Introduction
The climate in Errata is hostile. They still call it “weather,” but the word no longer has any real familiarity. Errata’s sky is a wounded engine. Its gears have been stripped. Its timing has long since broken.
Heat pools on the ground like standing water, then lifts in invisible tides that warp the horizon. In the Lowlands the winds arrive without pattern, baring teeth of glassy dust; then they vanish, leaving a silence so absolute it bruises the ears. On the Plateau the prevailing winds come in from overheated Great Dust Basin, and carry with them giant clouds of dust and silt. While in the Highlands heat can turn to chill in an instant, as the high winds rise along the walls of rock and rapidly cool.
Mid-day temperatures are avoided for heat, while at night they pitch‑roll thirty or more degrees, depending on location. No two regions share a forecast, because there is no global system left to predict—only pockets of turbulence carved by wrecked oceans that slam against progressively higher stone rises.
Everything Comes With a Cost
Lightning has become a refugee, untethered from rain. Bolts cut sideways through dust laden air, drawn from the static that builds in alkali flats and bone‑dry silt, and then is distributed across the landscape in the wind.
Thunder comes seemingly from nowhere and everywhere at once—sonic booms that rupture the lungs of unshielded travelers. Water still falls from the sky in the mountains, but it comes in deluges that are gone as quick as they arrive. The parched land, unable to hold the water it so desperately needs, quickly turns to floodwaters which settle into pools at the mountain bases. Pools that quickly evaporate.
Scirocco and tornado are familiar to all travelers, and feared, while great walls of dust and debris blow across the Plateau from the Basin, gaining mass before engulfing towns in sandstorms that can take flesh to bone in minutes.
In the Great Dust Basin it is more calm, but that isnt due to better conditions. Heat can be so severe all life seeks shelter, and the heat is constant—as is the silt. It gets everywhere, making fine mechanical devices wear quickly and requiring regular replacements from the Plateau for essentials to keep the water pumps running.
Survival is now a negotiation between the sky and the sand.
Dryrunner caravans pace their slow marches to the nearest water source, always moving and powering great cooling engines inside their wahka. These mechanical lungs allow existence even in the hottest reaches. But the wahka must keep moving. The lungs don’t breathe when the Run stops.
Plateau cities bleed energy into giant water pumps and environmental regulators for those wealthy enough to afford them, while the masses work for their small share, and just as often contend with shortage.
Highland citadels work the last glaciers in an existence that may seem to hold every advantage, if it were not for the land itself exacging its own toll. Every Highlander knows the quakes, and fears them. Almost as much as they fear what lurks in the forests that separate their lands from the Plateau.
Every clan, faction, and drifter has learned the same lesson: weather is neither forecast nor backdrop. It is the final sovereign of Errata, and it rules by whim.
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