Hard Winters Planning/Discussion Thread

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

On the RPG thread itself, we'll need to describe weather conditions without the benefit of all the modern amenities we're so used to, such as temperature, fronts, patterns, and all that. We may want to consider developing a vocabulary we can use, or have our copies of LotR and The Hobbit ready to hand so we can see what Tolkien did.

One tool will be to describe the weather from the perspective of your character: how does it feel? What is seen? Heard? tasted? smelled?

Certainly. Well, let's simply have The Ring Goes South open at hand, and maybe a few chapters about Túrin and co., I think (at Faelivrin and whatnot).

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

But lets also imagine that our characters don't have modern jackets and snowpants. Would they have fur coats? I don't think so. I can't see Rohirrim wearing them. (Also, wasn't it the end of winter when Aragorn&co came there in TTT? They didn't appear too cold without coats, and no snow). So without proper clothing and some wind, milder temperatures would be just as fearsome. Perhaps no freezing eyelashes, but freezing bodies for sure.

That's exactly it. Imagine, Rohan is really quite mild. There was no snow left at the end of February, and I have no reason to assume the year of the War of the Ring was in some way dramatically warmer than otherwise. So, imagine the shock when there actually is snow on top of it being normally cold like usually in winter, or maybe even a bit colder.

The whole difference of our Hard Winter and the normal conditions in Rohan can really be in the fact that there is the snow, which people may not be used to that much, or may not be used to it lasting. Certainly not used to any huge snowdrifts or snowstorms which take a couple of days. That's a weather phenomenon which can simply randomly happen one year, a set of really bad circumstances.

I imagine normal Rohan to be windy, it being such an open space, and the wind in winter would be cold, but usually - given that Rohan is protected by the mountains from the west and south - usually the wind would come from the east and it would be dry (because it is coming from the mainland), so there wouldn't be that much precipitation to cause large amounts of snow falling when the temperatures are below zero. But if, in our case, there simply came unusually more clouds from the west - from the sea, heavy with water - which obviously happens from time to time, but in our case it just maybe happened on a bit larger scale - you can get a large amount of precipitation; snowfall for days. And then, instead of leaving, some of the clouds can be stopped by the mountains and sort of keep rotating in place and hitting especially the valleys below - which could kinda be also the case of Midemnet - with more snow until basically everything falls down. And then, after the sky has cleared, you can have these very bright, but therefore also very cold days with cold wind from the East, when the temperatures are so low and people are just shivering and rattling their teeth and crust forms on top of the snow and it never melts.