Today’s RPGaDay prompt is “Flood”, which feels a bit awkward, given that my home, The Netherlands, is most likely to see excessive flooding over the next decades due to climate change. It’s one of my larger worries given the property we just bought is closer to the shore than we currently are.
Come to think of it, I’ve never played or ran an RPG where natural disasters were a major determinant of the story. Sure, there were epic games with large wars between nations, there’s been epic games with massive magics that could almost be considered natural disasters, and there’s been games where disasters happened long in the past, such as the setting of the Forgotten Realms, where magic ceased to work for a brief period, causing a whole civilization of people on floating mountains to experience tragic loss. Never, however, have I played in a compaign with a very natural, commonplace natural disaster driving the urgent situation.
It may be interesting to start off a campaign like that. A small tribe forced to leave its ancestral home due to flooding, having to trek out of their natural environs to venture out into the unexplored world, or a city that is lost due to the eruption of a nearby volcano having to deal with the exodus of refugees.