As I write, Summer is drawing to its last days and Autumn is upon us; a quick look at my calendar tells me that this article will go up in the middle of October (and today’s date inspires next week’s article), so Fall has fallen for certain.
Looking back on my notes for future game ideas columns, I note that last year I’d noted the possibility of doing an article about fall foliage. Last year’s foliage, the note reminds, was rapid and brilliant. We had had a severe drought during the summer, and the trees went dormant quite swiftly when they went. This summer we have had rain and more rain, a very wet summer after a winter marked by several serious snows. We got very little use of the pool (although the kids got more than we did, and I suspect that some of their neighborhood friends spent more time in the water than I), were rained out of several hopes to go to the shore, and cooked inside more than once when we had planned to use the grill. It has been wet. That causes me to wonder what sort of fall foliage we’ll have this year. I had noticed before that in New England, where the seasons change much more swiftly than they do down here in this southern section of southern New Jersey that is south of the Mason-Dixon Line, fall foliage is always brief but vivid. Riding through the hill country of southeastern Pennsylvania is beautiful, but almost always more subdued than my memories of shooting up from the North Shore of Massachusetts into the brilliant rolling countryside of New Hampshire. If my theory is correct, the cool wet weather we’ve had this year will run into a very slow and subtle color change as fall slips into winter. But I’m guessing.
I’m not exactly digressing to tell you this, but this summer has given me an entirely new insight on all those years of so-called drought we’ve had recently. It seems every year the state is declaring water shortages, putting everyone on restrictions, making every effort to conserve. Last year we were on odd and even watering (a goofy plan in my mind, because the obvious thing to do is if you’re on the odd day, water your lawn just after midnight and again just before midnight when it’s your day); we were on it the year before as well, and maybe part of the summer the year before that. Last year the complaint was that there wasn’t enough rain in the spring to bring in a corn crop for July; this year it was lack of sunshine that delayed south Jersey’s most anticipated crop. Last year I had actually asked, rhetorically, how many years you could have “below average rainfall” before it pulled down the average so far that it had to be considered normal. This year I have seen how it works. This year there was no rationing; the word drought seems to have vanished from the vocabulary, and everyone has more water than we could possibly use. I conclude that a couple times each decade we get drenched, possibly even flooded; the rest of the time, we have considerably drier years. Those drenching years pull the average up. Getting five times as much rainfall once every five years means that the other four years are going to be significantly “below average” even if they’re the real norm.
All of which shows me how very vulnerable we are to the weather. Little has changed since Mark Twain quipped Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it. We have become better at predicting it, certainly; and our ability to predict has resulted in improved abilities to respond, to build dikes against the floods that have not yet risen, to evacuate coastal areas while the hurricane is still over the ocean, to get snow removal crews to their equipment so they can dig themselves out instead of having to dig their way in. Yet we can do nothing about the weather, and it can do everything against us. Man against nature is usually listed as the first of the three great story conflicts (the other two being man against man and man against himself), and while that includes more than battling the weather, it certainly does include battling the weather.
Yet time and again, the weather is just so much color in our games. No one ever asks what it’s like, and even when they do it doesn’t usually seem to make a difference. Yet struggles against the weather can make great stories and memorable game moments. One of the clearest memories I have of the first party for which I refereed was the time they went on a forty-five mile trip to the nearest city to sell some of their accumulated valuables, only to get caught in a snowstorm which covered the roads and threatened to bury them completely as they fought their way forward. That party must have killed a hundred goblins, orcs, trolls, and other vermin; I don’t recall the combats half so vividly as that trip in the blizzard.
A game can be all about the weather, particularly in the right climate. The New Ice Age is set in a place where the ground never fully thaws; it’s about survival in a harsh environment, and although there are hungry wild animals the real threat is the weather, which can freeze you to death in a few hours if you can’t counter it.
On the other hand, even if the game is not about the weather, weather can be a significant factor at times. Whether you play The Mary Piper in its seafaring or spacefaring version, you will sometimes encounter storms which can drive you off course and damage the ship, possibly leaving you lost and dying. Great tension can come from this; even in the future, no one has complete control of the weather.
Give some thought to where your characters are, and what kind of weather they might have there. Someone once said to me that every part of the world has its own specific disasters, the worst thing imaginable which only happens there, whether it’s the tidal wave, earthquake, hurricane, tornado, wildfire, volcano, flood, or something else. Some have more than one. Figure out what can happen wherever you are, and have it happen once in a while–in mild versions most of the time, but always threatening to be serious and sometimes being truly devastating.
After all, it’s one more challenge for the players, something they don’t face very often, and since there’s not much they can do to stop it, just trying to survive it offers something different.
And as I always say, next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
