Fog, Mist, and Streams

As I've been preparing for my upcoming WWII campaign, I've been considering a number of things that I often omit from my games, and how I might add them into my campaign.  Morning fog and mist is one of those things.

Some years ago, while reading about a WWII infantry skirmish, the effect of mist rising off of a stream on the battlefield and how it impacted line of sight and tactical movement caught my interest. So, I set up a game that incorporated this.

The game involved  WWII infantry with one side needing to advance and cross a stream during the battle.  The game was played with 15mm figures, and incorporated a four inch wide stream.  the mist was represented by clumps of pillow stuffing from the craft store.

"Clouds" of mist approximately as wide as the stream and 6-10 inches long were placed on the stream with similar, maybe slightly smaller spacings left clear.  A die was rolled to indicate wind direction, and in the first case, the mist moved with the direction of the stream, such that you basically had clumps of fog floating down the length of the stream, intermittently blocking line of sight for figures as they moved.  It also provided cover for advancing figures, at least at times.

Wind speed was kept relatively minimal, and with slight variation dependent on a die roll each turn.  The experiment worked out to great effect, causing some noteworthy variability in sighting and movement.

Later, I tried this again, with the mist drifting off towards one bank of the stream, with the mist trailing off to a variable distance that could change slightly each turn with a die roll, again this worked well, and had a slightly different effect on the game.

The last form of the experiment with the pillow stuffing, was for patchy fog, which drifted and slowly dissipated during the game.  Similarly, the fog could have been accumulating during a game, though I've never tried that.

The only negative to this was that at the time, I had used loose lichen as foliage, and the pillow stuffing tended to "grab" the loose pieces.  Some effort was made to detach the lichen, when moving the mist/fog.

In my upcoming games, I will be using a greater proportion of foliage that is mounted on bases, which reduces this annoyance a little.  I also plan to experiment with trimming the loose tendrils of stuffing on the underside of the "puffs" and will experiment with giving them a spray of Dullcoat to see if that reduces their tendency to cling to the foliage.

I've seen a few rare instances of this type of thing being tried on the tabletop, but suspect that it was more common in reality, than on the game table, so thought I'd share the thought.