Around these parts (and in a shockingly large number of other areas), the saying “If you don’t like the Weather wait five minutes and it’ll change” is a common saying (insert another time as applicable). I sometimes find that the focus on Weather sometimes veers away from the flavorful and more of a tad to the mechanical in terms of how it’s implemented at tables. If we’re very fortunate, we might get a word or so of description (Rain, Snow, Sunny, etc.), while most of the wordcount is dedicated to various negative impacts they have on Travel and the Player Characters.
I feel that Good Weather should be as good as Bad Weather is bad, and don’t like to pass up an opportunity to toss in some additional descriptors. Rather than just creating more penalties/bonuses to track, I usually have Weather interface with procedures. Encounter Distance/Visibility is a big one, but so is Foraging/Hunting (resources), and even Travel Times themselves. The Weather can make folks grumpy or even more predisposed to parley (Reaction Rolls). Awful Weather can ding Morale/Loyalty of certain Monsters and soldiery as well, just as auspicious skies might have the opposite effect. And of course, there’s always the narrative considerations of a puddle-strewn battlefield or sodden or wonderfully dry firewood as well. I could Talk About The Weather for ages.
So here are a hundred ways to embellish the meteorological goings on in your worlds. These tables can be utilized by Season with a d20 or randomized completely with a d100. There are even twenty especially strange ones that might crop up from time to time and spice things up even more.
Naturally, I may find myself revisiting this a bit. I’d like to finish about 16 more entries for each, so that I can map it to the d66, and then allow these tables to leveraged with my standard “Reaction Roll with the Sky” that I tend to start a Travel Day with (reading the 2d6 as “tens” and “ones” for that delicious double-duty. This will probably work in a similar way to my Wilderness Vignettes 😊.
Hehh, I use the 2d6 Reaction roll for determining weather (from unfavorable to favorable) as well, then sometimes grab a keyword for flavor from any weather table, like the one from the Dolmenwood hexcrawl document - now I'm adding your stuff to that selection as well.
ReplyDeleteThanks, happy new year!
Incredible work as always
ReplyDeleteI love this table! Amazing. Exactly what I needed now my player got a weather predicting magic item. My only gripe is the winter section, all the weathers there seem to be of the extreme cold or wet varieties. I'm probably going to edit that one to get some more mild winter weathers there.
ReplyDeleteTrez bien!
ReplyDelete