Hello wise sages, I've come to this realm seeking you advice on matters of overland travel. In the most popular fantasy systems (you already know the ones) it's often handled as a simple navigation or survival skill check with success just being "you make it to your destination safely", sometimes with a planned or random encounter thrown in. This is boring.
How do we make it more exciting in a mechanical sense, and what systems make you excited for travel?

As always, it depends on what you're doing. If a large chunk of the adventure involves travel, then you probably need to sit down and build systems more complex than 'make X skill check, roll for possible encounter'.

I'm not going to spend time rolling on a chart if that's not the focus of the adventure or campaign, not unless there's a specific event that needs to happen/not happen.

That being said: if you are running a travel-heavy campaign, consider things like logistics, transport (on foot, wagon, horse, magic carpet, etc), terrain, weather (normal, bad, good, supernatural and weird), and of course encounters.

Don't try to do it mechanically.  That's what gets you into the stuff like the Middle-Earth travel system that was adapted to 5E, and completely misses the point.

Instead, just think about what happens in travel, then use the mechanics of the game to reflect that.  Now, this does mean that if you want travel to be "interesting" you are going to need to use a system that has meaningful resources, preferably tracks encumbrance if only in some broad, light manner, and completely and utterly get out of your head that "one encounter per day" is all you can tolerate.  For the latter one, that may work out fairly close to the average when all is said and done, but in the game world, you should have multiple days where nothing happens (and thus gets played over very fast in game time) mixed with a day or two where everything happens almost at once.  Keep this up for a little while, the players will appreciate those many, quiet, fast in game time days but the characters will experience them with dread and anticipation, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Happily, if you set a "world in motion" and play that, instead of trying to create drama every day, then the above is likely what you will get.  Whereas so many of the later games, and the people that play them, take out so much of the stuff that makes travel interesting, and then wonder where all the interest went.

I like Into the Wyrd and Wild from Wet Ink Games. It's not something I use every time I do travel-based stories, but the times I've used it have turned out well.

It's more or less a suite of rules for various activities and complications. The first chunk of the book goes over slimmed down systems for exhaustion, supplies, hunting/tracking/butchering things, getting lost, etc. It is all pretty system/setting neutral.

Then it moves onto a bestiary which is a bit less setting neutral, but most of the creatures will fit in just about any fantasy setting. Stat blocks are pretty OSR conversion friendly. For example, instead of a numerical AC it might say "as leather armor".

Then it gives some factions, artifacts and magic for the suggested setting. It's a small section and probably the least useful if you have a specific setting already in mind.

The books wraps up with a system and advice for creating wilderness dungeons. A wilderness dungeon is basically a more interesting area to travel through. It is a simple way to create huge swaths of wilderness with interesting points of interest, landmarks, roads, trails, encounters, hazards and how to connect them all. Its a good "how to make hexes" guide.

Quote from: rgalex on October 19, 2023, 09:23:41 AM
I like Into the Wyrd and Wild from Wet Ink Games. It's not something I use every time I do travel-based stories, but the times I've used it have turned out well.

It's more or less a suite of rules for various activities and complications. The first chunk of the book goes over slimmed down systems for exhaustion, supplies, hunting/tracking/butchering things, getting lost, etc. It is all pretty system/setting neutral.

Then it moves onto a bestiary which is a bit less setting neutral, but most of the creatures will fit in just about any fantasy setting. Stat blocks are pretty OSR conversion friendly. For example, instead of a numerical AC it might say "as leather armor".

Then it gives some factions, artifacts and magic for the suggested setting. It's a small section and probably the least useful if you have a specific setting already in mind.

The books wraps up with a system and advice for creating wilderness dungeons. A wilderness dungeon is basically a more interesting area to travel through. It is a simple way to create huge swaths of wilderness with interesting points of interest, landmarks, roads, trails, encounters, hazards and how to connect them all. Its a good "how to make hexes" guide.

Now this I like, this is more what I was looking for and I'll definitely check it out.

The source of my original question is a campaign I was preparing, but as usual the majority of the "interested" players ghosted me at the last second and so it joins all the other still-unused ideas in my notebooks. It was a campaign based around exploration, survivalism, and dungeon crawling, using a homebrewed Gold-to-XP progression system designed to make the players choose whether they wanted to level up but sleep in the dirt, or delay progression for the bonuses that come with not being homeless. For simplicity I was planning on D&D 5e, but I'm not married to it, I'm much more familiar with other systems like ShadowRun.

Maybe put a little mini adventure into the traveling. Lots of things can happen in a caravan, on a ship, or train for that matter. Bonus points if it's related to the place you're going/the things they're seeking to do.

I don't use travel mechanics because they are either too simplistic or they over-codify things which makes all travels seem the same.

A long stint of travel should be a big deal. It should be unique. It should be its own adventure!

Look at your map. The routes that the PCs could take form a simple network. Drop some interesting locations along those routes. Write up a random table of encounters, which should be a mix of hostiles, NPCs, fauna, mood setting events, and mini-adventure sites. Link some things together. What you've got is basically a stretched out sparsely populated dungeon.

There should be days where nothing happens (like Steven said) and days where things grind to a halt.

Try to convey a "mood". If the PCs are traveling from a city into the wilderness, there will be fewer and fewer passers by, the road will get rougher and narrower, it will get quieter, there will be less smoke on the horizon, there will be a low-key sense of dread that if anything really goes wrong, we are a long way from help. If the PCs are travelling in the opposite direction, the mood should be very different. These things should be mentioned just like you mention the color, texture, and smell of the walls of a dungeon.

My point is a journey is a thing in itself and it should be played just like every other adventure. When the players finally get to the end of that 600 mile hike they should have stories to tell and they should be pretty damn pleased with themselves that they succeeded.

Travel can be interesting and be very different depending on the terrain, the weather, and the mode of travel.

Overland travel over mostly established roads can result in multiple encounters per day on busy roadways. Most of these will be other travelers that might have interesting information to exchange. Busy roads can also feature roadside hostels & inns that can have some interesting things going on. A nights stopover could turn into an adventure in itself.

Overland travel through wilderness areas comes with many dangers besides hostile encounters with animals and monsters. Difficult river crossings, being mired in mud, flash floods in ravines, rockslides, and other dangers can present themselves from time to time. Of course harsh terrain such as broken badlands and desert where there is little water or animal life present additional challenges.

Travel by sea is its own little adventure. There is disease, food spoilage, rough waters, doldrums, hidden rocks that can cause damage or wreck the ship if going into uncharted waters, etc. There is also plenty of time for intrigue with the crew and possibly other passengers. Suppose the PCs board a ship heading to their destination and discover two days out that the lower hold is full of slaves?

So travel can be an entertaining and exciting part of the campaign with a little bit of prep.

I tend to think about it in terms of player decisions and information.

Just making travel more difficult and/or adding more rolls doesn't make it interesting. Hunger, exhaustion, etc. can easily become a dreary grind of bookkeeping rather than something the players look forward to.

But if the players get useful information about their goals, and the travel opens up new possibilities, that can spark player interest. If they have interesting choices or trade-offs, that can spark interest.

In my current campaign, not much is made of travel because they've mostly been traveling by the excellent highway system. Still, if the PCs are going to a distant place on a quest, they get a lot more useful information from the local people than from the distant quest-sending. So the players have learned its good to stop and befriend the locals to get more information.