Adventure Calendar 2022 7: Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

Adventure Calendar 2022

7: Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

Vaughn Monroe, Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

Okay. End of the first week.

Time to do Die Hard.

Die Hard, mentioned more than once in previous Adventure Calendars, is the classic snark answer for favourite Christmas movie, but unlike many action films set around the season it really does qualify as a Christmas movie as it centres on someone travelling to be with his family, and there’s also a gift that’s important to the plot...

And now it has an advent calendar too. Kind of.

Die Hard On An X (TV Tropes) is one of the easy action adventure plot hooks. In RPGs it’s up there with The Seven Samurai which has a group of PCs built in. There are versions in Buffy, Alias, more than one of the 90s Star Trek series complete with captains in vests, and the Crew doing it on purpose in Leverage.

Where might your PCs get missed during the roundup in an invasion?

I’ve also referenced how the weather outside is frightful when talking about snow and other conditions in games and indeed in real life.

Oh, the weather outside is frightful...

Judging by how much the boiler’s doing, Merry Fifth Christmas!

Oh, The Weather Outside Is Frightful

Today’s Google Doodle wildly exaggerates the size of the world's largest snowflake.

Granted, a snowflake fifteen inches across is still pretty big, but rather less so than one fifteen feet across.

(An expansion of a previous post.)

Strange weather can pop up across various genres, particularly when a magical or sufficiently advanced power can influence it. Fantasy has weather control turn up pretty often (maybe because it’s such a common fantasy in the UK), horror is full of dark and stormy nights, broad-strokes SF gives entire planets weather systems.

The Flash fights the Weather Wizard, one of the classic you-should-really-just-patent-that technological supervillains, Storm leads the X-Men, the Mummy controls sandstorms, Ming the Merciless started hitting us with Hot Hail, Weather Control is an important job in Mega-City One, and the Doctor once made it snow with the TARDIS just to make a point.

And PCs can do it too!

Weird things raining from the sky are among the standard Fortean events, so always pack an umbrella for an Unknown Armies game in case of frogs. And watch what you’re saying about the gods while wearing copper armour in the rain.

Even without something strange behind it, bad weather can change an adventure. Compare the sunny glorious Agincourt in Olivier’s Henry V to Branagh’s muddy horror. Running away from the battle of Hoth could mean dying from exposure, and if the Rebels hadn’t escaped when the power went down the Empire wouldn’t need to round them up.

And that’s before you get your killer snowmen.

So who is threatening the town with killer snowmen? (Probably a stretch for Sunnydale, but I wrote a short story for Cambridge in The Watch House. And it’s been done in Doctor Who fiction as well as a couple of terrible horror movies. And I’ve used these beauties before too.) Clearly there’s something magical or sufficiently advanced going on, and if people are under attack it behoves the heroes to deal with it. You can knock their blocks off, melt them and refreeze them (which might stop them, slow them or make them more dangerous), take their coal eyes out, but they keep coming, and if there’s enough snow around they can build their reinforcements, so you have to find how to really stop them. And soon.

Or maybe, just to be equally weird but less action-y, a nice living snowman turns up instead. Does he need your help? Do you need his?

Oh, The Weather Outside Is Frightful

As I write this, the amusingly nicknamed Hurricane Bawbag rages outside, disrupting plans and causing much consternation. This time last year, of course, we were two weeks into six and a half weeks of being snowed in, so I suppose a storm isn’t such a big deal.

So... the weather in games.

Mostly it’s scenery, with dark and stormy nights aplenty, rain most often falling on noirish PIs, vampires threatened by the bright morning sun.

Sometimes it’s a dramatic device that forces adventurers to take shelter in the inn where the murder happens, or miss a vital train due to leaves on the line, or travel through Moria rather than over the mountains.

Sometimes it’s actively involved, under the control of superhuman powers for good or ill.

Games that tend more towards the dice falling where they may and the likes of random encounters might well include random weather, with a roll of the dice always waiting to screw up plans.

But a bit of strange weather could change a regular encounter even if it doesn’t fit the weather’s usual dramatic uses.

Consider a typical battle with a troop of Orcs/brigands/vampires/Stormtroopers and add enough rain to turn the ground to mud as the fight continues. Compare Agincourt in Branagh’s Henry V to Olivier’s to see the difference it can make to a standard narrative.