This Accursed Solo War – the weather

Welcome and welcome back for all those that have been following the Chronicles.

The posts so far have set the tone for the campaign, the land, the notables, some details that will help guiding it. The actions will provide the evolution and creation of the story and that’s exactly what I want to discover, but there’s details that need to be established for the actions to happen.

The calendar I used is this one and for various reasons. For one it suited the campaign theme. Another one is the army and city organisation regarding supplies. With the Month of Wages every 2 years I can plan a supply cycle based on one and a half so there’s possibility of surplus but also periods of emergency that might spark looting and forced foraging.

Note: Everything happens at the same time in the imaginary world, so in the same way the creator – the players – do discover the details of the campaign and they move through. As an example the weather conditions were found out when moving the pieces in the map. Do not adhere to a rigid plan but adapt as you discover more and thus create more content for your wargames.

The weather conditions are very important, and easy to determine following the guidelines in Silvester’s book, but I had to adjust the 12 month year to a 10 month one with extra months every other year as the Roman republican calendar. This meant the adjustments fell mostly on the cross overs between seasons.

Given I did already calculated the movement of messengers I had now to plot the movement of armies and in this the weather is of dire importance as rain, fog, snow and heat, all affect march rates.

For reference this is how mensis December came out

Anno I – Mensis December ( 29 days )

1 heavy rain	2 light rain	3 light rain	4 fog	5 light rain	6 light rain	7 light rain
8 light rain	9 light rain	10 fog	11 light rain	12 light rain	13 light rain	14 heavy rain
15 heavy rain	16 heavy rain	17 fair	18 heavy rain	19 fair	20 fair	21 fair
22 fair	23 fair	24 fair	25 fair	26 fair	27 heavy rain	28 fair
29 fair

As we can see there’s period of continuous light rain that will take its toll on the marching troops and everyday marching will sap the next day distance if the weather remains the same until a column just has to stop and camp out of exhaustion, morale collapse ( rain does that a lot ), and a lot of other factors.

As the weather is only determined AFTER the marching plans have been drawn the calendar of armies movements will, more likely than not, change and the only thing we need to do is sit down and move cubes around the calendar.