First, I'm not going to be posting any climate maps or anything similar, because honestly I started out pretty strong and then just fucking gave up.
January surface winds and pressure. It's probably wrong. Don't tell me if it is, because I don't give a crap
Basically, I got through portions of this guide on mapping climates and when I got to a particular point, I decided I had enough information to just wing it. Part of that was the realization that there are good parallels that can be drawn with continent placement on Earth - for example, the northeastern most continent is about the same location as Europe, so it's probably not too far off to map climates on the eastern coast to Europe at the same latitudes. The size of the main continent (which, by the way, is about 60% of the land mass of the planet), the odd shape of the landmasses and the lack of significant land masses in the upper latitudes of the southern hemisphere would seem to throw a lot of complication in to the mix (from what I can gather there would be a continuous band of high pressure over the southern oceans year round). I don't have the patience to try to figure out detailed climate for every region in the the whole world.
In the end, with some creative airbrushing and a few extra gradient layers I whipped up, this is what I wound up with:
I know it doesn't look much different than the last one, but there's shading there trust me.
What I learned from the whole process is that while it's nice to have a good overall feel for how climate works, unless you have the patience and inclination (I don't) there's little reason to put a lot of effort into trying to figure it out. That probably will rub a lot of world building types the wrong way, but honestly I'm going to be zeroing in on one region and forgetting about most of the rest of it for quite some time.
Right about there...
So, aside from the pretty much standard advice on desert placement, some rough idea of ocean temperatures and maybe surface pressure, I'd say my best advice on gauging climate is to take a look at similar locations on Earth, make some educated guesses, and then make the rest of it up. Maybe after a while, if I can justify the expense, I'll get something like Fractal Terrains and try to have it automatically generate rainfall and climate or whatever. But nobody should hold their breath.
This really should be me motto for anything I do gaming-wise
I did come up with an interesting technique for the pressure gradients in the first map, driven by my near pathological aversion to hand drawing anything. I was able to adapt this tutorial to generate a layer with a bunch of contour lines, then select the ones I liked and cut and paste them. In the end, they look hand drawn - just not what they would look like if they were hand drawn by me (that red arrow in the image above? Took me four tries before it looked anything like an arrow - I'm a writer, not a drawer).
I have completed completely revising and rethinking the random exploration tables, and this is the result. I like them so much better than the previous ones. They may actually be suitable for random generation of modern cities with some modifications. These are going to be really awesome to use once I start a game (which is hopefully going to be shortly).
So I've been chewing and chewing on my tables, trying to reduce the number of tables and make things flow the way I want them to. I crunched a whole bunch of data on land use from various cities to come up with something that looks and feels about right. It led me to scrap the tables I had previously and come up with a single table subtypes.
The new table uses 5DF instead of 4DF because it's more granular and breaks down easily into the blocks that I need. I wanted to stay with 4DF as a nod to staying "standardized" but the dice for the tables aren't read in the standard fashion so I figured it isn't that bad.
Here's what the first table looks like so far:
There will be sub tables for each to get the specific building type. The table structure sacrifices leanness of the types of areas for having to roll on fewer tables (2 instead of 3 or more) and gives more freedom from the setup I had before.
EDIT: Here's the first of the subtables. Took me 20 minutes to throw together. I've decided to color code the areas so that it's easier to tell which labels belongs to which
