I’ve been wrestling with how to make travel the equivalent of dungeon exploration in activity (my bespoke system is entitled “Legendary Journeys,” after all). I think I cracked that nut.

It’s typical to have a navigation check when parties are wandering in the countryside. Their fearless leader checks to see if they’ve wandered off course during the day and are lost. Well, what if we change that up a bit?

Suppose the navigation roll does two different things. First, it slows the party by some amount, measured in time or movement points or whatever your system uses to measure progress when traveling. Assume the party gets it sorted out by discovering the error and getting headed in the correct direction from where they are. This, I think, can offer that “wandering in the wilderness” feeling without the wholesale “getting lost” condition.

What it also does, secondly, is provide an opportunity for the party to find/stumble upon Points of Interest they would otherwise have missed. So, if we make the navigation check a bit more difficult so the party wanders a bit more often, they can find a lot more stuff to eat their faces…er, explore.

Each time the party travels through the hex, the navigation check can result in the party traipsing along a different path and finding something new. If we want to, we can restructure the navigation roll to reflect that each trip through is likely to be a bit different which allows for new discoveries. Indeed, we can structure things so each trip through a hex is just different enough that new discoveries are possible.

That would provide more possible interaction and greater interest in travel situations. The wilderness and travel should just be something to endure before getting to the good stuff at the destination. Traveling should be an adventure of itself. It should be possible to have the journey to a location to be more involved than what happens at the location, which upends the usual circumstances of play.