Weather--Part 3: Seasonal Events Tables

In the last post on weather random weather tables. In the first post I talked about seasonal weather tables using the example of a wet/dry monsoon like seasons for a SE Asia campaign. Here's another version of a seasonal events table to integrate weather into your campaign. This sort of approach should work well for Honor+Intrigue and I like that added bits of local and rural culture.

In this post, from Elfmaids & Octopi, there are a series of seasonal activity tables for a medieval European setting. Here's the table for calculating a random month along with the typical activities for that month.

d12 Random Month With Typical Activities

1. Winter: Indoor chores, feasting, repairing, planting, weaving, tool making, fixing fences and nets, hoping for showers
2. Winter: Sitting by fire, ploughing, fertilising, carting manure and marl, pruning, hoping for showers
3. Spring: Picking flowers, enjoying countryside, sewing, weeding, ploughing, spreading manure, hoping for dry and frost free weather
4. Spring: Hawking, courting, scaring birds, pruning, weeding, sewing seeds, hoping for showers and sunshine
5. Spring: Scaring birds, weeding, digging ditches, ploughing fallow fields, hoping for showers and sunshine
6. Summer: Shearing, harvesting, haymaking, hoping for dry weather
7. Summer: Ploughing, gathering, shearing, haymaking, hoping for dry weather early and showers later
8. Summer: Harvesting, winnowing, tying, gather berries, hoping for warm dry weather
9. Fall: Harvesting, winnowing, tying, milling, threshing, pruning, fruit picking, wine making, hoping for showers
10. Fall: Sewing, milling, weeding, last ploughing of year, gather firewood, gather berries, gather mushrooms, gather nuts, gather roots, hoping for no dry frost
11. Fall: Butchering, weaving, collecting acorns for pigs, gather and split firewood, flax and hemp made into rope, hoping for showers and sunshine
12. Winter: Butchering, salting, smoking, collecting, digging, hunting, trim trees, pruning, weaving, baking, hoping for showers and sunshine

The post also includes four seasonal tables for Winter, Spring, Summer, and Autumn. These same activities would also work for an Early Modern setting like 1620s France. I like this idea and think it would be even more useful in a fantasy world where the activities might be a little different, like Glorantha or Tekumel. This sort of information helps ground the setting with some version of normal and even if tables aren't used in play, deciding what entries should be forces the GM to think more deeply about how his setting works. Which is almost always a good thing from my perspective. 

Now for something not completely different. Here are some more resources for weather.

Rick Stump of Don't Split up the Party ( one of my wife's favorite RPG phrases) gives a step-by-step method for creating weather tables for your own setting.

Here's a nicely formatted 1-page down load of weather tables. These are generic with modifiers for the terrain so they could be useful for multiple campaign settings.

Here's a thread on weather that includes some good links and discussion and another thread here.

May your weather in real life be a lot more pleasant and mundane than what you see in your game settings.

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