Magical Weather: The Sunderstorm

This morning, my 6yo said, through a mouthful of hard-boiled egg, that “th’ sunderstorm woke me up last night.”

She is quite articulate normally, but no one is really articulate – or neat – through a mouthful of eggs.

Even so…that mispronunciation was interesting.

D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder both have a several-step process for damaging a foe’s weapon or shield. You attack it, but you provoke an opportunity attack, and then you win a contested roll, and if all that’s successful, you apply damage, first subtracting the object “hardness” (Damage Reduction in 5e; Damage Resistance in GURPS).

You can damage or destroy an object this way.

Thanks to a mumble over breakfast, we now have a magical catastrophe.

The Sunderstorm

This magical upheaval would sweep over an area, leaving broken and shattered stuff in its wake. Depending on the storm severity, it might only damage fragile things, or it could be the equivalent of an EF5 tornado.

In a D&D game, anything caught in a sunderstorm would be hit automatically, and would take damage depending on its DR and hit points. Of course, that would require knowing those things (PFRPG and 3.5 have tables for such). GURPS has the generic rules for it, and an equivalency between mass and HP.

You’d need to determine countermeasures, if any. Note that hailstorms, bad lightning storms, tornadoes and hurricanes don’t really have countermeasures other than “shelter under something big.”  So a magical upheaval that leaves destruction in its wake isn’t that much different than any other kind of natural disaster.

It’s just magical.

Other Catastrophes and Magical Weather

Inverting Clarke’s Law, we have “a sufficiently well-understood magic is indistinguishable from technology.” Many spell-effect systems, including D&D, GURPS, and The Fantasy Trip, all have very well defined magic systems where you push the “smite” button, or the “heal” button, or the “long-distance teleport” button. With a few enchantments, it’s entirely possible to re-create an internet chat room. Magical Twitter: what you always knew your fantasy RPG never needed.

That is to say, magic is just a thing, and it is mostly predictable and known, at least in terms of playing the game. The absolutely wonderful GURPS Powers: Divine Favor, gets around this in part by having a petition roll and a result roll that means the cleric asking for help cannot always know what the results of a prayer will be. There are also “Learned Prayers” that are every bit as predictable as any other game effect. But magic with known outcomes isn’t a given…it’s just easier that way to know what your paper person can do.

But if the effects were known, but the magical background varied…or had the strength of the local mana field subject to local weather conditions, including storms, magic running hot or cold, floods, droughts . . . that might make up for the predictability of spells by having the wellspring from which one draws vary.

In 5e, there are “schools” of magic; GURPS has spell colleges. If these things had weight – “fire spells are at +3 today; cold spells are at -3; the power of illusion and glamour is waning this week…treat all spells from these schools/colleges as if they were in a low mana zone; the moon Mahni and the three other moons known as The Fates are aligned: divination spells are automatically successful…but the casters are flooded with information.”

Parting Shot

I haven’t given much thought to this in my Nordlond/Etera setting. But it’s interesting, and I have given quite a bit of thought to mundane weather. So having the supernatural world as variable as the mundane one isn’t crazy.

But it’s also extra work for the GM, done by random table or by fiat. So there’s that.

Having magical undercurrents, events, weather, and a more constant fluctuation of the flows of mana through the world might spice things up a bit, and provided that it boosts spellcasters as often as it hurts them, might add some fun flavor to a world.

Today’s random brought to you by a mouthful of egg.