You wait patiently for one week. Then, on the morning of Wednesday, October 13, an Angry article appears! It reveals Angry’s Secret Step-by-Step-ish Wilderness Travel Adjudication System!

And that’s the problem with real life. You’ve got to actually wait through the passage of time.

No time for a Long, Rambling Introduction™ today, though. We’ve got a long trip ahead of us.

Warning! Long Article Ahead!

This article is a f$&%ing beast. It’s almost twice as long as a normal article. And there’s a crapton of images making it look even longer. Sorry. I do cover a lot of ground and I didn’t want to split this article up. Thing is the article itself is only about 5500 words. About normal. Normal for me. The remaining 3000 words are all examples of how to do the stuff I said right. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, I figure an example’s worth at least 500. So, 3000 words of examples plus 5500 words of text and eight actual pictures means this article actually contains 1.5 million words worth of solid information.

In other words, quit pissing and moaning. It’s a miracle the final thing doesn’t even top 9,000 words.

How to Get to There from Here

Angry, how do you handle wilderness travel? How do you resolve it and play it out at the table?

I get that question a lot. And today, I actually think you might be ready for the answer. I’m going to tell you how, exactly, I resolve wilderness travel at the table. Or how I would, anyway, if I were running D&D 5E. Because I know that’s the system you’re all running. But it’s not the one I’m running. I run the best edition. Doesn’t matter though. The process is the same.

There’s a lot to cover here. And I don’t want to split this s$&% into two articles. I just want to get it done. And I want to be thorough. So I’m even going to provide not one, not two, not three, but four examples of treks that might happen at my table. Yeah. Four. Because I’m f$&%ing awesome.

Trouble is, that ain’t gonna leave me a lot of time for extraneous bulls$&%. So, I’m not going to spend a lot of time telling you why I do s$&% the way I do. I mean, in the end, there’s only one reason for everything I do: because it’s the best f$&%ing way to do it. Want to do it a different way? Fine. I don’t care. Think there’s a better way? You’re wrong. There is nothing better than the best.

You might be shocked to learn that I run wilderness travel mostly by the book. My process is 90% RAW. The 10% difference comes from using my Time Pool to track time and Complications, my keen understanding of the Arbitrary Game Turn, interpretation of unclear rules, a willingness to fudge s$&% toward good enough, and years of handling wilderness travel under other, better rulesets.

I do this s$&% because I want wilderness travel to matter. I want it to feel like an important part of the game. My game’s about trekking across a world of adventure and then having adventures. Trekking’s a big part of that. It’s easier to just gloss over s$&% or just let the characters fast-travel at the speed of plot. No one disputes that s$&%. No comment is necessary. Yes, there’s bookkeeping and plotting and math to this. The price of meaningfulness is effort. Nothing easy means anything. Suck it up, Buttercup.

Frankly, it ain’t actually that much math and bookkeeping. It’ll look like a lot because I’m explaining the math and bookkeeping in excruciating detail and taking away all the context and adventure and engagement. But it actually isn’t. Most treks are pretty easy to resolve in about ten minutes of table time.

That’s all the disclaimers I can think of. Now, let’s talk about making wilderness travel matter.

Knowing the World

If you want the wilderness to be an actual thing in your game, you’ve got to know it. Know the wilderness. Know it accurately. You have to have a map. A good map.

A good map has an accurate scale, shows the terrain at every point, shows where all the important destinations are, and shows a few prominent territories.

A good map doesn’t have to be pretty. No one gives a s$&% if it looks like art because no one but you will ever see it. Because we’re talking about the super-secret, accurate and precise, for-your-eyes-only map of the world. Never show it to the players!

A good map is accurate and precise, but it doesn’t have everything. First, only mark s$&% that you know exists and know can only exist in a certain place. You can update the map as the game goes on and add more locations.

Second, only plot the big s$&%. Major features and destinations. There’s all sorts of tiny s$%& all over the world. There’s streams, ponds, hamlets, farms, roadside shrines, caves, insubstantial ruins, monster lairs. None of that s$&% goes on the map. It’s the stuff of wilderness encounter and Complication and flavor text. Generally, if it ain’t a place the players will spend more than a few minutes on one time, don’t plot it. And if a minor nothing turns into a destination? Plot it then.

Back to what makes a good map. You need scale so you can easily determine in-world distances and travel times and s$&% and so that you can plot the party’s exact location in the world at any time. Because, yes, you have to do that. You keep track of where the party is in the dungeon, right? Why wouldn’t you do the same in the overworld?

You need terrain so you can determine what the world around the characters looks like. But also because terrain affects visibility, travel time, the kinds of random monsters that will attack the players, whether certain characters can use certain abilities, and so on. The D&D 5E world includes seven terrain types: arctic, coast, desert, forest, grassland, mountain, and swamp. At the very least, you must divide your map up into those seven kinds of terrain. You can subdivide the terrain types up if you want to. You can create cold deserts and moorland and differentiate between swamps and marshes, but make sure you decide which subtypes fall under which types because terrain’s important for some D&D rules.

The easiest and best way to handle this s$&% is to get yourself some hex paper and make hex maps. Pick a scale per hex and put one kind of terrain in each hex. I highly recommended the Adventurer, Conqueror, King regional map templates.

Creating a good campaign map’s outside the scope of this article. There’s a lot to consider. Climate, geology, how far apart the settlements should be, and so on. I’ll tell briefly how I handle that s$&% though. I handle it by absolutely not giving any kind of a f$&% at all about it. It never f$&%ing matters. Just draw a map that looks fun.

Maps also show locations. I talked about those above. And maps show territories. Territories are regions controlled by or patrolled by some non-civilized entity. Regions big enough to warrant inclusion on the map. You’ve got the territory of the apex predators like dragons, the stomping grounds for the savage races like orcs, the stomping grounds for tribal and insular groups of wood elves and human barbarians, and s$&% like that.

Territories ain’t a thing that exists in the core D&D rules, so I’ll explain a little more. Territories are particularly dangerous regions of the wilderness with special Complication lists of their own. Usually related to the controller. When the party enters a territory, there’s a chance they’ll notice it based on Intelligence checks keyed to particular proficiencies or Wisdom (Perception) checks or because it’s super obvious and impossible to miss. Orcs mark their lands with bloody orc signs on the trees and skulls on pikes. You don’t miss that s$%&. But, recognizing the signs of a green dragon’s hunting grounds might take an Intelligence (Arcana) check. If the party does anything in a territory — travel, camp, search, adventure — it’s Reckless. They’re just inviting trouble.

Here’s an example of a good, useful GM map. It’s from my AOWG. Sort of…

It doesn’t have labels so that it’s easier to read and add stuff to. I keep a list of the locations by numerical code. Notice how each hex has a code number?

• 0704 The Village of Highgrove
• 1112 The Sunken Swamp Ruins of Swampiness
• 1309 The Hamlet of Perrin’s Mill
• 1507 The Ruined Draconic Temple
• 1608 The Broken Wheel, A Roadside Inn
• 1702 The Town of Graybridge

There’s two territories in the woods between Highgrove and Perrin’s Mill. The smaller one belongs to the orcs of the Burnt Eye tribe. The larger one’s a green dragon’s hunting ground.

On Map Scale

I said I wasn’t going to explain a lot, but I will explain this: the best map scale is six miles per hex. It’s the absolute best. Why? Because six is half of twelve. And twelve is easily divisible by two, three, and four. So, it’s easy to compute travel times for PCs who generally travel two, three, or four miles an hour. And it’s easy to cut travel speeds down to three-quarters, a half, or one quarter to account for rugged terrain. The math is just super-easy when you use multiples or fractions of twelve.

But six miles is also a great scale because on a clear day, in open terrain, the horizon’s about three miles away. That is, if an average-sized PC passes through a hex of clear terrain, they can see all the big, obvious stuff to the edges of the hex. So visibility’s easy.

By the way, if you don’t have a good, intuitive grasp of visibility like I do, you can fake it by referring to this excellent article entitled How Far Can You See? by someone named Ronny over at the site Dungeon Master Assistance. It’s a very good reference.

In short: there is one correct scale for D&D maps. It’s six miles per hex.

What the Players Know

You — as the GM — must know your world. You must be able to track the players’ movements through it. Precisely. But your players don’t get the benefit of that kind of precision. At best, the PCs have a crappy and inaccurate hand-drawn map of the world around that wasn’t made using satellite imagery or precise surveying equipment. At worst, they have a vague idea of where s$&% is.

The information mismatch is part of what makes wilderness travel challenging and exciting and tense and fun.

The players do need some information though. Otherwise, they can’t plan a trip. They need an approximate sense of scale and a basic understanding of the terrain. That way, they can make guesses about how long they’ll be traveling and through what kind of terrain. Unless they’re traveling off the edge of the map and into the unknown.

I like to give my players their own little map of the world. Because I’m just that nice. The map I give them’s usually prettier, but also less accurate. I trace it off my own hex map. I even update it as we play. Because I can be nice when I want to be.

The player map either represents an actual, physical object in the game world or represents the players’ understanding of the world. Basically, all the places they kind of know how to get to.

Here’s the player map that matches up with the hex map above.

Now, there’s a scale on that map. But, it’s kind of crappy. I drew the scalebar freehand-ish so it wouldn’t quite line up properly. And it’s measured in leagues because that’s an in-gamey-sounding measurement. And also because it’s a convenient measurement. Traditionally, a league represented the distance an unladen person could hike over clear terrain — or along a road — in one hour. It was about three miles.

That four-league scale thing? Conveniently, that’s how far a D&D 5E party can travel at a normal pace in four hours.

Whenever I show off my maps, I get a bunch of people pissing and moaning about how they can’t draw maps because they suck at drawing maps. That’s a fair point. A stupid point, but a fair one. I mean, the only way to get good at drawing maps is to draw maps. So if you don’t draw maps because you’re not good at it, you never will be.

That said, players have no standards and they don’t deserve your best work anyway. If the best you can do is something like this…

… it works totally fine. That’s my same map but I crapped that thing out in ten minutes. I just didn’t bother labeling it.

That said, if you noobs do want to actually git gud at the whole mapping thing, check out Jared Blando’s instructional books.

Navigating the World

So, you’ve got your map and the players have theirs. It’s time to do some actual trekking. Every wilderness trip starts as a plan in some stupid player’s head. Then, the player turns to you and says, “we go to…” wherever. Some location. And then they’re off.

Except they’re not. Because the heroes can’t just click on a dot and say, “we go there.” This ain’t an Indiana Jones movie. It ain’t Skyrim. The best the heroes can actually do to get from one place to another is to strike out in a specific direction, try to keep true to that direction, and hope they end up where they want to. Or they can follow a big, obvious feature like a road or a river or a shoreline or a treeline or walk directly toward the tallest mountain in a range or sail along the coast. Or they can follow vague directions and landmarks. S$&% like:

Head out of town along the Eol’s Landing road and walk for an hour until you see the big rock that looks like a pig humping another, smaller pig. Stand on Pig Hump Rock — he won’t mind — and look around. You should just see a little pond in the distance. Head to the pond. Then, follow the creek that flows out of the pond until…

Point is, a wilderness trip consists of attempts to travel in straight lines, to follow existing features, or to follow vague directions and landmarks. Or some combination of those three things. And when it comes to traveling in straight lines, the best the heroes can usually do is travel in a cardinal direction or an in-between, halfway direction. Like north. Or northeast. But not seventeen degrees east of north.

The Wilderness Travel Turn

Wilderness Travel plays out as one or more Arbitrary Game Turns. Each turn comprises an attempt by the players to reach a destination or to complete one leg of a complex trip.

How do you resolve a Wilderness Travel Turn? Let me explain…

Step 1: Plan the Trip

As noted, a wilderness trip starts with one of the idiots saying, “we go to wherever.” And now you know that that’s actually not a proper action declaration. It’s incomplete. You, therefore, can’t resolve it.

The reason it’s incomplete is that it’s just a statement of an intended outcome. It’s basically the travel equivalent of “I Diplomacy the guard to get in.” It doesn’t include the approach. The party wants to end up wherever. Fine. How are they getting there? Walking? By what route?

At a minimum, to resolve travel in D&D 5E, the players must have a direction, a pace, and a formation. And the party members can undertake different tasks while they travel.

Directions can consist of straight-line travel in cardinal directions or directly toward specific locations if the party knows where they’re at. Alternatively, the party can follow a large and visible feature across the landscape. Alternatively, if the party has a set of vague directions and landmarks, they can follow those. And the party can also follow some other creature or party’s trail across the wilderness.

The party can travel at a fast, normal, or slow pace. That determines their base travel speed, what tasks they can undertake, and provides bonuses or penalties for certain rolls.

Formation, as described in the PHB, doesn’t mean an exact single-file line. People don’t travel like that. And they tend to move around as they travel, drifting in and out of conversation, spreading out to forage, tightening up in dangerous situations, and so on. So, you establish who’s in what rank as described in the PHB. No more detail than that is needed or wanted or useful.

Travel tasks are also described in the PHB. I don’t need to rehash that s$%&. But I will point out that if the party is not following a big, visible feature, someone needs to navigate. Traveling in straight, true lines across nature is actually really tricky and even small deviations can send you miles off course. Following vague directions and landmarks is also tricky. All it takes is one oversight or deviation and then you’re lost. Following a creature’s trail doesn’t require navigation, but it does require tracking. Most trails are actually fairly subtle and easy to lose.

By the way, the party’s navigator doesn’t have to be in the front of the party. People can point and talk. It’s fine. But I usually require trackers to travel in the front rank so the party doesn’t ruin the trail ahead of them.

Anyway, this is the s$&% you need to establish before you can resolve anything. Where’s the party going, how are they navigating, who’s where, and who’s doing what. It’s also a good idea to establish how long the party thinks they’ll be traveling for and the supplies they’ve got on hand to make the trip.

Step 2: Plot the Projected Route

Now that you’ve established where the party’s going and how, you can plot their route on your own secret map. Basically, figure out what a successful trip will look like. How long will it take? What terrain does it pass through? Does it go through any dangerous territory? That kind of thing. Just draw a little pencil line or highlighter line on your map.

Protip: if you put your secret GM map in a vinyl sheet protector, you can write on it with a dry-erase marker without ruining it. If your secret GM map exists in a computer, you can print out new copies and mark them up however you want.

Don’t share this s$&% with your players though. They don’t get to see the accurate map and the projected route. They know what they know. Or don’t.

Step 3: Can the Trip Fail?

Trekking across the wilderness is an action, right? Or a series of actions. That means it’s got to be resolved like an action. Which means you’ve got to decide whether it can succeed and whether it can fail. Presumably, if you’ve gotten this far, the trip’s at least possible. But what does it mean for a trip to fail?

There’s a crapton of ways a trip can end with the party not reaching their intended destination. They can die along the way. They can run out of supplies and turn back. They can discover something along the way and spend days plundering it. But, in the context of Arbitrary Game Turns, those are interrupted and aborted tasks.

In D&D, wilderness trips can fail for one of two reasons. Either because the party got lost or because the party failed to spot their destination and went right past it. But when I say a trip fails, you’ve got to understand precisely what that means. That means the Wilderness Travel Turn ends but the players aren’t where they meant to be. If they’re lost, they’re somewhere in the wilderness and have to figure out what to do next. And if they missed their destination, they’re somewhere in the wilderness and have to figure out what to do next. Assuming they realized they’re lost or that they missed their destination.

If the party’s following a big, obvious feature, they can’t get lost. If they’ve got a ranger navigating them through his favored terrain, they can’t get lost. If they’ve got an outlander navigating them between locations the outlander’s visited before, they can’t get lost. Otherwise, they can get lost. And it takes a Wisdom (Survival) check to see if they don’t.

If the party’s heading for a big, obvious thing located in reasonably clear terrain or that rises high enough above the terrain to be visible, they can’t miss it. Otherwise, they might. They might not see their destination. Depends on how visible it is from how far away. Usually, if the party’s within three miles of a building or settlement and they’re not in the forest, they can see their destination. If the destination’s small, though, like a monument or a ruined foundation or cave, or it’s in a forest or partially sunk into a swap, they might fail to spot it.

Most trips can be resolved with a single navigation check. Or a non-check. And a quick glance at passive Perception scores to see if they spot their destination. But some trips are more complicated. The party can travel in a direction for a few days to intercept a feature and then follow that feature. Or they can travel in a direction across the plains, into the forest, up into the hills, then follow a specific large feature, and upon reaching that feature, follow some vague directions and landmarks from an old treasure map.

Tracking’s a trickier beast. Time and weather can change the tracking DC. But the basic rule’s the same. Whenever the rules for resolving the action change, one Wilderness Travel Turn ends and another begins.

If a trip requires multiple checks — or the same check under several different conditions — you break it into multiple Wilderness Travel Turns. And resolve each turn. In turn. Obviously. At least, I hope that’s f$&%ing obvious.

Step 4: Determine the Wilderness Travel Turn’s Success

Once you’ve determined whether the trip can fail and whether you’ve got to break it into parts, take a die and roll any navigation or tracking check secretly behind the screen. That’ll tell you whether the party follows the intended route or not.

If the party follows their intended route and at least ends up in the right hex, check to see if the location’s missable. Compare the DC to notice the location to each alert party member’s Passive Perception score. Even though navigators usually don’t get to use their Passive Perception scores while navigating — see the PHB — I do allow them to notice the destination because what’s the point of all that navigating if they’re not looking for the destination? They can totally miss a goblin ambush though.

If the party fails to follow the intended route, they’re lost.

If the party fails to notice their destination, they missed the destination.

Don’t say anything to the players yet, though. You’re still working behind the screen at this point.

Step 4A: Lost!

When the party gets lost while navigating, the DMG says they travel 1d6 hours in the wrong direction and then get a Wisdom (Survival) check to recognize they’ve been going in the wrong direction. If they succeed, they know they’re lost. If they fail, though, they travel another 1d6 hours in the wrong direction and then get another Wisdom (Survival) check.

When the party’s lost, I usually send them traveling in the wrong direction by one hex side. I roll randomly or just decide. Each time they fail to recognize they’re lost, I determine a new wrong direction based on the direction they were traveling. Meanwhile, I keep accurate track based on the number of hours they’ve been traveling and their pace where they actually are.

The Wilderness Travel Turn doesn’t end until the party realizes they’re lost. Either by a successful Wisdom (Survival) check or because the players recognize something’s wrong. Like, they come out of the forest and they aren’t at their destination or they hit a map feature they weren’t aiming for or the trip takes longer than they expected.

Meanwhile, keep track of how much time passes and where the party travels and s$&% like that.

Step 4B: Missing the Destination!

When the party misses the destination, they walk right past it. They didn’t even notice it. Whoops. Sucks to be them. The problem with missing the destination is that the characters have no chance of noticing that they missed the destination. There’s no “oh s$&%” moment of recognizing the party’s heading the wrong way. Instead, the party just keeps blundering along in the same direction expecting their destination to pop up in front of them.

When the party misses their destination, they just keep going in the same direction, stuck in endless travel until the players themselves realize something went wrong. Like they end up in the wrong terrain or hit an unexpected feature or travel for longer than they anticipated.

As you would with a lost party, keep track of a party’s actual location on the map once they miss their destination and when something changes — terrain, arrival at a feature, or they’ve passed their allotted time for the trip or are running low on supplies — interrupt them then and see what they do.

Step 5: Determine How the Trip Plays Out and What Happens Along the Way

Whether the trip succeeds or whether it fails, make whatever other die rolls you need to make to figure out what happens. Roll the Time Pool once a day to determine if a Complication arises at a random hour during that day. Or roll wandering monster checks. If the party’s foraging along the way, have them roll however many checks are needed to cover the travel time. Or roll them yourself. If the party passes through something’s Territory, roll to see if they notice. If they don’t notice, make some extra Time Pool or wandering monster checks. If they pass interesting features, determine if they notice them. And take note of any planned encounters that happen along the way.

Some of this s$&%’s just mechanical resolution. When the party’s foraging on the way, for example, I just roll to see how much they turn up each day. Some of this s$&%’s going to interrupt the trip though. It won’t end the Travel Turn, per se, but it’ll provide a distraction. Some of it may change the turn in the middle. Like, if the party notices they’ve passed into orc territory and decide to change their route.

Oh. Remember when I told you to find out how much time the party thinks the trip will take and how much food they’ve got? Take note when they’ve hit that projected time and when they’ve consumed half, three-quarters, or all their supplies.

Don’t say anything to the party yet. Just take notes. Figure out what’s going to happen when.

Step 6: Narrate and Apply the Results from One Interruption to the Next

Now that you know whether the trip succeeds and how long it takes and you know all the s$&%’s that’s happening along the way, you can narrate the trip and apply the results. If nothing interesting happens during the Wilderness Travel Turn, you can just tell them how much time passes and what the terrain looks like as they pass through it and tell them how many days of food to mark of and s$&% like that.

You can also stretch things out a little bit. I like to narrate transitions between different terrain types even if nothing interesting happens. And I usually narrate the passage of the first and second day to give a sense of time passing. S$&% like this:

You set out at dawn and travel through the farmland around the city. By noon, though, you’ve left the walled-off farm fields behind and you’re moving through rolling, grassy hills with occasional stands of trees. Night falls and you camp under the stars in the middle of the plains. More trees and brush dot the landscape as you travel through the second day and they grow closer together. Just before evening, you spy the thick tree line of the forest and find a convenient place to make camp on the forest’s edge. The three days you spend trekking through the forest are rough, slow going. Most of the trees are small and widely spaced, allowing copious underbrush to cover the ground in a tangle. It’s a relief when you emerge for the final leg of your journey. The road’s within a few hour’s walk of the forest’s edge and you reach the outskirts of the village by evening on the sixth day. Mark off six days of supplies.

If you took note of any interruptions — Complications, encounters, obstacles, interesting sites and distractions, the decision to enter dangerous Territory, whatever — narrate to the first one and then play it out. After it’s done, if the party resumes their trip, narrate to the next interruption. Otherwise, if they suddenly abort or change their trip, well, that’s the start of a new Wilderness Turn. Fortunately, you know exactly where they are in the world and can plan out the new trip. Usually, though, the players just carry on.

If the party’s supplies are running low or if they’ve hit their projected time for the trip or they realize they’re lost, those are interruptions. Treat them as such and see what the party does.

It’s the sixth day of your trip. You’d expected to reach the village today, but as the sun descends toward the western horizon and sunset blankets the land in crimson light, you see no sign of civilization before you.

Back to the Start

And that’s it. You’ve resolved the Wilderness Travel Turn. The party’s either at their destination or they’re at the start of a new leg of their trip or they’re lost and only you know where they actually are.

If the party’s finished a single leg of a trip, but everything’s going as planned and the rest of the trip’s already planned, you can go right ahead and start resolving the next leg. You don’t even need to talk to the players. That’s a f$&%ing relief, right?

But before I launch into the actual examples and then end this crap, there’s two other issues I want to bring to your attention.

Searching the Wilderness

What if the party wants to travel to a location, but they only have a vague idea of where it is? What if they missed their destination, realized it, and want to backtrack and search out the location? As an Arbitrary Game Turn, the party can search the wilderness. They can fan out and move slowly across an area looking for a thingy. It’s no different than searching a dungeon room. A really big dungeon room.

The party can search an arbitrarily large area. The bigger the area, the more time it’s going to take. Generally, I assume it takes the party an hour to search a six-mile hex of open terrain or two hours to search a six-mile hex of rugged terrain. If they search a bigger area, it takes more time. If the area’s in dangerous territory, it’s a Reckless search.

Otherwise, the exchange is something like this:

PC: We know the shrine’s somewhere in these plains. We want to search for it.
GM: You want to search the plains? Like all the plains?
PC: No. Well maybe. If we have to. But, look… [takes out the player map]… we know the shrine’s probably in this area that the river curves around? East of the road here? Can we search that area?
GM: [looks at his hex map and counts the hexes] Yeah, okay. That’ll take most of the day probably.
PC: Fine. We’ll search until nightfall, spiraling outward from where we are.
GM: Okay. Got it.

Just get the party to define their search parameters, figure out the area they’re covering, roll the check, and based on how far away the location is from them, decide how much time the actual search takes.

GM: It’s late afternoon. A chilly wind blows as you crest a grassy ridgeline. Peering out across the rolling grasslands to the southwest, you spy a small gray blot in the grasses. Looks like a small building about two miles away.

Is Travel an Adventure?

You might have noticed I’m a big fan of resolving big, complex things in the smallest number of Arbitrary Game Turns possible. Travel three days through the forest? Fine, one roll. Travel a month to the next city? No roll needed. Search an entire forest for one ruined structure? Fine, one die roll and a week of wilderness survival. Done and done.

Of course, surprises and interruptions come up. The party gets lost sometimes or misses their destination. And that s$&% might change the equation and lead to aborted Wilderness Travel Turns. This is why you resolve Travel Turns until the party knows they succeeded, until they know they failed, until something changes, or until they give up. Right?

That might seem f$&%ing crazy given I started all of this by saying this is all to make travel matter, right? It’s there to make wilderness travel seem significant. Exciting. How the hell can I say that when I’m telling you to resolve months of travel through the wilderness with a single die roll and a paragraph of traveloguey flavor text?

The thing is this s$&% makes travel significant because the players’ choices and plans and guesses matter. Because they can get things wrong. Because they can succeed or fail. And because their failures can cost them resources. And because sometimes random, unexpected s$&% can happen along the way.

But making wilderness travel exciting — making it an adventure or part of an adventure — takes more than just resolving the trip. And lots of GMs forget this. When you’re designing a dungeon adventure, you don’t just draw a map and then resolve exploring the dungeon with some random monster rolls do you? No. You put some s$&% where the players will stumble over it. You plan some actual encounters and obstacles and challenges. All the rules for managing light sources and wandering monsters? Those are constraints and consequences and complications and chaos. They aren’t the adventure.

When the party’s just hiking between towns on the map, that’s the equivalent of just walking from one dungeon room to another. It’s a transition. Roll the random encounter checks, expend the resources, and move on to the next good part. But when the party’s trying to find some ancient shrine whose location they only have a vague idea about in the heart of dangerous territory so they can plunder it for treasure? That s$&%’s part of the adventure. The adventure’s like:

Part 1: Finding the Swampy Ruins of Swampiness
Part 2: Plundering the Ruins

Don’t rely on the random travel rules bulls$&% to carry half the weight of the adventure. Plan some s$&% to happen on the way the same way you’d plan some s$&% to happen in the dungeon rooms. And look, when you’re putting encounters in the wilderness, you’re just deciding that the players run into a certain obstacle or challenge at a certain point in their trip. You’re not putting encounters in hexes. You’re putting encounters in an adventure.

Want to make the wilderness an exciting place to adventure? Write a f$&%ing adventure in the wilderness!

Four Wilderness Travel Examples

All right. Let’s do some examples. But let’s do them quick and dirty, okay? This s$&%’s gone on long enough. So, just assume my narration is brilliant and the flavor text is evocative and the players are a bunch of morons and every attempt to get information out of them is like trying to get piss out of the ocean: unpleasant and impossible.

All of these trips will start from the hamlet of Perrin’s Mill in hex 1309. As a reminder, here’s what the players know of the world. And this is all they know.

Trip 1: Shopping in Graybridge

The party’s got a bunch of treasure they can’t sell in the tiny hamlet. And they want to buy some upgraded gear that’s not available. So, the players decide to visit Graybridge (hex 1702). They declare their intention.

Step 1: Plan the Trip

The party will follow the road from Perrin’s Mill to Graybridge. They’ll travel at a normal pace. They don’t need to forage or navigate or anything, so everyone’s just staying alert. And they’ll travel only during daylight hours. So eight hours a day given that it’s springtime. The easiest trip in the world. They estimate the trip’s 16 leagues and they expect to reach Graybridge at dusk on the second day of travel or morning on the third day. They bring a week of supplies.

Step 2: Plot the Route

Easy…

The route is 10 hexes long. 60 miles by road, mostly in the plains. But the last 10 miles or so pass through cultivated farmland.

Step 3: Can it Fail?

The party doesn’t have to navigate. They’re following a road. And they can’t possibly miss a city in the plains along the road they’re traveling on. No. It can’t fail.

Step 4: Determine the Travel Turn’s Success

The trip succeeds!

Step 5: Determine How the Trip Plays Out

The party spends two-and-one-half days on the road. I roll two full Time Pools to see if Complications arise during either day. A Complication arises on the second day. I determine what it’ll be and make a note that it happens in the late afternoon.

I determine the weather for the next three days. It’ll be clear and cool and windy, dropping near freezing at night. But the party has bedrolls and is willing to keep a campfire burning, so that won’t impede them.

I note that the party reaches a roadside inn, The Broken Wheel, in midafternoon on the first day. The party can stop for a meal or even spend the night. That’ll be an interruption.

I also note the party’s passing south of the ruined temple in Howlwind Hills. The temple’s six miles from the road and up in the hills. The height of the temple’s dome and broken tower make it visible above the surrounding hills on the horizon. The party will be able to see it at noon on the first day. That’ll also be an interruption.

I also plan one encounter with a patrol from Graybridge for the morning of the third day. Just an interaction with some soldiers keeping the local roads safe. But I can foreshadow interesting events in Graybridge.

Step 6: Narrate and Apply the Results

I describe the first morning of travel and then describe the ruins in the hills. The party decides not to take a detour but notes the location for a future expedition. I narrate again until the party reaches the roadside inn. The party stops and visits the common room, buying a meal and interacting with a visitor. But they decide not to stay for the night and keep traveling. I narrate through the first night and on into the second day until late afternoon when the party is beset by some giant wasps on the wing. The giant wasps take their toll and the party decides to camp early to recover from the poison, losing two hours of travel. I narrate the next day, describing the transition to the farmland and the encounter with the guards that the party ignores. The party reaches the gates of Graybridge at 2 PM on the third day. They traveled for two full days but rested and resupplied at the inn on the road, and so only used up one day worth of supplies.

Trip 2: To the Ruined Temple

After returning from Graybridge, the party mounts an expedition to the structure in the hills they saw from the road.

Step 1: Plan the Trip

The players aren’t sure where, exactly, the ruins are in the hills. But they guess they’re not more than a few miles from the road. Their plan is to travel along the road until the ruins are visible on the northern horizon and then head straight for them. They guess the trip’s 5 leagues and assume they’ll arrive by late afternoon if they set out in the morning from Perrin’s Mill.

Step 2: Plot the Route

Voila…

The trip’s 18 miles. 12 miles along the road through the plains, 3 miles across the trackless plains, and then 3 miles into the Howlwind Hills. The party travels at a normal pace and brings a full ten days of supplies to allow themselves plenty of time to explore the ruins.

Step 3: Can it Fail?

The party’s following a road and then heading for a visible feature. Since the temple is built on a prominent hill and rises some 30 feet above the surrounding hills, it’s visible from 6 miles away in the hills and even farther from the right angle in the terrain beyond.

Step 4: Determine the Travel Turn’s Success

Can’t fail. Duh.

Step 5: Determine How the Trip Plays Out

The party travels 15 miles across the road and the trackless plains. That takes 5 hours. They travel another 3 hours into the rugged hills, which takes 2 hours because traveling through rugged hills takes twice as long. The party will reach the ruins an hour before dusk on the first day of travel. Presumably, they’ll set up a camp and start exploring the next day. I roll the Time Pool once for one day of Complications. Roll for weather. Yaddah yaddah yaddah. It’s a short, easy trip.

Step 6: Narrate and Apply the Result

I describe the trip and the party’s first glimpse of the ruins as the sun is getting low in the western sky and a chilly, howling wind blows across the Howlwind Hills. They make camp. Mark off a day of supplies. Done. Easy.

Trip 3: Flight to Highgrove

Let’s get more complicated now. After their adventure in the Dragon Temple, the party meets a Mysterious but Sympathetic Stranger. She’s being chased and has to get a valuable Macguffin to her friends in Highgrove (Hex 0704) before the mercenaries catch her. The party agrees to help.

Step 1: Plan the Trip

Wanting to avoid the mercenaries, the party avoids the road and heads straight through Carrow’s Forest. And with the time pressure weighing on them, they decide to set a fast pace. They’re going to strike out northwest from Perrin’s Mill, hopefully on a direct course for Highgrove. If not, they’ll end up on the road near Highgrove. They estimate the trip’s 13 leagues. At a fast past but slowed by trackless forest, they estimate the trip will take 20 hours. The party is willing to travel into the evening, which is Reckless, but it’ll let them travel for 12 hours a day. Meaning they should reach Highgrove or the road by the end of the second day at worst. I point out the party’s going to need a navigator and they nominate someone who has proficiency in Survival. The rest of the party stays on alert. The party brings a week’s worth of supplies to be on the safe side.

Step 2: Plot the Route

I give the party the benefit of the doubt because, by an accident of map drawing, Highgrove is actually directly northwest of Perrin’s Mill. I checked it with a protractor. So I plot the directest possible route, hex by hex, for them. By an accident of map drawing, the directest possible route through the forest actually skirts nicely in-between the dragon and the orc territories.

And people call me a killer GM.

Anyway, this is the route…

In theory, the party’s traveling 9 miles through cultivated land and trackless plains to the edge of the forest and then 39 miles through the trackless forest. At a fast pace, I’ll let them cover the first part through the plains in two hours. The remainder will take 20 hours if they keep true to their course. And that’s a big if.

Step 3: Can it Fail?

The party can’t miss their destination. That is, they’re either going to get to the town itself or the road. But they sure as hell can get lost. They’re trying to keep to a direction through trackless wilderness. And they’re moving at a fast pace. This means their navigation checks have a -5 penalty according to the DMG.

There’s two different navigation DCs in play. This means, initially, there’s two legs to the trip. The first leg consists of the 9-mile trek across the fields and plains to the edge of Carrow’s Forest. The second leg comprises the 20 miles through the forest.

I have to go through Step 4, Step 5, and Step 6 for each leg of the trip. And if any of the legs fail, the trip might become a lot more complicated. Rather than breaking this down by step, I’m going to break it down by complete Wilderness Travel Turn.

Turn 1

I roll a secret Wisdom (Survival) check and determine the first turn succeeds. For two hours, the party strikes out across the farmlands and rolling meadows northwest of town and reaches the forest’s edge exactly where they intended.

I also roll the Time Pool to see if a Complication arises anytime during the first day. I often pre-roll the Time Pool and apply Complications during the travel day rather than rolling it at midnight. The party lucks out. No Complication.

Turn 2

And s$&% immediately goes bad when I roll the second Wisdom (Survival) check. The forest is tough to navigate (DC 15) and the -5 penalty hurts. The first navigation check fails. I roll 1d6 and discover the party travels 2 hours in the wrong direction. Instead of northwest, they veer north.

I roll another check. The party doesn’t realize they’re heading in the wrong direction. The dice say they head another 4 hours in the wrong direction. Finally, a success! The party recognizes, after 6 total hours in the forest, they got off course. Not that I tell them anything yet. I’m still working out what the hell happened.

6 hours of travel through the forest at a fast pace is 12 miles or two hexes. And 6 hours on top of the 2 they’ve already traveled through the plains to reach the forest means it’s now evening. Worse, when I plot their actual position on the map, they’ve hit the edge of the Burnt Eyes orcs’ territory. The savage orcs mark their territory in unmistakable ways, so there’s no doubt the party will know there’s something up in this direction.

Now, with the party’s exact position marked out and knowing precisely what time it is, I narrate away the rest of the day. They travel for six hours through the woods. As evening falls, the navigator starts to notice the shadows are wrong. The party’s pointed in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, the forward lookout spots a bloody orc sign on the trees and several animal skulls piled up on the ground below it. An Intelligence (History) check tells them these signs mark orc territory.

The party decides to continue traveling into the evening, even though that’s Reckless, but they’ll stay out of orc territory and try to head northwest again. They’re hoping they’re not too far off course and counting on the fact that they’ll hit the road even if they miss Highgrove. They also decide to slow down to a normal pace so as not to incur further navigation penalties. The NPC protests this, insisting the mercenaries could be tracking them but the party shuts her up.

Turn 3

I roll a secret navigation check to see if the party keeps on course to the northwest. And they, unfortunately, don’t. Whoops. I roll 1d6 to see how long they travel for. 3 hours. I round the travel time up to 4 hours because it makes the math easier. Figuring they won’t go into orc territory, I decide they overcompensate and head due west instead of northwest, giving the orcs a wide berth. I roll another check to see if they realize they’re off course. They do. So they travel until nightfall and then realize they’re still going the wrong way.

4 hours in the forest at a normal pace only carries them 3 miles. I round things off a little bit to put them into the middle of a hex. Which is something I do a lot of. Fudging times and distances to make things a little easier to count and track. Here’s how I’ve plotted their positions throughout the four total turns the trip takes.

Traveling by evening is Reckless. So, I roll 4 Tension Dice for the Reckless action — if I’d been tracking the Time Pool for the entire day, there’d be 4 dice in it at this hour. But, if you don’t have that intuitive grasp of the Time Pool, you can just roll a half-pool for any Reckless action that happens in the middle of the day. It’s okay to fudge s$&%.

A Complication arises and I decide a couple of orc hunters saw the party skirting their land and decided to follow them and attack.

So, the party travels in the fading light, stumbling through the forest. As the first stars peek through the trees overhead, the navigator recognizes a constellation and realizes it’s in the wrong place. The party’s been traveling west, not northwest. As the party descends into an argument, the orc hunters assault them.

A bitter, injured party makes camp in the woods. The night passes without further incident.

Turn 4

At first light, as the party breaks camp, one of the PCs decides to climb a tree and get above the canopy to see what he can see. But the trees are a fairly uniform height and he can’t get too much higher above the trees. So he can only see for about three miles. It’s forest in every direction, though the jagged line of the Howlwind hills is just visible along the eastern horizon as the sun rises over it. So the party reasons they’re not too far off course.

The party decides that getting lost was a fluke and tries, once again, to travel directly northwest through the forest. They stick with a normal travel pace though. This time, the secret navigation roll succeeds. The party stays on a northwesterly course. Amusingly, even though they wandered out of their way, they’re actually right back on the original, plotted course. So they’re on target to reach Highgrove now.

Highgrove is 24 miles away. At a normal pace through trackless forest, that’ll take 12 hours. I confirm the party’s still willing to travel into the evening. They will reach Highgrove at last light. But they’ll risk a Complication in the last four hours of the journey.

I roll a full Time Pool to see if a Complication arises during the travel day and then four Tension Dice to see if another, different Complication arises in the evening. Two Complications. So, although the party is on course now, they’re going to have a rough day.

Especially because I also have planned encounters with a forward mercenary scout and a spider nest. This is a wilderness adventure, after all.

Trip 4: In Search of the Sunken Swamp Ruins of Swampiness

If you can handle that Carrow’s Forest trip, you can handle anything. So I’m going to breeze through this last one quickly.

After their terrible adventure in the woods, the party discovers an old journal that describes a treasure-filled ruin in the swamplands at the heart of Faela Basin. Well, technically, it’s marshland not swampland, but who cares. Point is, there’s no directions in the journal but the naturalist who wrote the journal made several sketches of reasonably permanent landmarks and the stars, so the party has some landmarks to go by.

Their plan is to cross the Tumblestone Run at Perrin’s Mill, walk around to the lakeshore, and then strike out southwest across the Faela Basin. They can see the swampland in the heart of the basin on their map.

The route looks like this:

The party now includes a ranger whose favored terrain is plains. The party can’t get lost while they skirt around the lake — even though it’s not clear that’s what they’re doing on my hex map — and they can’t get lost in Faela Basin because it’s mostly plains. They also really can’t miss their destination. It’s 85 square miles of swampland in the middle of a route they can’t fail to follow. They’ll know it when they get there.

Once they get there, they’ve got to search the swampland for the Sunken Swamp Ruins of Swampiness. The search is a Wilderness Travel Turn by itself. Just one. It can succeed and it can fail. The swamp is technically a marsh, so the vegetation’s mostly ground cover. The terrain is pretty clear. But the ruins are mostly sunken into the swamp. I assign a DC 10, moderate difficulty. The swamp covers three hexes and I decide that, even though the terrain’s open, it takes two hours to trek around each hex because of the marshy swampiness. Because the party also has a bunch of landmarks to go by, I give them advantage on the check.

I roll a secret DC 10 Wisdom (Perception) for each member of the party with advantage. Unsurprisingly, someone succeeds. The search takes a maximum of six hours. I roll 1d4+2 for reasons that are perfectly logical based on the map and the party’s route.

I also, of course, roll for random weather and Complications and include a planned encounter with a lizardfolk village the party stumbles on during their search. But that’s all exciting game stuff.

…and exciting game stuff has no place in wilderness travel rules. Which we’re now done with.