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Tag: #travelrules

Design: More On Travel

September 21, 2026 / / 0 Comments

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.

Design: Travel Navigation

January 29, 2026 / / 0 Comments

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.

Update:

I’ve been stewing on this topic for a long time, wanting to end with a sub-system that offers up travel-as-adventure instead of travel-to-reach-adventure. What I wrote above is just a part of that. Yes, offering variation in trips through a given wilderness space increase the chances of discovering new points of interest. That, of itself, doesn’t make a wilderness trek feel like a dungeon foray, though.

What that doesn’t offer is all of the interaction that can be expected in a dungeon setting. The tricks and traps and puzzles we find in dungeons are generally missing in the traditional wilderness travel rules. I think that’s a element we have to introduce to bring wilderness adventure up to the same level as dungeon adventure.

Providing more chances to find POI is just the beginning. Having multiple small dungeons to be found during travel doesn’t provide the same flavor as full-size dungeons. I think we need to have our encounter tables expanded to include more, plus add in pre-planned material for any given trip.

I think of the wilderness in a fantasy game setting as wild, in the sense that the kinds of things and situations found in folk tales/fairy tales are not only possible, they’re not uncommon. Spend much time traipsing about in the wild and you will encounter weirdness of some sort — fairies come through the Hedge, elder beasts from the Greenwood, people from other worlds, weather anomalies, malevolent spirits, enchanted pools, ancient shrines radiating power, and on and on. These are the things that can provide the same flavor in the wilds that a variety of rooms and chambers provide in a dungeon, especially when many of them invite direct interaction with the PCs.

To that end, I think the encounter rules have to provide as many opportunities for something to interact with as a party could expect to have in a dungeon. That’s not to say that every ten-minute turn of travel should include a check or reaching a new “room.” It does mean that there should be fairly regular instances of interesting things to do, whether measured by hour-long turns or opportunities per hex or in some other fashion. A trip should be filled with chances to engage with the unusual and interesting bits of the setting.

As there are many folks who approach dungeon settings as the Mythic Underworld, I think it just as useful to approach at least parts of the wilderness as the Mythic Wilds. Stretches of forest or swamp or plains that feel as if they have an interest in the PCs traveling through and aren’t taking kindly to the intrusion. I’ve already been thinking of the Little Gods, spirits of the place, that can take notice of travelers; this extends that to the entirety of a locale taking notice. An increase in encounters with hostile critters, say, with those critters being the most dangerous in the locale. Those critters trailing the party and causing issues. The party getting slowed repeatedly by fresh obstacles the terrain throws up in the way. Stopping for rest breaks or camping resulting in getting constantly harried by denizens of the forest that make rest impossible.

Even locales that aren’t Mythic Wilds can offer similar experiences. The lands immediately surrounding an ancient barrow that holds a malevolent golem possessed and animated by the spirit of a long-ago tyrant and warlord. Hauntings a-plenty, undead clawing out of the ground and shambling after the PCs, shadows flitting about out of direct sunlight and chilling the PCs to the bone. The PCs can figure out what’s at the area’s heart and try to put an end to it, though that just may result in the golem escaping it’s chambers and roaming the wilds to create yet more havoc.

Encounter tables should provide for much more in the way of flavor and challenge. I can see each area having designation of danger that affects the results on tables, or specific tables for each such area. As I mentioned previously, I also think the regular addition of pre-planned POI can make a major difference. Even if it’s a drop-in selected from a list of possible drop-ins, knowing that on a given stretch of travel something a bit more involved is going to crop up that’s already prepped makes GMing a trip a bit easier, and the players will get regular doses of more substantial and demanding play. Prepping a handful of events/encounters/sites for a given stretch of wilds in advance can go a long way to filling out travel in an interesting fashion.

Planning a trip thus gains quite a bit of flavor. Planning a route now involves deciding what known stretches of dangerous ground it might be better to avoid, though at the expnse of taking more time to reach the destination. PCs can try to find good sources about what to expect along the way and prepare for it. Planning a trip becomes the equivalent of planning a dungeon foray, as does the actual experience of it. An exercise in survival becomes an exercise in adventure.

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