Weather / Campaign Diary: Archipelago Adventures - Pt. 5

So last week, we figured out how to locate a new, undiscovered island. This week, we are going to journey to our new island. But first, we must begin our travel to get there! To get there, I’ve gone ahead and figured out the path we will be taking.

Here is the path we will take through the uncharted ocean! Now, leaving Colial, that first hex in the ocean has already been discovered. Buuuut this wouldn’t be an adventure without encounters! And this wouldn’t be a high seas adventure without weather blowing your ship off course!

Yup, you heard me. Weather. We are going to be talking about the Weather… I’m sure there’s an old person joke in there somewhere.

Rain or Shine

When you go off traveling through places unknown, one of the problems facing you will not just be hordes of kobolds, but also the weather. Often forgotten at the table and in RPGs and, I confess, forgotten by me during games. How often has it been the blistering cold months and I forget to describe for the party the snow dancing around them in the cold winter winds? Well, I aim to fix that here. In this adventure, the wind is both an ally and a foe for our party of questionable adventurers, and so the weather will play a pretty important role for them.

Thinking through things, and even reading through the stat blocks of ships, I’ve come up with a few different weather problems that our ship may be faced with. This includes things like strong winds, no winds, typhoons, nice weather and heavy fog. I’ve gone ahead and made a weather chart to work off of, and will pry see revisions ahead. If you think I’m missing any weather make sure to let me know in the comments!

Now, when creating this chart, I set it up so that there is a positive result 60% of the time for our table. While hardships are always nice to play out, eventually they players want to get to their destination… I guess.

On a side note, I do make note of being blown off course when in a Typhoon or under Gale Winds, which is also a quick chart I wrote up just taking the information we made in the Charting post. The idea is that when powerful winds, and the literal ocean itself, is messing up your navigation… sometimes you can get thrown way off from where you mean to be. But, this isn’t the post about getting lost and correcting yourself on course. This post is all about the weather!

Beginning Our Journey

So, now that we are jumping on our big, beautiful ship, how is our weather going to look over the next few days? I think that our Navigator can be quite good at figuring out the weather for the next few days and may try to determine how the weather will fare for the next few days.

To determine the weather for the next few days, the GM has the option to choose from our Weather List, roll for it everyday or just have a single roll to determine the entire journey’s weather, some may even go ahead and print out a calendar and roll for everyday ahead of time just to save on time. Which is a great idea, and I wish I had thought of that sooner! I need to add that to my own calendar I use for my home games!

Now with our Weather Forecast chart, our Navigator (or maybe this responsibility will pass on to another role) can roll to find out how the weather is going to shape up over the next couple of days. This is probably a smart thing to do right before they leave Colial!

So, let’s say that our Navigator goes ahead and makes a Weather check and rolls a 16. This means, they know what the weather will look like for the next 3 days for their area. Now, if we were a prepared GM, we would already know the weather for them for the next 3 days, but because we believe in winging everything we do in life, let’s go ahead and roll the dice!

Using a dice roller, I got a 97. This means that they can expect favorable winds that will help speed up their progress to that new island. But… When can they expect these favorable conditions? Our chart simply says “Next 3 Days” so this is where we get a head scratcher. Will they have favorable winds all 3 days? Or just the next day and we have to roll 2 more times on our chart?

Because I’m not one to let a good chart go to waste, we are going to roll two more times for each day they have information on. I rolled 51 & 36. A perfectly good day on the sea, and now we have winds blowing against our sails. Great.

For those keeping track, our 3 day forecast is:
Day 1 / 97 - Favorable winds to help speed up our progress
Day 2 / 51 - A good day for sailing, no issues
Day 3 / 36 - Ill-favored winds that will slow down progress

Time to Sail

Looking at our upcoming forecast, I think it’s a pretty reasonable decision to go ahead and start sailing on Day 1 instead of waiting 3 more days for more favorable conditions. We know that we will have strong winds at our backs for the first day, followed by good sailing weather and then a bit of ill-favored winds. Seems like a good 3 days of sailing for us, though if we assume that each hex will take us 1 day to sail through, we have a total of 9 days on the ocean and on the 10th day we will land on our new island. I’m sure nothing too terrible will go wrong for us, at least… I hope we never come across that Typhoon!

So, the party hops on their boat and sets out for their new island, and the first day they have favorable winds. But do they run into any problems? The hex right off of Colial was already discovered when we were charting islands last week, so what dangers might lurk beneath the waves? I suppose next week, we will finally talk about the encounters they could face on the open seas. If you have ideas or theories, make sure you leave them below!

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