Tropic of Evil, Part 1/5: Climate Control
You guys remember that one time when Cavalier jousted Swash and Buckle’s pirate ship to death? And then The Evil Party (who were apparently passengers on board for some reason) got shipwrecked on that desert island? Well grab your sunblock and prepare your Craft (coconut radio) rolls, because The Evil Party is taking a tropical vacation.
I love sudden and dramatic shifts in biome like this. When I’m writing up a mini-dungeon, one of the first things I ask myself is, “What’s different about this setting?” The antagonists are usually the first and most obvious answer. We’ve got the option to search monsters by terrain for a reason after all. It’s all about evoking that sweet, sweet sense of place: putting your cyclops in the cyclopean ruins and your shambling mounds in the swamp. But when there’s an epic journey afoot, and when you’re attempting to best the Pass of Caradhras or cross the Sun’s Anvil, there’s nothing that brings home the extreme change in setting quite like an extreme weather event.
Just think of all those wonderful cinematic moments you’ve got squirreled away in your head. Pirate ships battling in a tempest. Mist coming down the mountainside in a haunted town. Wind kicking up dust (and possibly providing a penalty to ranged attacks) in a western gunfight. In visual media, you have to think about these things. They’re the backdrop of your world. On film, for example, the texture of a scene moves and shifts along with changes in the weather. But when you’re working with a verbal medium like TRPGs, this is exactly the sort of element that tends to disappear. GMs can get away with eliding the weather; with skipping over the seasons. And if you’re not careful, the Land of Adventure becomes an oddly featureless place. There are goblins to fight, gosh darn it! The rain can’t even get you inside the dungeon, and if anyone thinks to ask it’s always “late spring” or “early fall.” You can just move on with the session without sweating it… And unfortunately, the world is poorer for it.
Additional detail is meant to aid in the suspension of disbelief. All those niggling little extras like weather make for a more complete setting. And even if they seem like throwaway lines or box text sometimes, I think it’s worth the extra effort to include them. To that end, I would like to take the opportunity to champion our old friend the Random Weather Table. And I mean any random weather table. It’s exactly the sort of element I want on my GM screen. Additional rules about visibility in fog or treacherous footing in snow are great, but simply having the visual reminder of this is a thing you should be describing there in front of my face is enough. Even if you don’t roll on the thing, you’ll have a handy list of possible weather conditions to jog the memory and pepper your descriptions. And if you do decide to roll, and if you happen to score a 99-00 or whatever, you’ve also got a fun environmental challenge on your hands.
Question of the day then! Do you guys try to incorporate random weather into your games? And if you do, have you ever run into the crazy weather events on the high end of the chart? I’m talking hurricanes, avalanches, and tornadoes showing up to kick around a party. Were there any survivors? Tell us all about your group’s run-ins with nasty weather down in the comments!
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Back when I prepared to DM a kingmaker campaign, I made this chart of the weather and the phases of the moon/the seasons for a year out from campaign start. (I think I found a generator to make the weather for me), complete with temperature, wind direction and any rainfall. I also pasted it next to the chart for how much it’d be likely to rain/be windy in a spot on earth I had decided was analogous (which was also the one used for the weather).
My idea was that this would make it easy for me to describe the weather as the PC’s travelled and to allow for people with high survival to predict coming storms and such-like a day or two ahead of time.
It worked pretty well all in all, the players even changed their travel plans so they’d better be able to seek shelter from time to time.
I didn’t end up recreating the calendar after the first year though, and instead just rolled on the table from time to time, which I kind of regret even though it’d have been a significant amount of work, for something that’d probably just change which day of the month they started their expeditions on.
It’s always a balancing act: how much time are you willing to spend vs. how much impact will it actually have in the campaign?
It makes me wonder if the best solution is to include very general info for climate: “Mostly hot and muggy. Occasional rainfall in afternoon. Major storms 1/season during climactic narrative moments.”
“It’s always a balancing act: how much time are you willing to spend vs. how much impact will it actually have in the campaign?”
That it is, that it is.
I did like the verisimilitude from the weather not always following narrative convenience, through. Sometimes a storm was just a storm instead of a harbringer of drama, which suited the particular tone of the campaign nicely (and sometimes it is created by angry winter fey out to get revenge for a minor accidental insult).
It also fit my sense of fairness that it was more random rather than deliberately picked, since as an campaign where a lot of stuff happened outside rather than in caves and underground ruins and such-like rain and wind could give some serious penalties to the archer in the group.
Always struck me as odd that most weather mechanics boil down to “the archer gets screwed.” There must be different effects out there….
I think some of that was born from a desire to keep the balance of archers the same when the games moved outside the dungeon. The idea being that the penalties to hit would be counteracted by the open space allowing them to shoot significantly farther and thus get more shots in before any melee types could retaliate.
Of course that would depend on actually starting most overland combat on distances where ranged combatants while everybody else just waits for the foes to get close enough (or move closer if they are on the side without the firepower). In my experience that often gets skipped since it’s pretty boring for the non-archer-players sitting around the table.
I love how Succubus looks more scared than the rest at this inclement weather. I guess her Abyssal home layer must have a more even-tempered climate. 😀
And Antipaladin clearly isn’t worried about the morality of his actions when it comes to the Unkicked One. ^_^
That’s why you want to invest in knowledge geography/local or survival when visiting a foreign plane! Well, foreign for Succubus at least.
What I don’t get is why Succubus is even enduring this mishap – as a Succubus, she’s got greater teleport (self only).
She can ditch the gang, nag one of her plane-shift-capable demon peers, or visit ye olde scrolle shop for a way off the island.
Buying a brochure from the local tourist department might also be a good idea. ^_^
Maybe Succubus is just too freaked out to think straight.
“Aaah! Aaaaah! The sky is angry! What is this, what is this?! Is this the sky gods?! Did I anger all of the sky-gods?!How does my mother keep being right about this?! Aaaaahh!”
… Or the fact (and/or the way) Witch summoned her way back when is blocking some of her powers?
Concentration > Wind with hail and debris while casting > 10 + spell level
Or the opposite; she’s dreading the moment when the storm starts disgorging hostile undead, predatory lightning, and acidic blood rain like it would in the Abyss.
I tend to avoid random weather tables, because I find they very rarely add anything to the session. That said, appalling weather definitely does add to a session, and in fact I have just written an adventure for my WFRP group that involves them scaling a very large mountain in search of a dead (they believe) Dragons treasure, and I have loaded the daily encounters with rain, pouring rain, blizzards, and avalanches for their ‘enjoyment’.
Weather definitely has its place as an encounter or dramatic backdrop, I just feel some times it loses something when used randomly, as the players don’t tend to interact with it as much. Even with the best will in the world players can usually sense the difference between ‘a storm rolled on a table’ and ‘foreboding storm as they approach seemingly-abandoned mansion’.
I think this is where I’m coming from when I say, “Even if you don’t roll on the [random weather chart], you’ll have a handy list of possible weather conditions to jog the memory and pepper your descriptions.” The charts’ randomness may be more trouble than it’s worth, but a handy “don’t forget to mention the unseasonable cold” reminder is always welcome.
I experimented with random weather tables in two of my Roll20 campaigns: One set in a tropical climate and one in a more polar one, with appropriate options for each. Not much came of it except for one storm that kept the tropical party’s ship from leaving port for a day. Eventually, I gave up on the tables for two reasons: Firstly, I couldn’t always be bothered to remember to roll weather, and secondly, it was jarring that I could have calm weather one day, then a sudden blizzard/hurricane the next, then it would go right back to calm again. Nowadays, I prefer to just pick weather that feels appropriate to the current scene rather than trusting it to fickle die rolls.
That’s a narrative problem, isn’t it? You want to foreshadow big events like this with strange winds, ominous clouds, and panicky sailors who made port just ahead of the storm. Hard to do that when “oops it’s suddenly a hurricane.”
Not in the sense of rolling on a table that tells you that today is a hurricane, and tomorrow a blizzard… that kind of thing is too big to be left to chance. But tossing a coin simply to determine whether the weather will be one of the challenges in a journey, sure.
Whatever helps you to remember that the world is more than a backdrop. It’s all about evoking that sweet, sweet sense of place, and actually pausing to consider the weather is a useful way (for me anyway) to do that. I imagine a “weather coin” could work just as well as that sort of mnemonic device.
Yep. Basically, I kind of look for three options… no hindrance, some inconvenience, or the world hates you. So if the characters are going to be crossing a high mountain pass, that might translate to roll a d6
1-2 — the air is a little cool, but the clear skies offer stunning views.
3-5 — the weather is fine, but the fresh snow that fell overnight slows you down a lot
6 — the strong wind is bitterly cold, and snow is falling steadily… this is a bad place to be right now.
One of my first PF games, we used a weather table. While in a generic village on way to our home town, we rolled a tornado.
My Tiefling bard would end up dying in that tornado, trying to save his dire bat by dragging it into a shelter before the barn it was in got sucked up and demolished. One reflex save failure later, he was sucked up and taking 10 rounds of excessive damage, killing him in two turns.
The party would later find the journal he logged their adventure in, complete with the moment he lost his pen in the gust. They had to use locate person to find his body for a rez.
In other games, not much use of weather, APs generally don’t seem to use them outside of scripted/planned encounters, specific spells or as a general feature of travel/exploration segments (e.g. desert or ship travel).
I don’t think “random tornado” is necessarily bad. But I don’t know that it should be an encounter. Maybe more of a “seen in the distance” sort of event, far out on the open plains….
Direct continuity? In Handbook of Heroes? And it’s out of whack with the other strips chronology (e.g. Witch baleful poly-ing Fighter a few strips ago)? You’ve gone mad with literary power!
What makes you think the strips are presented in chronological order?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/origin-stories-team-bounty-hunter
That’s technically a flashback. So I guess Witch is reminiscing of better times?
Yo mama’s technically a flashback. 😛
Oh boy, tropical island tropes, here we come! Let’s see how many of these come to pass:
Angry natives (and/or arguments on the stereotypical/offensive portrayal of the same) or a subversion of the same!
Megafauna, especially dinos and reptillians!
Adventurer-eating plants!
Exotic poisons, bugs and diseases!
Ancient trap-filled ruins (volcano mandatory)!
Witch learns/teaches the benefits of the cook people hex (complementing her cauldron hex)!
Badass version of the village of Brie (like a ratty swarm of Pug’s)!
Where were you when I was brainstorming!?
I’m open for hire! :p
You missed the inevitable wardrobe change to rags, furs, and banana leaf bikinis.
That one relies on Laurel’s artistic mood. Can you make poofy dresses and other absurdly fancy outfits out of palm leaves?
Alternatively, it involves the other handbook.
Is it really random weather if Necro broke the age-old rule, ‘tempt not the DM/dice gods’?
The dice have their own strange sense of irony. Do not tempt them.
I’m amazed that Necro’s lipstick, mascara, hairdo and makeup is handling a tornado/monsoon/shipwreck better than Witch’s dye job.
Assuming Necro is casting off the sorc/wiz spell list (not sure exactly what class she’s supposed to be), she has access to Prestidigitation, whereas Witch doesn’t (just checked the Witch spell list).
Necromancer. 😛
Couldn’t find that class in the SRD or PFSRD, maybe it’s sourcebook-only
I know this is belated, but I believe she is a dread necromancer from the 3.5 book “Heroes of Horror”
Very well. I will now hear evidence in support. 😀
(Also, welcome to the comic.)
It wasn’t randomized, but there was a time that we had to investigate a wrecked city while a storm constantly dumped water and wind and lightning all over it. Highlights include our Cleric, Bard, and Barbarian nearly drowning in the river, which had burst its banks due to all the extra water. And our winged Tiefling was effectively grounded by all the wind.
On another occasion all the way back in session 1, a series of bad rolls caused us to mistake wolves howling for the heavy wind, like we were Skyrim NPCs or something.
Is this “set piece” weather? That’s an interesting concept actually….
Did “normal” weather play any roll in that game? Or was it only a factor when it affected adventuring?
I suppose it could be called that.
I use the donjon weather generator for most things. Since I most run WoD systems, I can mostly ignore the secondary effects and instead convert them as needed. It has some interesting ones as you get into magical storms.
For a mundane one, in one game I got a Severe Thunderstorm. The Players had set out on an attack against the final boss in a helicopter, which immediately had issues. They had to spend several tense rolls just fighting nature itself to keep their aircraft going against the wind.
For the magical example, my favorite has been Clockwork Clouds. No effects, but the clouds look like gears in a machine, moving through the sky. The players freaked out a bit since that was a clear sign something was off and I basically invented a terrain feature to explore as they tried to figure out if Order was out of control or if I was just messing with them.
This one?
https://donjon.bin.sh/d20/weather/
Well that looks extremely convenient. Do you just roll it randomly at the start of each day, or do you roll ahead of time so that you can plan around weather events?
I agree with most of the comments above: definitely on the weather, not so much on the randomization. Occasional missions have taken the party to mist-shrouded valleys and blazing deserts. One DM in our group had us make a harrowing climb up Ye Ancient Mountain in Mid-Blizzard (elf lost his rapier down a crevasse). But the weather, for all its seeming randomness, is always pre-scripted.
One of my favorite tactics as DM is to include a PC or NPC with near-Epic levels of Survival to predict the weather a day or two in advance, then give the PCs advance warning of WEATHER, something big in the near future they can’t escape, can’t control, can’t stop, but can only prepare for as best they can.
“Strap yourselves down!” “Warn the villagers!” “Will secure shelter stop a hurricane?”
Is there a text that tells people to run it like this? Or is it just a case of a bunch of GMs independently coming up with “only mention weather when it matters?”
For me, it grew out of a mix of attitudes like “Yeah, yeah, less yakking, more smacking” or its opposite, “The DM mentioned it, it must be important. I want to capture the butterfly so we can interrogate it. Maybe our real quest it to discover the source of this unseasonably unremarkably nice weather.”
It may be a matter of narrative style as well. Like, how much exposition and setting description typically goes into the game? If that sort of thing usually takes a back seat (less yakking, more smacking), then any description at all becomes more significant.
Wait a minute, where’s Brutus in all this? Familiars happen to be pretty dang important for Witches, and we haven’t seen him in the last strip either.
Unlike Patches, Brutus is pocket-sized so he can keep out the elements.
I mean, it doesn’t look like Witch has pockets, but maybe he lives in her hair?
What… What do hedgehog hair habitats look like? Is there a hamster wheel made of hair?
Maybe it’s like basket-weaving (white witch hair is surprisingly durable). Or gratuitous use of Sovereign Glue.
I tend to not think of things like weather or seasons when playing, but fortunately my DM does. He also thinks about time zone shifts when we transport through a tree from one side of the world to another and climate shifts when going into the extreme north. Even time of day changes, how it is mostly dark during winter and mostly light during summer times up in the higher regions. It really adds to the adventure.
Mostly I think he uses weather as a sort of distraction from the mundane to give a travel some extra enjoyment, but it has affected our travel times more than once, got us lost (in a blizzard… twice), and affected how far we can move in a storm. A convoy was struck by lightning in that same storm!
I think the most memorable moment of weather was when our party started using Leomund’s Tiny Hut and he described the blizzard outside as howling winds and snow so thick our perception checks couldn’t see past the dome’s exterior, so we just sort of hunkered down in the warmth and dry safety of the hut. The next morning, the dome had kept us warm, dry, and safe, and the blizzard seemed to have subsided, but our dome was COVERED in snow that we had to tunnel out of XD
Really fun to have those kinds of things readily “remembered” by the person running the game. Glad it is not me XD
Roll a fortitude save for the teleportation-equivalent of jet lag!
Your GM is doing it right. 🙂
I’d be curious to hear what their system is. Think you could ask ’em of they use a chart / just improvise / wrote out weather ahead of time?
I have very little interest in outdoor survival, and I find most DMs have a similar attitude. Trekking to the adventure shouldn’t be the focus. This is another reason people are so dissatisfied with the Ranger.
Man, the evil-party really isn’t dressed for the weather outside of Oathbreaker. (Since he’s fire-resistant hot weather doesn’t affect him, so wearing as many layers as possible makes sense since he only needs protection from the cold)
You seem to be confused. There’s nobody in this strip named oathbreaker. Here’s a link to the cast page, you should be able to figure out their names once you open the evil team’s section.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/role-call
Also… Oathbreaker literally means someone who broke an oath. An oath is a promise made to another mortal party, quite literally with a god as their witness (and enforcer). Antipaladin made a pact directly with a powerful otherworldly being, which would be a “vow.” Note that while Antipaladin may be ineffectual minion material, he has made no oath; he cannot break what he never made, so he cannot be an Oathbreaker. Additionally, he continues to serve his fiendish patron, so he isn’t an “vowbreaker” either. See link below for a more entertaining discussion of both from a RL historical perspective:
https://acoup.blog/2019/06/28/collections-oaths-how-do-they-work/
whenever weather comes up, I look outside and what I see is what the players get.
Lol. I gather that you play remote.
na, I only play offline.
When I invented this rule the gaming room was under an angled roof, so rain would be pretty obvious.
And even though we played every week there where no session cancellations due to shit weather.
Awww man, blizzards again?!
I don’t feel weather fits in most games. It’s an additional thing you have to run through the DM’s bandwidth. My table generally has 7 players at it; and while I feel comfortable enough running it, sometimes my players feel I should cut it down by 1-2.
Running the weather is like running a cohort for every piece on the board. It’s great window dressing, but it bogs things down with extra dice rolls and extra resolutions.
That said though, I’ve been thinking of a game that’s much more centered around the adventure as opposed to encounters. I just don’t know if that kind of openness and “quiet” would be compelling for the players.
In fact I have, not too long ago.
3-way war for control of a cluster of villages in a forested area. (One of the Woodlands in Root RPG.) Chaotic enough, right? Now add in a major hurricane ripping through the forest while the sides fight, with the war impeding evacuation efforts. The war ends once everyone – civilians and soldiers – is dead or fled, leaving destruction and ghost towns.
Result: some of the survivors wind up seeking revenge against the commanders who ordered the war but never got close to the action.
We like weather in our games. In our city we got crazy weather so adding it to the game feels natural. An small rain, windy wind, puddles after a rain. Now using tables to roll an avalanche in a desert? That is lazy, nice but lazy. Weather is the kind of things a DM can get from his memories and life on the fly without problems 🙂
Now about crazy weather once in a game of Numenera, for which my group need to bribe me to play, we got in problems with something called the Iron Wind. We got some fun with a storm of it and changing class, focus and bodies until we got back to normalcy 😀
Oddly enough, just yesterday I was looking through the weather rules while working on an arctic horror campaign for the To Maybe Do Someday file. It seemed to me important that the arctic terrain feel quite hostile and unnerving even without the wendigos and Great Old Ones stalking you. It’s the only campaign concept I’ve had where I think I really would keep track of the weather and wilderness travel rules and rations and that kind of thing and make everything take like a day of walking and some Survival checks to get to. While it is normally just inconvenient paperwork, in this context, I believe, it would add quite a lot to the sense of isolation and danger even if the party is smart enough to cast Endure Elements on everyone to avoid actual HP damage from the cold.
The other times I can recall paying some attention to weather or season are my upcoming single-book version of Strange Aeons’s In Search of Sanity (where the constant rain in the background makes exploring the dark, monster-filled asylum even creepier) and my ancient aliens campaign (which is in autumn solely because it’s a nice red herring when the players hear about the mad druid whose ramblings associate “winter” and the apocalyse, and think he’s talking about the upcoming season).
You reminded me about a similar issue we talked about back in “Travel Time.”
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/travel-time
This is the relevant bit: “This is your big chance to make the world feel vast and lived-in. Mechanical headaches or no, it’s worth putting in the effort to make that happen.”
But it occurs to me that there are two schools of thought at play here. One wants variable weather ripped straight form the random chart because “a realistic world should have weather.” The other side of the coin is more narrative, and wants the weather to be a thematic element (as in your arctic example). I tend to fall on the latter side myself, but I’m beginning to wonder how worthwhile it might be to try running strictly by the charts. I mean, it’s not that hard to hit a button at the start of each day…
https://donjon.bin.sh/d20/weather/
…and I’d be curious to see what it added to play.
Hmm… I am a very controlling, narrative-focused GM, but I can see the argument for some randomness in the weather (within reason – spontaneous hurricanes are likely to derail rather than add). And it doesn’t have to be entirely detached from narrative meaning. With the arctic example, I could totally have a table determining where on the spectrum of “cold weather” things are for a day, and still get across my meaning of the arctic being inhospitable. If I roll weather for a one-day horse trip between Rodric’s Cove and Riddleport, I don’t feel like it is worth the effort of rolling or the mental space of telling it to the players and the players remembering.
I think the best argument for the “simulationist” approach (which is what using the random tables randomly is) over the “narrativist” approach is that, counterintuitively, giving away some narrative control actually makes things more immersive, because it makes the players feel like their characters are not at the center of everything. (You know, like real life.) It also avoids the issue where it becomes possible to predict what another human thinks is the most dramatically appropriate moment, which can reduce drama. For a weird example, I believe that the Five Nights at Freddy’s series uses jumpscares better than most cheap online horror games specifically because the jumps are not scripted, which makes them much harder to predict and increases tension. As opposed to “there’s either a jumpscare behind this door, or there is nothing behind the door and a jumpscare when I turn back around.”
I think in the back of my mind it occurred to me this is maybe a thing to do, but scene description is already one of my weaknesses so I never properly thought about focusing on the weather. Also just happens I never quite got far enough in any of the games I’ve run where it’d have been relevant that maybe I’d have thought to include weather like that on my own.
I’ve certainly thought about what the weather is like in general in areas of my settings, but not “I should actually have weather events“.
Given I can’t think of any reason why not to, I’ll certainly be making an effort to remember to include weather events in the future now though.
I think it’s part of that Gygaxian quote about time tables. Hmmm… Found it!
Weather is part of the flow of time in a game world. There are mechanical implications (like Gygax implies) but there are also some narrative ones. How is the setting different in winter? Is there a higher likelihood of encountering migratory drakes in the fall? It all adds to that sense of verisimilitude we chase as GMs.
It’s not a ‘random hurricane’, nor even a ‘tropical island’… It’s just the bulk of the Tarrasque, that has accrued enough sand and dirt for vegetation to nestle on it, and it just exhaled. Or farted.
It can’t be a tarrasque fart. Nobody is making Fort saves.
I don’t generally use random weather in my campaigns, except at sea, but I use weather a lot. In fact, the first time in a given session that we touch on the location of a specific faction, I always make a point to mention in passing the weather and season. My campaign map has general wind directions and rainshadow marked on, and that’s helpful. Season is carefully tracked in an extensive timeline, as are the months and festivals of two different calendars. Further to that, one of the major campaign antagonists is a goddess of winter, and therefore has pretty substantial power over the weather when her power waxes. One of her aspects actually manifested as an enormous storm, dealing immense damage to the infrastructure of the nation it manifested in despite only remaining there for two days, swelling rivers, flattening fortresses and only barely being brought down – at the cost of no fewer than two secondary player characters and one primary one.
Perhaps the most notable weather-driven series of events in the campaign, though, was that in which famed knightly duellist and lover of the queen of one of the major kingdoms, Bohemond Dre-Prades, defeated along with Her Royal Highness by the superior arcane firepower of an insurrection and cut off by the territory of traitors allies from any non-icebound coasts, decided to march his army across the polar ice caps to reach the territory of an ally. A fierce winter storm whipped up, losing him 80% of his infantry, all of his artillery, little of his cavalry but all of his horses and the Royal Marshal of the Levies over the next three weeks of brutal march. They finally reached the island, only to find that delays brought about by the storm had seen it more than half-destroyed already. Undeterred, Bohemond, the Queen and their surviving forces battled for a few weeks more inthe kind of grim conditions you might expect of a bad Scottish summer, before the surviving leaders were finally forced to flee the island in a stolen fishing-boat.
The sails of that boat,of course,were shredded by a strong storms, and the heroic royalists eventually found themselves becalmed and without oars four miles out to see from the province where their initial defeat had taken place.
We all had good laugh.
“Had A good laugh,” of course.
I, uh, might have made my own random weather generator as part of a general time tracker on my custom digital GM sheet. Basically I was growing frustrated with the idea that campaign sessions always took place in “Clear weather during Spring” unless it was explicitly important for the campaign/event that the GM mention weather/seasons existing. So I wanted to make something that’d automate a number of factors and give me a quick display that’d be easy to run in-game.
With my current sheet, I can set a start date of the campaign and then track how many days pass during play. The sheet then auto-calculates the current date, season, sunrise/sunset, moon phase (including number of days until next full/new moon), and if it is currently a leap year or not. It also does a random roll for temperature, cloud coverage, wind, and precipitation based on the current season (with ability to edit percentages for each season individually).
Since creating it, I’ve decided to start my first campaign in mid-spring and have each campaign take place a bit after the previous one ended. I also don’t have anything too extreme for weather on my current random tables (worst is thunderstorm), and admittedly tend to take the random weather results with a grain of salt so individual days don’t have extreme shifts (i.e. instead of temperature increasing 20+ degrees overnight – I’d describe the next day as slowly increasing the temperature throughout the day by a less extreme margin overall).
So far I’ve had good results, with the party reacting to a minor drizzle or delaying traveling due to some Heavy Fog (also better time of day tracking helped players react to limited hours in a day, as the sun started to set when they were about to travel home – forcing a decision of whether to travel hostile territory in the dark or rest in somewhat safe territory for the night). Haven’t used it for very long yet – so it’ll be interesting to see how well it works in various seasons and/or campaigns with more available downtime.
Randomize Weather (3.5e)
Transmutation
Level: Clr 6, Drd 6, Shu 5 (Water), Sor/Wiz 6, Wuj 5 (General)
Components: V, S, M
Casting Time: 10 min
Area: 2 mile radius, centered on you (3 mile radius for druids)
Duration: Instantaneous/2d20 hours
Saving Throw: N/A
Spell Resistence: N/A
This spell randomly changes the weather within a two mile radius. When it is cast roll on DMG table 3-23: Random Weather (or the local weather table if in an area with non-standard weather); over the course of ten minutes the local weather changes match the result of this roll. The weather is not thereafter magical, and prevailing conditions (although not necessarily the specific local weather conditions that existed prior to the casting of the spell) overtake it in about 2d20 hours.
Material Component: The wing of a butterfly
Ooh, I like this! I may use this in one of my own campaigns.
Random tables are fine, but DMs do need to remember that sometimes you just have to say “no, they’re already busy with the story”