The lands
Grassland weather for your tabletop campaign
Open plains under a huge sky: hot summers, hard winters, and storms you can watch coming for an hour. Tornadoes, wildfires and blizzards are all at home here.
Through the year
Averages from a year of Skyscribe's weather in typical the plains. You can set how high, how far from the sea and how far from the equator it lies, and the weather follows.
How it sounds at the table
A few days from that year, as Skyscribe describes them to read to your players. No two days read the same.
The horses and mules blow plumes of steam in the cold, clear morning, eager to be moving. Sunlight is bright but thin, and a patient breeze keeps on out of the south. Frozen ruts and ridges of mud trip the unwary, their edges sharp as broken pottery.
'Gray sky, gray bread,' the old saying goes, and there is no gap anywhere in the cloud. An autumn breeze out of the west smells of the year going bad, and the warm days are plainly numbered.
Even with the sun hidden behind thick cloud, the long prairie is furnace-hot, and folk wonder aloud how it manages it. Metal buckles sizzle when splashed, with apron strings and hat ribbons fluttering toward the northeast.
What to watch for
The hazards that come with the plains. When the weather makes one likely, Skyscribe shows the risk and lets you roll to see whether it strikes.
- Snowbound
- Whiteout
- Lightning strike
- Damaging hail
- Tornado
- Wildfire
Villages and cities
Put the party in a village or a city and the scene and the writing move into the streets, styled to suit the plains.
The crier calls the hour and adds "fair enough" as if it were his doing, and the warmth is welcome on the skin. Lizards dart out of the way, and from the southwest a fresh wind comes on strong and clean. The horse market at the edge of the village is in full swing, with dealers running horses up and down to show their paces.
Rare sights
Keep an eye on the scenery. Now and then something unusual turns up in the picture, and a few sights are rare enough that most players will never see them.