Weather Tables

[Edena_of_Neith]

Hey thanks!

 

[Twowolves]

I just use real-world weather reports for various locations, and keep campaign time roughly analogous with irl claendar time.

I was going to recommend this. Got cable access to the Weather Channel, or even just web access? Pick a few places in your world and make them "sister cities" to real world locales. Whatever is happening in Burkina Faso is happeneing to Verbobonc!

 

[Solmyr]

I like the random weather generator in DM Genie, it even comes with descriptions of d20 weather effects.

 

[Ogrork the Mighty]

Here's a website I found with a pretty good online program. It's free to use. Check it out. I might start to use this and use some of the ideas from above. Thanks guys.

http://direpress.bin.sh/tools/weather.html

That's a pretty sweet generator. Too bad it isn't available as on offline version...

I have a lot of experience trying to come up with good weather generators. I've used everything from DM Genie, to that website that you pay $19.99 for, to the tables from the AD&D Wilderness Survival Guide, to the 3.0/3.5 versions (including Frostburn and Sandstorm), to my own custom homebrew tables using Excel to randomly generate effects.

If I can offer some advice that I've gleaned over the years, it would be to simplify, simplify, simplify. You don't need all the bells and whistles. Just determine what a "normal" day is in each season and then come up with the likelihood of abnormal effects. That's probably good enough and you can just look up specific rules (e.g., for storms) on an as-needed basis. Most players don't care what the temperature is or what the wind speed is unless they have an adverse impact on them.

One problem I've found with pre-generating detailed weather effects is that it either doesn't fit what's going on in the campaign at the time it comes into play or that that really cool storm that would have perfectly fit in with that really cool end battle comes up a couple days sooner/later than it should have. There's also the enduring problem of adjusting weather to account for moving into different geographic areas. It's very rare to find a system that adjusts existing weather to account for moving between geography (normally you get a brand new weather result starting from scratch, which might not make sense if you were just enduring a drought or blizzard or some other abnormal weather condition).

Keep it simple and work from there as needed.

 

[Deimodius]

Not a program, but if you go to my D&D downloads page I created a PDF with all the weather charts from Frostburn (and the effects of all that weather).

Frostburn Weather charts