Earlier thoughts can be found here: https://osrpgtalk.net/design-travel-navigation/

I’ve been pondering the choices players should be making for travel and trying to whittle the number of key decisions down to few enough to not clutter up play. While doing all that thinkery, I’ve come to realize that a detailed understanding of what, exactly, the travel is supposed to provide for in the game is key to deciding what choices players should face.

OD&D relied on a boardgame for a wilderness map, a game about survival, and that focus on survival carried over into the D&D mythos. Gotta make certain the party has enough food and water for travel and then more for when entering the dungeon. Light sources then get added to the list of resources to be managed (though light doesn’t seem to ever get mentioned during wilderness travel — no overcast nights or deep fog or other circumstances requiring light sources?)

So I had to ask myself what choices I really want to have at the heart of my travel rules. In most environments, water is reasonably abundant to where PCs should have no trouble refilling skins when needed; that’s not a resource in need of management. The management of food, when it comes down to it, is a resource that requires but management of time, with hunting and gathering being available choices. Navigation can be an issue, though I don’t see wholesale getting lost and wandering far off course for long periods as reasonable, and certainly not something I want to include; I think navigation issues are better seen as triggering more opportunities for discovery and adventure and slowing progress to the destination.

I think fatigue is far more important a consideration during travel than any of those factors. Choices about speed of travel, how long to travel during a day, and how well the night’s camp allows for recovery from the day’s travel — those are important considerations in the experience I want to offer in my systems. That also gets affected by finding distractions along the way, time sinks that provide more interaction and challenge at the expense of miles traveled and conservation of stamina. That requires choices about how to manage time on part of the players; that’s what I want at the heart of my travel rules.

The Types of Travel

I’ve also taken to looking at movement in the wilderness as having three different modes: travel along roads and clearly marked trails; travel following landmarks relying on animal trails and dead reckoning; and actual intentional exploration of unknown areas. Journeys, excursions, and treks into the wilderness. I think the nature of each warrants different procedures for each. This means that pointcrawl and pathcrawl and hexcrawl procedures will appear.

I recently stumbled across the notion that PCs should be able to find shortcuts here and there in the wilds, reflecting them finding game trails and the like that help cut off a bit of time/distance when traveling. I love that! It fits nicely with my penchant for variable travel distances and with failed navigation meaning only a delay before the party gets back on track. The travel procedures can slow the party or speed the party along. Woot!

The Weird Environs

I think it worth a look at the environs the PCs move through, too, as those can — should — have an effect on movement rates and encounters. Incursions by other worlds on the main setting world can appear in all sorts of places, and the Fantastic Wild should be rife with the odd and unusual. I’m still pondering and playing with the existence of such incursions being obvious or not to the travelers. The incursions I’m thinking of are pre-planned sites on a campaign map, either, just randomly

The lands of Fae can intrude on the mortal world, with the most obvious places for that to happen coinciding with hills or hedgerows and the like. Hints that something is amiss can include faint music, distant chatter of small voices, or odd glimmers of light. The sudden appearance of fae creatures or beings would be a dead giveaway, though the fae could certainly have stepped through to the mundane world without the party having stepped through in the other direction.

Haunted forests or groves or the like can also waylay traveling parties. A slight darkening, mists rising unexpectedly, the appearance of distant features that PCs can swear weren’t there just moment before, all of those can provide clues that the party has stepped into a different realm.

The Elder Lands are akin to Faery, and the two can overlap a great deal, as the boundary between them is even more porous than that between them and the mundane world. Where the trees and plants in Faery tend to be a bit…brighter…, the trees of the Greenwood grow larger, with darker foliage. The beings found in the Elder Lands also tend to be larger, whether animal people or monstrous creatures.

All of these affect travel times, with the major factor being how quickly the travelers realize they are, indeed, Elsewhere and figure out how to get back to the mundane world. The distance traveled Elsewhere has to be traversed again, with perhaps some variation that could shorten or extend the distance. Having passed into and out of another world can also taint the travelers so they encounter more beings from the other side that slow them, even when back on the mundane side of things.