My games tend to have a European feel to them.  I am so old that when I was kid fantasy books weren’t widely available, so I came to fantasy from Norse and Greek myth and then as I grew up I added a healthy dose of Celtic mythology to the mix.  Since then I have read more widely, but my roots are still in European mythology and history,  and my games all tend to have a European feel to them.

One thing I have noticed over my years of GMing is that I am rubbish at describing the weather in my games.  Sure we have the occasional rain, the odd storm and the rare day that it snows or there is a severe wind – but realistically my games all finish up in a fairly bland weather system.  Summers are warm but not hot, winters are cool but not really cold, you get rained on sometimes and very occasionally there is severe weather of one type or another.  There isn’t much point in changing that – I have tried adding weather reports to my games, it lasts for a couple of weeks and then disappears.  For me, the effort of the change doesn’t appear to be repaid by the difference in the game - so I am going to stick with a bland weather system.

That actually has the big advantage of allowing me to build a simple game setting and means I don’t have to plan too many differences.  I don’t have to worry about un-metalled roads and other areas becoming muddy, impassable, or flooding in winter nor will rivers, streams and croplands drying up in drought conditions through the summer.  I know that roads, rivers and other features will stay pretty much where I put them.

It also has a knock on effect for the agricultural environment.  A mild climate means that you can get long extended seasons for your crops, and that in most cases you can get two or more crops a year.  It means I can build a system where (in most areas) there is plenty of food available on a day-to-day basis.   It doesn’t mean that every one eats well every day, the political system deals with that, but it does mean that the land is capable of producing plenty of fresh food if it is cultivated properly.