Climatology and world-building?

[gamerprinter]

There are a fair amount of world builders with some level of climate concern, but most people aren't meteorologists (many aren't even sound geographers). There's a crowd over at the Cartographers' Guild that has greater concerns on geologic/geographic soundness in creating realistic maps.

Really, though unless some extreme climatology is the basis of the world design, like an ice planet, ocean planet, desert planet relying on actual science for every detail is not really a need for most world design.

It depends on you, your intended players and the campaign you intend to utilize whether climatology really matters - beyond as mentioned how weather affects the local cultures.

 

[Jhaelen]

Does this matter to your worlds or campaigns? How have you applied this to your world-building?

I used to, but have since found it doesn't really matter.

Back in the days when I wrote my own rpg system I also invented a setting for it that featured a planet with no axial tilt, orbiting a blue sun and having two moons on excentric orbits.

I doubt I considered all of the consequences correctly, but it served as a nice starting point to explain the oddities of climate, tides, etc. that I wanted it to feature.

Besides none of my players knew any better, so it was fine

 

[Gilladian]

Back in my heyday of campaign world design, I read up on climate, geography, meteorology, etc... for several years and designed a portion of a campaign world that was as close as I could get it to "realistic". It was a royal pain!

In the end, I chose to set my campaign on earth. I set my main kingdom on the Chesapeake Bay, and went from there. It was TWO years before a player finally recognized the map! (We live in Texas, so it wasn't something they saw EVERY day, but still...)

I like the ease of knowing the weather, geography, tides, native plants and animals, etc... and it is easy to replace one thing (passenger pigeons) with something else (miniature drakes) that gives a whole different flavor to the world.

 

[the Jester]

My world isn't a planet; the campaign (largely) takes place on the inside surface of a bubble of air in an infinite ocean. The Sun is an object created approximately a million years ago by a god to bring light and warmth to a dark and cold world in a war against its antithesis.

The bubble is about 780,000 miles in radius; the Sun is much smaller, orbiting a specific island in a slightly (and increasingly) irregular orbit about half a million miles in radius. Night time is when the Sun is in the water.

I have thought about the climate a lot, but none of it is grounded in real-world climate models or actually, you know, knowing anything about that stuff. My milieu's physics are substantially different from the real world's, too (gravity is replaced by the bubble's own surface tension, for example, so if you go deep enough underwater "gravity" reverses and wants you to rise towards the surface).

 

[Celebrim]

Back in my heyday of campaign world design, I read up on climate, geography, meteorology, etc... for several years and designed a portion of a campaign world that was as close as I could get it to "realistic". It was a royal pain!

In the end, I chose to set my campaign on earth. I set my main kingdom on the Chesapeake Bay, and went from there. It was TWO years before a player finally recognized the map! (We live in Texas, so it wasn't something they saw EVERY day, but still...)

This is an excellent illustration of my earlier point, that this sort of big scale world building is seldom practical for the starting DM. It may matter to the DM running the game how coherent the big picture is, but since the player's perspective is from within the game world itself they really can't see the bigger picture. And the bigger picture seldom really matters in the player's session to session experience of the game, and long before they can get a coherent picture you can easily revise details to make them more coherent. If the climate is slightly off, well the previous year just had unusual weather. If the distances are slightly off, well the previous time the journey was made they just made unusually good (or bad) time. If the plants are slightly off, well either it was a microclimate environment or else in this world certain plants have adapted to slightly different environments. These things seldom matter to your story anyway. Spending a large portion of your valuable preparation time on things like this won't usually pay off.

 

[mikeg]

This level of climatology or planetology shouldn't be a requisite for creating fantasy worlds, and in some cases might inhibit the author's creativity. What if kingdoms are floating masses of rock? or there is some kind of hollow earth, etc? Even Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea setting with so little dry land, or Frank Herbert's Dune with next to no water might render the What If methodology a fruitless exercise.

That being said, I loved that article like crazy. And it reminded me of the same exercises I went through developing my Äram campaign world years ago, with geology textbook in hand and a wall covered with drawing paper.

For my own setting, I prefer setting up these rules first, and then seeing what can grow organically from there. Deserts are on the west sides of continental masses near the Horse Latitudes. The axial tilt of the planet is the same. There are defined patterns of prevailing winds, volcanic activity, etc. I even discovered where monsoon seasons would occur, and I loved it. It made the regions and cultures seem alive alive in a way that was original, but still seemed subconsciously familiar to me. And that is what attracts me to works of fantasy fiction and RPGs in general.

I went a step farther and gave the planet two moons that appear the same size as the sun. One is roughly the size of our moon, and the other is farther away and 'earth'-sized. I figured out that the year would need to be 405 days long, but that influences the sense of numerology within the setting, and offers a rationale for a festival that occurs every four years to correct the calendar (which itself has figured into gameplay). Even tides have two cycles which can work with or against each other now that there is a slow double planet. The party's own ship therefore became stuck in a periodically lowering high tide, which wouldn't let them out for several weeks.

So for me, this approach is way more compelling. Phenomena can be mysterious, but they don't feel arbitrary. And that keeps your head within the logic of the game, and within the mind of your character… and isn't that what the big appeal of RPGs is in the first place?

 

[Gilladian]

[MENTION=7706]SkidAce[/MENTION] - presuming you mean Hampton, Va, the village of Edgeton is located just there on the coast; across the way, (where Norfolk is located in our world), is the small town of Southgate, on the southern edge of Greenvale. They're both in County Seawall, one of Greenvale's oldest and most populous counties.

 

[SkidAce]

[MENTION=7706]SkidAce[/MENTION] - presuming you mean Hampton, Va, the village of Edgeton is located just there on the coast; across the way, (where Norfolk is located in our world), is the small town of Southgate, on the southern edge of Greenvale. They're both in County Seawall, one of Greenvale's oldest and most populous counties.

Excellent! Let me know if there are any monsters in my area...

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Especially the dreaded "Pyromancer-Caused Global Warming"

"Daddy, save the Remorhazes!"

 

[Gilladian]

Excellent! Let me know if there are any monsters in my area...

Ummm... well, it is probably the calmest and tamest region of my campaign world! It has been resettled for about 150 years (since the fall of the 2nd Empire 400 years ago) by peaceful survivors of the Empire's fall. Ex-slaves, renegade troops of soldiers and lucky townsfolk who avoided death during the fall made up their ancestors, so Greenvalers are a plucky, sturdy folk.

There are some sahuagin outside Silverwater Bay, and a sea-monster in Dragon Bay, to the south, just inside the breakwaters. And a copper dragon is reputed to live on one of the many small islands to the north-east. Also, the local fishermen claim to trade with mer-folk, but most people assume they're making the story up, despite the fine pearls they often bring back from their expeditions.

The town of Saltmarsh is located almost due west of Edgeton; it is famous for the smuggling that is reputed to go on in the region, although the town's leaders protest the tales.

The whole of County Seawall is experiencing some political turmoil; five years ago Count Alharvon, vice-admiral of the Navy, was arrested and convicted of treason - he was accused of attempting to lead a revolt against Prince Starbow, made up of rebel naval units allied with pirates and mercenaries from Harothar. He's been imprisoned ever since, because Prince Starbow, ruler of Greenvale, will not have him executed. Sir Math rules the county as regent for the Count's 7-year-old nephew. Most of the locals and barons in the County dislike Sir Math and quite a few still refuse to believe that Alharvon was guilty.

The pirate village of Mound is some 50+ miles down the coast, on the north shore of Dragon Bay, as well. How they avoid the sea-monster is unclear... perhaps by paying it tribute!

Do you REALLY want me to keep going?