Weather Forecaster Hex Grid (free download)
Weather Forecasting Hex Map for Dungeons and Dragons / Other RPGs
A chart upon which you can somewhat randomly generate a weather condition and then move around through it to forecast potential weather and decide on actual weather. The edges are more winter focused and the center is more summer focused, with a bit of a transition between them, but depending how you travel it you can get vastly different weather experiences. It’s a hex, so the way you can move your marker for the daily weather around can really determine the experience you get.
Inspired by the much simpler Weather Hex by Daniel Sell. Grab that one if you want a much faster to traverse weather chart.
Weather includes 3 ranges of winter and summer weather, plus rain, storm, wind, and “seasonal indicator” which means that if you’re on or beside that token, you might indicate to your players that there are leaves or petals falling down from trees, pollen in the air, puffy seeds being blown about, etc.
I did my best to make it readable for a colorblind game master by adding a different texture to the snow, rain, summer, wind, and storm hexes. Hopefully it will be useful to you.
Print this out or use it for your online VTT game. If you print it, just roll a dice over top of the sheet and wherever it lands is the weather you get! Then you can either reroll on the chart or, use a token and travel through the hexes as the day progresses to change the weather. Ignore the hex you came from, and pick the five surrounding you to give a 20% chance of whatever weather surrounds you. You can also pick any start hex and just ‘travel through’… the edges are more winter weather and the middle is more summer weather. Move 1-3 times a day unless your setting is San Francisco, London, Vancouver or any other notorious coastal region best known for having all four seasons in a single day.
If you pin it to the back of a DM board, my trick would be to sandwich two small magnets such as my Buckyballs and move them on the hex.
If you use it digitally, open it up in a photo-editing program, put a dot where you begin, and move your marker or draw a new spot periodically throughout the session to change the weather. This will be easier than installing it in a virtual tabletop and lining up the hex grid. That’s how I’m using it, I’ve just made a new layer and I’m drawing a route through the weather to generate it/ as well as its possibilities. Maybe you have a player who’s a ranger wood elf and they’re always like “what do I sense from the wind!” or one of your characters is a witch made of parchment and it’s vital to know if it’s raining or not. (Troika! problems!)
This is a means of randomizing weather without thinking too hard. But don’t leave thought out of it entirely. For example, the storms in the middle of summer that aren’t surrounded by rain… are those just thunderstorms, very noisy, or worse…
Clicking the button will put it in your cart where you can check out and the high res file will be emailed to you! It’s an 8×11.5. You can whip this off on a printer sheet. The texture should enable it to be legible in grayscale if you don’t have a color printer, or pay your local library / Staples / print shop a buck and have it printed on nice paper. There’s also a smaller version for use on the web. I think it’s around 8×6, it’s basically sized to fit nicely on a screen if you wanted to use it on a VTT like I do. If this won’t work, shoot me an email and I’ll send you an even bigger file for it. I have the
If it’s useful for you, you can pay some money for it, or you can guiltlessly get the freebie. There is no difference in what you get, other than the warm feeling in your heart of knowing you’re financially stable enough to tip an artist for making a free asset that many others will simply download for free. Your life is stable. Your fridge is full of beer and vegetables and eggs. Your pantry contains snacks. Your bills are paid. You know you won’t miss that dollar, and with it, you speak across the tubes and say, “You know what? This will be useful for me. I am grateful. Buy a cookie or whatever.”
If you’re not flush with food and drink, take the freebie. It’s there specifically for you.