Weather is a weather-generating system for any role-playing game. It is freeware, and can be freely distributed as long as it is unaltered, and as long as this document and the Calendar Archives document go with it.
Weather is a HyperCard stack (for HyperCard 2.1+) that can be used on any Macintosh computer. It was designed for PowerBooks, so the information could be read off from the computer as required, but basic weather information can also be exported to a text file if you want to print it out. For reasonable performance and ease of use, at least a 68040 Mac and a PowerBook-sized screen is recommended. You should allocate HyperCard 1600 K or more of memory, perhaps a megabyte more on a Power Mac. Skimping on memory will slow Weather down (a lot), and may even prevent it working at all. Vast numbers of fonts in your system will also slow down HyperCard (and hence Weather).
If you “never read documentation” then you might find Weather baffling at first. I’d suggest saving the help as a text file (File menu, Save Help), and keeping it open in your word-processor (so you can do text searches) or printing it out for convenient access while initially using Weather. To start with, you should at least read the introduction and the summary of weather generation, then play around with generating weather in the Weather section (where you’ll be clicking the hours on the graph and reading off information during your games). Look up the more complex things, like setting up a calendar or choosing weather, when you need to.
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Weather lets you add realistic weather and other background information to your game without spending ages in preparation. You can customise a calendar and weather pattern for your own world, or simply use one of the calendars supplied or available. Temperature, precipitation, cloud cover, and wind are all calculated, along with the hours of daylight, the phases of the moon or moons, and how far you can see at any hour of the day or night in all weather conditions.
Once a calendar has been chosen, all you do is indicate the climatic zone, terrain, and date, and then weather appropriate to the season and latitude can be generated for days and weeks at a time. If you don’t like the weather for a particular day, just generate it again. If your party teleports to a different area — say, from temperate hills in one planetary hemisphere, to subarctic forest in the other — you can simply change the settings and generate the weather for the new location within seconds.
Weather was designed for Earth-like planets, but allows you to create an environment far removed from that of Earth. You can vary temperature range, stability, how the seasons change, and even the number of moons and the brightness of the sun. Weather should be suitable for nearly all planets inhabitable by humans in a science fiction milieu, and most alternate worlds and planes in a fantasy milieu. If you want weather patterns for extreme worlds, with ammonia rock, methane lakes, and a hydrogen atmosphere, or seasons where magical energy waxes and wanes and emotion storms sweep across the land, it won’t do it, but you can generate more normal weather and extrapolate.
You can always choose the weather type if you want to (as gamemasters often do): what Weather does is take care of the details you don’t want to be bothered with, like hour-by-hour variations of temperature, visibility, and so on. A lot of data is generated, and it is highly unlikely that you will use most of it, but the computer does all the tedious work, so you can relax and just take what you need at the level you want. In a fantasy campaign you might describe the weather in verbal terms (warm, partly cloudy), and in a science-fiction campaign, you might give the specifics that the instrumentation would reveal.
The level of detail you use in a game is up to you and your gaming style... as the Internet joke has it:
A person starts a story:
“It was a dark and stormy night.”
An avid gamer starts a story:
“It was a <die roll>...lightless and <die roll>...rainy night.”
An avid wargamer starts a story:
“It was a dark (35% visibility) and stormy, 7/8 overcast, night at 21:16. The wind was blowing from the southwest at 21 kilometres/hour. Occasional flashes of lightning provided a 20% visibility increase for the remainder of the combat round in which they occurred, at GM’s discretion. The terrain caused a -3 modifier to be applied to all movement rolls.”
