RPG Weather Generator – Harsh Summer in the Forbidden Lands

When Mara, Bruni, and Hrod set out with Grulf into the Thynde Range, they were probably readying themselves to meet deadly monsters or hostile characters like warriors or sorcerers. B t I suppose that they didn’t expect who their primary opponent would be for a good part of the campaign. Harsh weather can be as let al and fearsome for RPG characters as demons and warlocks – and fun, too, if you’ve got a sound generator for it! Mine is a single thing that I’m most proud of.

I’ve recently written what I like about the exploration and how I handled it in the Forbidden Lands. I find lacking in this RPG system, though the inclusion of weather in the game. It’s almost there, with the effects of Cold or Thirsty characters, but the game doesn’t fully accomplish it. I wanted to fix it since I see great potential with this game’s survival aspects and resource management. We’ll return to these mechanics soon enough but let’s look at how the story unfolded.

Following the Legend of Aslene Warrioress

The Trio went into Thynde Range looking for an ancient mountain stronghold. They had just a name of the mountain range and a general direction of “north-west from Harga.” Secretly I determined if the legend of the Eagle Nest keep was true, and the dice said it was. But I didn’t want them to find the place too simply. It aligns with my previous post on discovering the map. If the players had the complete map of the Ravenland before them, they’d instantly see a castle mark two hexes into the mountains. The way I’ve handled it, they needed to make guesses and collect some clues. Since the legend told of the castle as the last place of Arrows of the Fire Wyrm’s presence, the Aslene-born Mara knew the tale.

With two successes in the Lore test, she was pretty familiar with the history of the Demon Flood and how Aslene fought their way through the mountain passes to escape their fiend-ravaged homeland. In the story, Eagle Nest was a hold where a warrior-princess of Galdene, Nirmena, made her last stand, pushing Zygofer’s outlandish forces to buy time for the rest of her people. The legend had it that back in the Aslene, she received a blessed weapon against the demons and thus held her ground. But in the end, she met her heroic fate, and the sacred weapon of god Horn was lost.

Make Chasing Legends Interesting

Searching for remnants of such a story – 300 years old in-game – can’t be too easy. But Forbidden Lands is not a game about Investigators delving into mind-twisting mythos (as Call of Cthulhu is). Its primary focus is raiders and rogues bent on making your own mark on a cursed world. So, risky adventures in an unwelcoming setting – coming right up, sir!

A Bit of a Hollywood-style Archeology

First, I set a goal for the party to find a trail of the Eagle Nest. Since Thynde Range saw numerous fights against the demons, the company had to spot tracks of the battles. Next, they needed to discern who fought there and follow what they knew about the war – slow retreat of the Aslene into their last stand. Finally, they had to find the actual stronghold in the narrowed-down area.

Each step required three successes in a test – Survival or Lore for finding remnants of battles, Lore for figuring out the course of the conflict, and Survival or Scouting for spotting the castle. I borrowed this from The One Ring RPG and its prolonged actions resolution. It played out very nicely, providing a balance between plain dice-rolling and engaging challenges that were arising meanwhile. Most of the time, it was the weather, which I loved to include in this fantastic RPG.

Enter My Weather Generator for Forbidden Lands RPG

It was summer. In most RPGs, the climate plays a minor role. In the mentioned The One Ring RPG, there is no weather generator, and only “cold months” of fall and winter influence exploration/travel negatively. But traveling in the heat of summer can be as hard as suffering autumn winds and rainfall. The former was the main thing in my campaign.

As you can see in a fragment of my weather generator for the summer, rising to “hot” is not uncommon. And in the game terms, that means that the characters have to drink more water. Since “hot” required them to take the Endurance test each Quarter Day or drink another ration of water and “warm” did the same each day, resource management became the main challenge.

Thus, the group had to solve a puzzle of splitting time between Foraging for water, looking for clues, and the essential exploration with making camp, etc. The effects of weather raised the stakes as pushed and failed Endurance tests meant damage and more vulnerability for any mishap along the way. The times when someone went missing while going off to look for water proved to be fun and challenging, with a threat of too much thirst adding a thrill to the game. Also, thanks to that, the feeling of relief when an occasional rain fell was quite realistic at our table.

Skipping up forward a bit, Hrod went a couple of hexes ahead one time to scout with his Killer talents. In the critical moment, stalking up a hill, he was caught by a powerful storm. The tables turned completely with the slippery ground, obscured visibility, and hindered hiking. The one die increase of water resource wasn’t too much of help, and that gave us an excellent occasion for role-playing and teamwork.

How I Designed My RPG Weather Generator

Wrapping this week’s Forbidden Lands post, I wanted to give you an account of how I created my generator. I was looking up the Internet for an idea and found this great post by Daniel Sell on his blog, “What Would Conan Do?” I instantly liked it because it emulates the interdependencies between the weather types. Like in my graph above, where you don’t get from “cool” to “hot” in a one step or winds bring about a change most of the time. Another thing was that David’s weather generator is extremely easy to use in your RPG. You just roll one d6 and read the result. And it’s effortless to modify, with a lot of room for tweaking the ratios of each weather type.

You can see that my idea clearly reflects his, but I wanted to add a few things to make it even better. First, I liked the weather patterns to be season-specific and more diverse. Secondly, I added specific mechanical effects to make that part of the game meaningful. And finally, I even ran statistic tests in Excel, calculating the distribution of each type of weather in each season and fine-tuned it to fit each season. And if you’d like to see how it plays out in your game as well, click the campaign’s logo below and download my RPG weather generator along with some more tables I put together for the Lush, the Wench, and the Goblin campaign!