Weather in the Indicara (the Amedio Jungle)

Rumble in the Rain?

When I think of jungles, the weather is always omnipresent - oppressive humidity, almost constant rainfall, clear days that rapidly become overcast with tropical thunderclouds and massive downpours.

There was no existing weather system for the Indicara in UK6, so rather than design one from scratch, I decided to look at the "Amedio Jungle" section of Sean K. Reynold's The Scarlet Brotherhood supplement for inspiration. This 2E work is itself based off Roger E. Moore's classic article "The Green Nightmare: the Amedio Jungle" from Oerth Journal #6.

I remember the complex weather generation tables from the Glossography booklet from the World of Greyhawk Boxed Set with mixed feelings - evocative but also hideously complex!

So I built a Google Spreadsheet generator, incorporating the relevant descriptor text and mechanical effects that requires only a choice of Season to be entered (0 = Dry/Summer, 1 = Wet/Winter) and is set to update every minute, for ready use at the gaming table.

No dice rolls needed!

Example "Amedio Weather Generator" result

I could probably go back and hide the "Precipitation" row as Cell D13 is just a dependent variable for the "Rainfall" result generated by setting the "Season" variable in Cell B6, but it seems to work well as it is, so I'm inclined to leave it for now.

Although the descriptions are taken from the 2E sources, I've stuck with the 1E source for the mechanical effects summary as it was easier to insert (the 2E source references multiple 2E PHB and 2E DMG tables). Interestingly, the wind effects are calculated to be negligible for all cases except for the strongest thunderstorm as the jungle canopy and foliage provides significant shelter (-10mph wind speed per the 1E source material).

On checking further, the original weather article from DRAGON #68 that the WoH Boxed Set Glossography material is based on included "special weather effects" including volcanoes, earthquakes, quicksand, rainforest downpours, as well as the possibility of generating more intense storms (tropical storm, monsoon, gale, hurricane/typhoon). I could probably use a "triples", "doubles", "sequentials" and "max" approach with the calculations to generate these like the KNeE Table generators, but it gets more complicated than I'd like to go for weather and I believe such extreme weather works better as a scripted story event than just a random event.

Downloadable Amedio Weather Generator & Resources

This embedded spreadsheet below should calculate everything you need for a day in the Indicara:
(This will be replaced once I work out how to embed the spreadsheet properly, it's a placeholder line)

Alternatively, this link will take you to the complete Google Drive version.

I'll export an Excel for Mac version for offline use eventually.