Season-ing my game world

Right now I’m running a game of The Drowned Isles, a setting / ruleset I wrote to play a bunch of OSR adventures. There are plenty of inspirations for the game, but one its earliest seeds is an attempt to write a game about where I’m from. Of course, I’m not from an archipelago infested with seafaring magical adventurers. But I’ve tried to infuse a little New Jersey into this far-future science fantasy.

The thing I missed most, when I briefly lived in the perfect weather of the Bay Area, was seasonality and weather. It is not natural or godly for it to be a pleasant seventy-something degrees every day. It’s bad for the character or something. Plus, seasons give the passage of time interesting texture, especially in a game where the time in the characters’ lives is utterly desynced from the time in our own.

There are four seasons that define the weather in the northeast: spring, summer, fall, and winter. It gets hot and humid enough in the summer to be miserable (and cold enough in the winter for the same), but spring and fall contain drops of real beauty, as long as you can bear fluctuation and unpredictable storms. So what rules am I going to use to get these feelings across?

Cribbing from Mausritter?

I initially planned to just grab the weather and season system from Mausritter:

Roll 2d6 for weather each day.

Weather that is highlighted are poor conditions for travel. For each Watch spent traveling under these conditions, a mouse must make a STR save or gain an Exhausted Condition.

Had I not snagged on one little thing, I would probably not have bothered to write my own system. But I did snag: that’s not how summer weather works in my climate, at all. The storms, humidity, and heat form a rhythm: hot, sticky weather that crescendos into a sky-splitting thunderstorm, followed by a day or two of sweet relief. Repeat until everyone begs for colder weather, even a snowstorm, oh god this heat is unbearable (of course, they’ll say the opposite when the blizzards hit in February). So if I really want to capture my seasons, I’ll need to write my own weather with some bespoke seasonality.

Let’s add holidays

And while I’m at it, I think we should sprinkle in holidays. Holidays serve as anchors for seasons in my life: Passover to greet Spring, and Memorial Day to send it off; the Fourth of July to break up the long stretch of summer; Labor Day and Rosh Hashanah to herald cooler weather, and Thanksgiving to herald the truly cold; Hanukkah, Diwali, and New Year’s Eve just when the nights are darkest and Lunar New Year for when the warmth and sun begin to return.

For gameplay purposes, each season gets one holiday. That way everyone can easily keep the holidays in their heads. And also I don’t have good ideas for two holidays every season.

Spring

Blossom Parade: To bring in the New Year with good fortune and chase away the winter doldrums, it is traditional to parade floats of cherry blossoms. Guilds and families create floats with themes of renewal, new life, and good tidings. Generally the parade ends after noon in a massive picnic in a public space.

Twill has precious few cherry blossoms, but has a longstanding relationship with Ark to its east. A baby cherry tree is ceremoniously shipped through the riverways each year.

Spring is the New Year in the setting for a simple gameplay reason: I want players to start the campaign at the start of the game-year, and winter should be “adventuring hard mode” that they reach as seasoned Wardens.

Also I know that cherry blossom holidays maybe don’t scan as quintessentially New Jersey, but I do want to point out that Branch Brook Park in Newark has the “largest collection of cherry blossoms in the United States” (see Wikipedia). That’s right, Tony Soprano is neighbors with a bunch of beautiful blossoms accessible by half-decent public transit.

Anyway spring weather is unpredictable, so I decided for a truly random and flat distribution.

Roll 1d6.

1. Sudden thunderstorm.
2. Scattered sunshowers and rain throughout.
3. A light drizzle
4. Chilly, but clear.
5. Perfectly pleasant weather.
6. Beautiful day: crisp, clear, refreshing. All Wardens recover 1 Guard or Aether.

Summer

Midsummer: A gift-giving holiday celebrated differently across the Isles. In some places the Baron demonstrates his beneficence to the peasants; in others business partners curry favor; in others tribal leaders one-up each other in public displays. The one constant is that children across the Isles hope for a more exciting gift than socks.

Midsummer is my weakest holiday. I wanted a gift-giving holiday but I didn’t want Christmas (because I am a grinch), so I put it in the summer. I know that’s how it’s celebrated in the southern hemisphere, but I can’t let the concept of seasonal gift exchanges be a casualty of the war on Christmas.

Summer weather has the most involved rules. For the first day in an adventure, roll on the “pleasant” column below. Then each day, roll on the column for the previous day’s weather.

• Hot weather ranges from “pretty nice” to “I don’t want to do anything without a wet towel draped across my neck”.
• Humid weather is hot, miserable, and sticky. Intense daytime activity may be dangerous, but night provides relief.
• Heatwaves give no such respite. It is unrelentingly hot at all hours.
• Summer storms are violent and sudden, sometimes with deceptive lulls before striking a second time.
• Pleasant days are rare. Maybe the cloud cover provides a shield from the sun; maybe a storm has just blown off days of heat; maybe you’re just lucky. All Wardens recover 1 Guard or Aether.

Fall

Harvest Banquet: It is said before the Kernish Empire, the farmers of the Drowned Isles shared alike during the autumn months. After months of back-breaking work, all shared equally in the fruits of their labor. In today’s world of deeds and tithes and taxes, the spirit of the commune lives for one night each year. Everyone brings a dish of fresh food to the town hall for a potluck-style feast. It is traditional for farmers to bring their choicest fruits, and for traders to bring their most unfamiliar wares and spices. It is a terrible faux pas to eat any food that one ate at last year’s Banquet.

This one is Thanksgiving and Sukkot. I’m banking on enough cultures having their own harvest holiday that the direct inspirations here don’t matter as much as the general autumnal vibe.

For fall, I’m actually going to crib the weather rules from Mausritter (more or less)

Roll 2d6:

Winter

Snowfall: Starting on longest night of the year, a bacchanal is held in each town, lasting three nights and three days. Townspeople party with wild abandon (even scolding aunties and curmudgeonly grandfathers). Each morning, whoever drank the most mead is crowned the King of the Day (though you are disqualified from Kingship if you fall asleep at any point when the sun is down).

Tradition tells us that Snowfall is celebrated as Lady Night encroaches upon Father Day. It is important to stay awake and light up the dark, so that the Lady does not think Her temporary gains from Her Father will become permanent. In the furthest southern reaches where the winter nights threaten to swallow the day entire, the party continues for five nights instead.

Here’s my secret: I don’t have a good idea for winter weather! I want to somehow simulate the feeling of snow piling up as storm after storm dumps more on you, and then the snow being cleared from some paths but not others, and snow melt… that all seems impossibly fiddly.

If you’ve read the whole post, your reward is a challenge from me to you: send me pointers to games that do a good job at capturing winter!