Aldawyn has weather, and it is the same weather everywhere in a climate. Two regions of the same kind, however far apart on the map, see the same skies and near enough the same temperature. What changes between places is what kind of place they are.
The seasons turn on their own clock, the great year, which is six of the years people are counted in. Everything in this chapter is measured in it: when this page says "the year", it means the great year, and one full turn of it takes six of yours.
The great year turns steadily and never stops. It runs from deep winter up to midsummer at its midpoint, then back down to winter again.
winter ────────▶ spring ────────▶ MIDSUMMER ────────▶ autumn ────────▶ winter
│ │ │
start of the year warmest point end of the year
Two things follow that are worth knowing before you plan anything:
The warmest weather comes a little after midsummer, not on it. The world takes time to heat up and time to cool down, so the peak lags. Expect the same at the other end: the coldest days come after the year has already turned.
Roughly the middle half of the year is the wet season. Rain is much more likely then in most climates. Deserts and the tropics are the exceptions. They behave the same all year, one relentlessly dry and the other relentlessly wet.
Where you are decides what your year looks like. These are the temperatures you can expect to see across a year, the extremes rather than the averages:
| Climate | Typical low | Typical high | What it is like |
|---|---|---|---|
| mountain | -25 | 23 | Bitter and long. The coldest place in the world, and it snows for much of the year |
| temperate | -18 | 34 | The widest swing of anywhere. Hard winters, warm summers, wet in season |
| sea | -4 | 28 | Mild and damp. The ocean softens both ends, and it is the only climate that stays wet out of season |
| mediterranean | 5 | 40 | Warm and dry, with a brief wet season. Rarely cold enough to snow |
| savanna | 17 | 40 | Hot all year. Sharply split between a wet season and a dry one |
| tropical | 18 | 41 | Hot and wet, always. Barely any season at all |
| dessert | 22 | 53 | The hottest place in the world by a wide margin, and it almost never rains |
Two are worth calling out. Mountain and temperate are the only climates that go below freezing, so they are the only places you will see snow. And tropical and desert have no seasons worth the name. Their year is nearly flat, one soaking and one parched.
At any moment a region is under one of six conditions:
wet: rain thunderstorm drizzle
dry: sunny clouded windy
Weather holds. It does not flicker from hour to hour. A spell of rain tends to stay a spell of rain, and changes come every several hours rather than constantly. What changes it, and how often, depends on the climate: a tropical region is nearly always wet, a desert nearly always dry, and the rest sit between depending on the season.
Snow is rain that falls into the cold. There is no separate snowy weather: when a region is wet and at or below freezing, what falls is snow. So snow arrives when winter and rain coincide, which is why the mountains see so much of it and the tropics see none.
When a region stays wet for an unusually long stretch it floods. When it stays dry for an unusually long stretch it falls into drought. Either ends when the weather finally turns.
"Unusually long" means unusual for that place. A month without rain is ordinary in a desert and alarming in a temperate forest, so each climate is judged against its own normal rather than a single figure. A desert is not permanently in drought, and the tropics are not permanently flooded. Those would be descriptions of the climate, not events. Expect roughly a couple of these a year in most places, and fewer in the extreme climates where the weather rarely does anything surprising at all.
Floods and droughts move a crop. A farm worked while its region is in drought or flood yields 10 more or 10 fewer raw food, depending on whether the crop planted wants dry or wet: see crops. They are also drawn on the statistics page and written in the chronicle, and that is all they touch.
Worth stating, because they are true in most worlds and would be reasonable to assume: