whether there will be weather

[marycatelli]

 One of the things fairy tales leave out in their sparseness is weather.  Unless you need a storm to cause shipwreck or a merchant to be lost, or a wind to blow a ship home, or other plot device, there is no weather. 

There are, in fact, no seasons.  It makes life interesting when trying to fit it into a more detailed and realistic setting.  Especially since the fairy tale can knock off serving a blacksmith for seven years in order to get him to make something for you so you can cross the glass mountain in a sentence or two.

The characters don't have anything that bad, but they are traveling, and they don't have the technology to make winter a nuisance rather than a serious obstacle.  Also, no less than three women get pregnant and give birth during the story -- in parallel, not in sequence -- but still, it locks some time periods down hard. 

Using the winter as a reason to stop does burn up some time, so the factors do help each other -- sometimes.

Comments

[nodrog]

http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2011/11/articles-of-dragon-weather-in-world-of.html

Dragon #68 in PDF, with this on pg 44:

https://annarchive.com/files/Drmg068.pdf

Note the foldout section included at the end of the magazine.

[marycatelli]

Not really going into more detail than -- it's winter, it snows, roads are hard to travel on.

[nodrog]

That same issue of The Dragon has an article on gaming an Ice Age setting, that you might find interesting also - and it coincidentally sheds light on your original point.  It’s not a case of no seasons, but rather always the same season - a seemingly trivial difference but not really:

When winter first begins to bite
and stones crack in the frosty night,
when pools are black and trees are bare,
'tis evil in the Wild to fare.

- LotR, “The Ring Goes South”

All such stories take place when they would:  In daytime, and in warm weather.  Exceptions exist, but they are exceptions.

[nodrog]

Remember also that it was the impassable winter weather which caused the Fellowship of the Ring to go underground and lay the foundations for D & D.  The party need not be snowbound if they can find a particular door, like the Badger’s in The Wind in the Willows…

[marycatelli]

Ah, but how often do fairy tale characters find ingenious ways to bypass the weather? If you don't give them a giant eagle that can carry them from the underworld or the like, they go by foot. Or maybe horseback (or wolfback).

And a magical means of transport would give them too many options in this world.

[nodrog]

Unless their control of it is shaky at best.  I was imagining the “marble puzzle” in Riven as the Heechee setup in whatsisname’s stories:  Put down each of the colored stones in whatever array you choose, and see where the resulting portal takes you:  To a lost city of treasure, to a cave, to a flooded cave, to the seashore, to the seashore that existed ten million years ago and is now under solid rock, to ten thousand feet above the seashore…

[marycatelli]

That would be worse. They would discover its properties and revert to trudging because it's the only way to plan.

[nodrog]

You’re working from a cultural assumption of prudence - and therewith, longevity.  Which is fine, I’m just pointing it out.  The Hellenic Greeks, conversely, were basically high-school kids, mentally and often physically, with a “Hey, y’ all, watch this!” attitude:  “Let ’r buck!  Kowabunga!”

CRUNCH.

“… Ouch.”

Hey, you never know ’til you try, right?  *grin*

[marycatelli]

But I'm not doing Hellenic Greeks, I'm doing fairy tales.

And in fairy tales, if you imprudently do so much as ignore the advice of a talking fox about which inn to stay at night, you are in DEEP trouble.