Weaponize Encounter Weather With The Beaufort Scale
Use the Beaufort Scale to help make wind and storm rulings easier.
I grew up on a street called Beaufort Avenue. When we moved there, it had no curbs or sidewalks. And it dead-ended a few blocks down the road.
And we had some fantastic wind storms. The walnut tree became weather’s weapon during gales. The power would flicker and then just stop. And the sea would froth up into whitecaps that crashed against the barrier down at the water level.
The Beaufort Scale puts wind speed into tiers. It works for gentle breezes and dire hurricanes. This graph shows water speed at the top, land speed at the bottom, and where each tier falls on the scale:
For example, you might roll a d12 for outdoor encounters and reference the Beaufort scale. That single roll gives you the wind speed, the storm’s type, and immediate environmental hazards.
Add Wind to Your Campaign
Your quest today is to create a table of wind scale effects like the one below below in Campaign Logger or your source of truth, and to modify the effects columns to match your game system.
Please note: The two tables below are pretty wide and tough to read on a phone.
I’ve made both available in a plain text file, along with table code you can copy and paste into any Campaign Loger page:
https://clst01.blob.core.windows.net/community-cdn/cl/public-files/rptn-beaufort-scale.txt
Here’s the Beaufort scale along with some potential land and sea effects:
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaufort_scale
Finally, we should decide what game effects different wind speeds have. Here’s an example table to start with and adapt for your rules.
Quite often, our encounters just offer basic air movement details. Environments become a boring binary of safe or windy.
The Beaufort scale offers us greater granularity for encounter design and challenge variety. It gets us thinking more about potential effects of storms and wind events. And you can use it in both directions: roll or choose wind speed to determine effects, or to decide what scale the wind speed was from a description and extrapolate additional, consistent details.
Cheers,
Johnn
Have more fun at every game!
