The lands
Tundra weather for your tabletop campaign
Treeless, wind-scoured land under wide skies: whiteouts, deep cold, midnight sun in summer and polar night in winter, with boggy ground when the thaw comes.
Through the year
Averages from a year of Skyscribe's weather in typical the tundra. 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.
Over the tundra the clouds stand in a long procession to the horizon, and their shadows cross the land slowly. Breath smokes at every step, and a small south breeze tears it to rags. Out on the snow, musk oxen in a tight huddle leave a trampled patch where they have fed, the only other life in sight.
Empty pale sky hangs over the open barrens all day, and the old saying holds: a clear sky never fed a child. Spring has come in name only, with every cheek burned raw by the northwest breeze. After two months of hard frost, fuel is running short everywhere, and some burn what they cannot spare.
A thin, misty rain beads on everything, cloaks and whiskers and packs alike. Chapped hands get rubbed with goose grease, and every lantern flame leans a little toward the west.
What to watch for
The hazards that come with the tundra. When the weather makes one likely, Skyscribe shows the risk and lets you roll to see whether it strikes.
- Snowbound
- Whiteout
- Ice breakup
- Bog and quagmire
- Biting insects and fever
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 tundra.
White hares sit hunched in their snow hollows, as white as the ground they sit on, under a clear sky. Folk who claim to have seen worse are not believed today, with a cold breeze from the northwest nipping at noses. Sled dogs in every yard howl together for no reason anyone can tell, and the people do not even look up.
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.