What if your storm is blowing in off a plain of negative energy dust, or it is a blizzard across a forest of elemental fire trees or this big flood washes out a haunted battleground, that sort of thing. For this post we are looking at this from a 'wind off the plane of horrors' angle; roll this to see what kind of weird weather-related effect you are getting and then snap that together with known local weird locations in your campaign or go to the bottom table for some ideas of what those strange locations could be.
d8 Strange Weather Effects:
1. Weyr-winds: where the winds themselves bear some magical phenomena; effectively swapping the atmosphere of one location for that of another - the gloom of the local spooky wood, the shrieking wind of a mountain pass, the perpetual storm that sits over the necromancers tower - whatever that signature weather of the other location is, now it is here.
2. Dust winds: like the harmattan, bringing dusts, smokes and other traces far from their usual locations and temporarily changing the nature of the local place. Perhaps sand coats all surfaces, or this forest air is suddenly sulpurous with volcanic ash, or mushrooms sprout from spores carried in.
3. Elemental tides: where things from beyond this world are drawn in by the strong element resonance with their home plane. Here the elemental spirits that resonate with whatever the other place is are now found here.
4. Extreme floods - surges of water along rivers or coasts, sometimes even avalanches that are not inherently magical but can carry larger, heavier things from magical places. Monsters get washed over, flyers are blown off course, things that dwell in the strange location now turn up here. For this one you can just transpose encounter tables.
5. Leyline resonance - not what actually happens but people use it to describe when the magical phenonema that occur in one place start cropping up elsewhere - the stronger shadow magic of the gloomy woods suddenly becomes possible on the nearby plains
6. Migrations - when flocks, shoals and herds of smaller creatures typical to a place surge into another, bringing the rest of their ecosystem along with them. Like a plague of locusts but not necessarily automatically a disaster, just the 'wrong' critters being found in a place
7. Avalanches and collapses - where a chunk of the nearby terrain is carried along into this one - down a river valley, atop an avalanche or simply driven by gravity down a slope. This can range from debris to whole chunks of a strange landscape complete with occupants
8. Exodus - the weather here is just an out-growth of a long-standing weather systems that has wreaked havoc in that other place and what you are finding now are things that normally never leave fleeing the heat/cold/flooding. These were the masters of that other terrain, now driven out and seeking a new place to lair/rule.
d20 Weird locations the weather is coming from:
1. Dreamwillow swamps - featuring trees with hallucinogenic bark, prophetic monkeys, still, humid heat
2. Sunken Towers - flooded ancient mage towers with all sorts of leaked magical contaminants, escaped experiments and rusted constructs
3. Haunted battlefield - haunted armour, bone dust, strong necromantic vibes and a thin veil to the beyond
4. Wax Shallows - ruins of gigantic ancient hives slowly dissolving, rainbow stained waters, hordes of insects of all sizes
5. Plantwarper Rifts - overgrown ruins of ancient alchemo-bontanists, profusion of magical, semi-sentient and dangerous plants
6. Towering Forests - ancient first growth forests, the trees that pinned the earth down in the first days
7. Earthblood Seeps - tar pits, ever-burning flames, a strong affinity to the demi-plane of mineral
8. Black Earth - positive-elemental aligned terrain, rich, life-encouraging earth, where plants spring up easily
9. Caldera Lake - aligned to the plane of steam, hotter than the surroundings
10. Frozen life - an intrustion of the elemental plane of ice, with flora and fauna that thrive in sub-zero temperatures
11. Blazing Tree - actually a crystalline alignment to the plane of radiance, scourge of the undead, blinding and disorienting radiant 'leaves'
12. Overgrowth - positive energy aligned location manifesting as mutagenic effects. Everything is unique, nothing is predictable here.
13. Mind stones (astral) - crystallized magical power, dripping from thin places in the astral. Dreams roam and have power, psychic winds howl.
14. Ghost lands (Ethereal) - spirits roam, long-gone trees cast shade, the willful can walk through the terrain, ghosts persist
15. Rippling Veil (Shadows) - perpetual gloom, spooky forests, eerie swamps, things that stalk and lurk, unseelie fey, the undead
16. Faerie Wood (Fey) - labyrinthine forests, voices underhills, paths, small doors, tempting smells and invitations, goblin markets, seelie fey
17. Smouldering Forest (smoke) - charred trees, renewing fires, insects, birds, imps, mephits and things of ash
18. Salt Desert (salt) - blinding brightness, thirst, sharp sands, silence, illusions, mega-insects
19. Howling Pillar (vacuum) - driving grit, howling winds, emptiness, lack of life
20. Meteor Fields (dust) - grounds that shift, dust that clings, strange unfamiliar life, disorientation, aural hallucinations
If you need more than that you could take a set of terrains and flex them - hotter/colder, wetter/drier - through weather and seasonal change to see what we might get. For that flexing we are going to take biomes of the Earth as a start point - I worked these up initially in Quick polity and biome procedures for approaching strange worlds. There I talked about interpreting what that means for the world you are dealing with - is 'drier' irrelevant if you are dealing with an ice-world perhaps?
Biome | d100 |
---|---|
Mid temperature, wet, stable climate, abundant life | 1-22 |
Mid temperature, wet, highly seasonal, abundant life | 23-41 |
Hotter, drier, sparsely inhabited | 42-56 |
Cooler, wetter, sparsely inhabited | 57-65 |
Hotter, wetter, abundant life | 66-70 |
Hotter, drier, abundant life | 71-71 |
Coldest, dry, sparsely populated | 72-86 |
Hottest, dry, sparsely populated | 87-100 |
I rolled Migrations + Howling Pillar: there's ideas coming to me already!
ReplyDeleteOh, that sounds worrisome - some kind of anti-life swarm? A reverse-flow with all the wild-life from the region being drawn to their doom at the Howling Pillars?
DeleteOr weird pockets of null-weather driving creatures from their usual habitats? This is why spark tables are great IMO
ReplyDelete