Have you ever been stumped by your players asking about the weather, or do you find them travelling in eternal sunshine? I have found myself wondering about the weather on more than one occasion and have wished for a randomized way to answer this question. This became more pressing as I prepared for a hex crawl through Ravenland. Sure, Forbidden Lands has the occasional mishap during journeys that indicates bad weather, but what about all the times in between?
So I created a set of hex flowers. They generate different weather patterns for different seasons appropriate for Ravenland. This was inspired by Goblin's Henchman's extensive work on procedural generation with hex flowers.
The general idea is simple. Use navigation across a hex grid to determine content. Each hex is filled with an event (weather in this case) and to determine what happens next you roll some dice (I'm using 2D6) and follow the instructions to determine which hex to move to. This provides an easy way to track state so that today's weather can help to determine what tomorrow's weather will be like. But there is more! Because the navigation instructions can introduce a general tendency to move in a particular direction it is possible to get different weather patterns simply by changing the navigation rules for the same hex flower. Read more about the theory of hex flowers here.
What all this means is that hex flowers are really good at encoding complex patterns. You could do all this with conventional random tables but you'd be hard-pressed to fit all of it on a single page. As a bonus, hex flowers have a nice visual quality to them that I enjoy.
The weather hex flowers are now available online.