Have any of you ever used a natural disaster of some sort, earthquake, flood, volcanic eruption, blizzard/avalanche, ect in your game?  To what effect?  Was it just narrated or did you have some mechanical support behind it?  Obviously these things will play out differently based on genre and setting but how did the PCs handle it and the aftereffects?

Specifically for me, I'm thinking of having an earthquake hit the city the PCs call home in our current Shadows of Esteren game (low magic, fantasy setting). I know I want some major structural damage to happen and since it's a coastal city maybe some flooding in the waterfront district.  Past that I'm not sure what else might happen.  I'm going to do some research to see what else an event like this may lead to.

I want this to give the PCs some opportunities to go out and help the general public as 2 of the 4 characters belong to groups that aren't well liked.  One is a member of the Temple in a traditionally "old ways" region and the other is a Magientist (steampunk-like mad scientist).  I'm thinking this will give them a chance to go out and save people trapped in the rubble as well as set up care for the injured/displaced.

Do the PCs count?

Oriental Adventures had a whole system for yearly events for holdings which included floods, famines, earthquakes, plagues, and more.

In my own campaigns Ive used an earthquake to to kick off uncovering a threat. A flood featured in another.

Both were a mix of narration and mechanics. Either drawing from OA's systems or working something out from existing spells.

Wilderness Survival Guide was great as it covered several natural disasters.

Hmm. In my own games, I haven't had many, but there were some, though I don't think I've had them right where the players were, though I may be forgetting. They affected the settlements and sometimes a bit of the terrain where they happened. At least one magical WMD but it was only used once in a test against a town, which only appeared in play as a mystery about why/how a town had vanished. There were some active volcanoes, many wars. Also diseases, plagues and severe weather, all of which do have specific rules. Weather comes up the most often as it affects travel and so on.

The biggest disaster I remember in another GM's game was a huge flood which severely changed the world map, turning an entire country into sea, and creating refugees and a new political situation which led to all sorts of world events.

Landslides, but not avalanches.

The only thing that qualifies is a Global Epidemic. Which was mostly narrative as the PC wasn't susceptible. I'd love to include a hurricane, earthquake, or tsunami though.

Quote from: rgalex;856101Specifically for me, I’m thinking of having an earthquake hit the city the PCs call home in our current Shadows of Esteren game (low magic, fantasy setting). I know I want some major structural damage to happen and since it’s a coastal city maybe some flooding in the waterfront district.  Past that I’m not sure what else might happen.  I’m going to do some research to see what else an event like this may lead to.

If the quake happens offshore you would also have a tsunami. The major affects would be destruction of infrastructure. If there are a lot of wooden buildings fires would be a major problem. There would be plenty of injured to take care of. The clean water supply could be at least temporally contaminated. It would be worse with a tsunami as that would bring in salt water. Also supplies of food could be lost by either fire or the collapse of the building they were stored in. A few outbreak of disease would follow due to contaminated water.

A fantasy twist if there are monsters in the area they may see the chaos as a good time to attack.

I run lots of post-apocalyptic RPGs (Gamma World, Rifts, Waste World) and I love adding natural disasters to the already screwed up landscape.

Waste World has shatter storms which are great plot devices too.

Quote from: Omega;856110Oriental Adventures had a whole system for yearly events for holdings which included floods, famines, earthquakes, plagues, and more.

Those charts for weekly / monthly / yearly events was awesome!

A few.

One recurring one is that my world has five moons.  As such, tides can be very severe and very erratic (even predicting high/low tide is a difficult job for dedicated astronomers), and I've pulled damaging floods more than once.

A variation on that theme I've used: one groups has as the base of operations a manor on a large, swift moving river on which a lot of trade goes.  There's an annual spring flood, dependent on when the ice on the upper river breaks up.  While the manor itself is on a bluff and not at risk -- except in so far as their pier routinely gets taken out if the ice is severe -- the friendly estate next downriver is, and would've been flooded out two years ago if the Master-class ice wizard didn't set up an impromptu levee, with a lot of help.

One party was snowed in for six weeks once because of an avalanche that buried the highroad heading out.  No huge impact, but stuck in a small town that exists pretty much only because it's a wide spot on that road, they got into mischief ...

The capital city out of which the main party is based was hit by a direct strike from two tornadoes last year -- all rolled, quite randomly, in front of the players.  The devastation was less severe than it could've been, but it's heavily impacted play.  One reason was that while the storm track didn't directly hit there, the city's shanteytown was pretty much flattened, and the party was heavily involved then -- and subsequently -- in relief and rebuilding.  Another was that one of the few buildings taking a direct hit was the kingdom's hall of records, turning about 90% of the land tenure records and tax cadasters into confetti, with a material impact on this year's civil war.

Two came up in the last ACKS campaign I ran:

1) The campaign basis was a group of colonists setting up a town on a recently-discovered island.  I gave them a map (with the interior blacked out) and let them choose their landing site.  Unfortunately, the river mouth they chose to settle had a plague cult living upstream.  They lost something like 20% of the initial population to plague before the PCs were able to resolve it.

2) I found some software that I could use to generate a year's weather for the site.  A few months after their initial landing, the generated weather included a tornado.  When the appropriate date arrived, I laid out the map of the settlement and the immediately surrounding area, then dropped a pair of d4s on the map to determine the path of the tornado.  As it turned out, the path passed about a half-mile south of the outer walls, doing little significant damage.

Dragons are natural disasters, right?

I mean, it's an elephant-sized, sentient, flying, carnivorous, incendiary reptile. It will eat livestock and set fields and towns ablaze until someone stops it.

Quote from: Shawn Merrow;856216If the quake happens offshore you would also have a tsunami. The major affects would be destruction of infrastructure. If there are a lot of wooden buildings fires would be a major problem. There would be plenty of injured to take care of. The clean water supply could be at least temporally contaminated. It would be worse with a tsunami as that would bring in salt water. Also supplies of food could be lost by either fire or the collapse of the building they were stored in. A few outbreak of disease would follow due to contaminated water.

A fantasy twist if there are monsters in the area they may see the chaos as a good time to attack.

Yeah, I was thinking about some of that.  

The way the city is set up is that there is the "lower" districts which have the warehouses, docks, farmers, poorer people and then an "upper" area.  The upper area is actually several districts (markets, nobles, guilds, etc) built on the tops of several mesas all connected by bridges.  I figure at least one of the bridges is going to collapse, which will strand people on top and cause lots of damage to those below.

I know SoE has disease rules.  I'll have to reread them to see what might be done with the contaminated water.

That was something BX lacked. Aside from the seagoing storms. There were no rules for natural disasters. It was up to the DM to play out however they deemed.

Quote from: Omega;856243That was something BX lacked. Aside from the seagoing storms. There were no rules for natural disasters. It was up to the DM to play out however they deemed.

Isn't that the basic premise difference between basic D&D and AD&D?



Anyways, natural disasters can be fun if used sparingly, just like natural disaster films. Just don't do it too often or it might feel like releasing Deep Impact and Armageddon in the same year.

Most of the tropes of that kind of adventure are both features and bugs. There is no bad guy (unless there's some madman with an earthquake generator, which is really a different story). The central conflict can't be "defeated." A lot of the things to do are rescue people in imminent danger (very doable, but lots of the player's special powers and abilites may or may not scale to that level), tend to the wounded (if the system limits healing to X spells per day, this will certainly swamp it), and figure out what to do with large numbers of wounded, homeless and resourceless people in the middle of a chaotic situation. This will stress your player's mental ingenuity and resourcefulness, so hopefully both you and your players are good at thinking on your feet.

I don't know that I've every done much with it, but it certainly opens up a lot of opportunities for (mostly) roll-less gaming.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;856247Isn't that the basic premise difference between basic D&D and AD&D?

Up until Wilderness Survival guide I am not sure if AD&D had any rules for hostile weather. Not counting OA of course.

One of my favorite things (not saying much) about white-box D&D was that (IIRC) it told you to get Avalon Hill's boardgame Outdoor Survival to resolve long-distance wilderness travel. Which I never did. I assume Outdoor Survival has weather rules... perhaps not rules for disaster-level weather, though?

I've not hit PC's with an earthquake, but having been in a few in real life, I'd tend to determine where the players are when it happens, and then set up a tactical battle map as if they're about to get attacked unexpectedly, and then give them increasing clues that something's happening, and let them react. Then I'd roll for chances that certain things fall over or collapse, and how people react.

In some settings, disasters can lead to various types of social breakdown, such as looting and pandemonium (popular with many of my players).

A natural disaster, or at the very least, freak weather, can provide amazing adventure hooks.

A semi-flooded city is awesome for all kinds of reasons.

Massive downpour and thunder storms just at the same time as the Baron's opulent wedding? Is this caused by a sorcerous, jealous ex-lover (of either party)?

Harsh winter blizzards in summer? Who the fuck murdered the local Unicorn?

The volcanic activity is threatening to awaken a long-dormant ancient firedrake. Gotta find a way to put it to sleep again or else.

And, of course, the looming threat of a giant asteroid slowly getting bigger and bigger in the sky...

SO many possibilities (beyond my clichés, I mean).