your peoples' reproductive cycle; journey equatorward for harvesting some grain (maybe on land tended by slaves and convicts?) but always returning home to the ice where one can raise a good family and where the hearth warmth is more... Personal than that enervating general heat of the sun of the equator.

UV. Maybe your people NEED a lot of ultraviolet and your planet has long-term polar ozone holes that let more in. Low-UV latitudes allow some dread skin parasite to flourish, or permit some nasty predator species to flourish, so only near the poles does one find relative safety. Or your people are adapted best for the long nights and days of extreme latitudes' summer and winter, if you have a decent axial tilt. Malaria may be 100% fatal for your folks.... there's a reason to stick to icebound territory. Or switcheroo - the whole planet is icebound or ocean and only the ozone holes, ground radiation, coal deposits, and some volcanoes make the poles even remotely habitable.

In any of those situations, say ALL of your worlds' cultures live near the poles and raid the temperate zones for (naturally occurring) resources and food - that way there's no easier life to generate a "higher civilization" to compare with.