Cormyr, Sembia, Dalelands Weather

[Lady Frost]

I came across this today as I was searching about Cormyr's winters.

Ed Greenwood's Twitter (Dec '19) is the source of the information.
www.sageadvice.eu/2020/01/13/weather-question-is-there-forgotten-realms-map-or-description-of-who-gets-snow-in-the-winter/

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Question:
I’m curious about Cormyr, especially Eveningstar & Suzail, and Sembia’s climate, if you wouldn’t mind.
Published novels & 1e/2e game products let me know suzail & Sembia have quite warm summers, maybe some snow in winter but the picture is fairly fuzzy.

Answer:
The problem is that published adventures seldom include weather as a factor (in the old days, this was due to a paucity of both rules and available wordcount), so all too often published source material (except when handing players parched desert or howling blizzard conditions, was largely "weather silent."

When we talk of Suzail and much of Sembia (not to mention coastal Cormyr), the Sea of Fallen Stars acts as a temperature moderator and moisture adder; if you're close to the sea, it warms you in winter and cools you in summer and gives you mists, fogs, and humidity all the time. Cormyr also has a wall of mountains at its back that acts as a wall against the worst winds blowing from the interior, and Cormyr, Sembia, and the Dales experience prevalent winds blowing to the west-northwest onshore from the Dragonreach and the open heart of the Inner Sea. What all of this adds up to is: interior areas (upland Cormyr [including Eveningstar], the Sembian backlands, and the Dales, can get a lot of snow and biting cold at the depths of winter, and some years will have long winters, whereas the coasts will have a bone-chilling 'damp cold' and ice storms as the worst of winter, and shorter winters, and both of them can have hot, humid height of summer, but usually experience moderate, pleasant summers (and spring and fall) with lots of precipitation in short bouts (i.e. swift storms that "blow over" rather than days of gloom and rain. Hence, the Dales can grow enough food to support themselves, and Cormyr and Sembia are agricultural powerhouses (growing surpluses).
If all of this strikes you as giving a DM maximum freedom to have almost any sort of weather on a given day, and you're suspicious that I designed it this way (back in the 1960s, pre-D&D)...you'd be right. ;}

[Munroe]

Well, good to hear that Eveningstar and that region "can get a lot of snow and biting cold at the depts of winter, and some years will have long winters."

Of course Eveningstar is farmland so the fact that it's year-round snow cover on FRC is a little bit incongruous.
(I always like to imagine that the village is built above the mountains' frost line where it wasn't good land for farming, but that they do their farming below the frost line where the snow is seasonal.)

[Warlord]

Live now with our Stoneland Weather Forecaster, Ugh'U Sno'Dend the Jealous.

"We is need rain."

[ShadowCatJen]

I've always imagined Valkur's Roar weather to be San Francisco-ish. Cold fog during the winters and during the summer, fog in the mornings that burns off by noon. Does make for good wine/grape growing weather so I'd say Miss Miller's vineyards is a good IC call.

Course, as Samuel Clemens said once, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”