Natural Hazards: Geothermal

Since I just finished a great vacation in Yellowstone National Park, here is a brief section on natural hazards associated with geothermal areas.  You often see signs in Yellowstone that say “stay on the path”, and for good reason.  The ground surface may look solid, but areas are less than an inch think before you crunch into scalding hot water.  This water may be inches deep or tens of feet deep.  If you are lucky, you get severe burns on a limb.  Less lucky…being burnt to death is a pretty painful way to kill off a character.  Areas like Yellowstone with geysers and hot springs are rare around the world (about half the known geysers are in Yellowstone), and they are great for games because of that uniqueness.  

Natural Hazards: Volcanoes

When you think of volcanoes, what comes to mind first?  Ash and rock spewing into the air or lava flows racing down the slopes catching everything in its path on fire?  Both of these are common types of hazards from volcanic eruptions, but other hazards such as earthquakes, landslides, toxic gases, climate change, and structural damage are also associated with volcanic activity.  

Natural Hazards: Earthquakes

Earthquakes are far reaching natural disasters that may be barely felt or devastate entire kingdoms.  Earthquakes are unpredictable with our current technology, and will remain unpredictable for the foreseeable future.  We know that there have been this many earthquakes of this type in this time frame, so it will probably happen again in a similar way.  Earthquakes are caused by natural forces such a volcanic activity, magma movement, and tectonic plate movement.  Human based activities that have a strong correlation to earthquakes is “fracking” during oil and gas recovery and waste water injection wells.  

Natural Hazards: Landslides

Landslides are game friendly natural disasters.  They can be so small and slow that trees outgrow the movement of the slope, or so fast and large that towns can be obliterated in minutes.  Landslides can be caused by rain, erosion, accidentally during construction or traveling, or by people purposely looking to make trouble.  Landslides can lead to humanitarian efforts by your group, add a new element to economics or politics of the region, redirect a traveling group to a new area, or be a fun way for the bad guys to ambush the group.  Though geologists like myself can get pretty crazy about different classifications of landslides, this article will highlight a few landslide types that could be useful in a gaming situation.

Natural Hazards: An Overview

Think about all the great disasters that your characters have had to overcome or learn to cope with over the course of your gaming career.  Odds are, if it wasn’t caused by the bad guys (and even some that were), it was based on a natural hazard.  If thinking back over your gaming career you can’t think of natural disasters that occurred, now may be the time to change it up a bit.  Natural hazards can infuse complexity into situations, add drama, or force characters to deal with situations where there aren’t any ‘bad guys’ to be caught.

This series of articles is intended to provide information on types of natural hazards, locating them from a storyteller perspective, how characters can identify that there is a potential hazard, how evildoers may utilize them, ways human activity can intensify hazards, and general damage information.