Whither the Weather Gods?
Of course it didn't start exactly there, no, it started with spending a lot of time outside on my lunch breaks wondering what weather really means to me, you know, when you get right down to it.
See, you have the weather as it's presented to you after the news, possibly with a lot of little symbols and arrows and desperation to be validated, and then you have as it appears outside your window, or as you try to avoid it when busy doing other things. But then there's the weather where you can't (or shan't) avoid it on those days when you're paying a bit more attention, when you can enjoy it a bit more, when it's affecting your mood and seems to have a mood of its own…
Back in 2016 I stated working on a board game based around gods moving souls through their lives and onto the constellations (it's currently going through a major overhaul - more on it another time, perhaps) and in the course of my very rigorous research I remembered that weather gods were a thing so…
The next question was just how does a god create weather? Do they spend hours on end in a cloud somewhere crafting each drop of rain or have they a set of trained butterflies that they drop across the globe and tell them to flap really hard? I decided the weather god of my world is lazy and so the weather patterns followed their mood which then led to lists of moods that could relate to weather and that led me to the following table:
Temperament | 2d6 | On a double… |
---|---|---|
Joyful | 2 | Noise |
Giddy | 3 | Precipitation |
Flirty | 4 | Calmer |
Optimistic | 5 | Lighter |
Clement | 6 | Warmer |
Settled | 7 | Fog/mist |
Ambivalent | 8 | Cooler |
Melancholy | 9 | Heavier |
Gloomy | 10 | Agitated |
Restless | 11 | Wind |
Angry | 12 | Silence |
The left-hand column covers the current temperament of our weather god and the weather remains otherwise the same. However, on a double (which should occur every one in six rolls) you roll again to find how the type of weather changes by reading the right hand column.
This means most common type of weather will be settled into whatever it's currently doing and should be based on the region in which the characters are adventuring.
How that manifests is based on the temperament so (7) settled rain could be it's just there, raining, not too hard, not to blowy, just wetting you down to your ankles.
Let's try a couple of example rolls:
- If it gets gloomy (10) then it could become damper, more sodden - the type that manages to run down your back even when you have a hood up.
- If it becomes angry (12), well perhaps that means it rains harder, starts coming in sideways and starts to blot out the landscape but rolling a twelve also means a change in the weather too so one rolls a second time…
- And becomes agitated (10). Angry and agitated… the rain lets up occasionally to let in some hail or buffeting winds, never sits still for very long.
- The next day comes around and becomes flirty (3), a bit more settled, occasional spots of sunlight glimmering through the clouds, gusts of wind playing at the characters hair.
The main idea is to provide inspiration to the GM, give them something to build a feeling, a story, around; something that doesn't involve Fahrenheit, mm of rainfall, or science as we know it.
We're in storyland here.