Cover art by Yuhong Ding

Why Overland Travel?

Given the deluge of procedures for overland travel in homebrew blogs, it feels like a fitting subject for one of the inaugural inkblot gibberling posts.

Art by Kevin Zamir Goeke

I want to include a procedure for overland travel in my fantasy RPGs for a few reasons:

• The travel montages in Jackson’s LotR film trilogy are stunning.
• Historical TTRPG expectations that “getting between the town and dungeon” is its own distinct challenge.
• The themes of fantasy as a genre are deeply tied to a conceptual “journey”.
• An experience of exploration and discovery.

Styles like the OSR are also going to want systems for getting lost, foraging, weather, and so on.

At the same time, a procedure for overland travel needs to be fun. For me, that means:

• Easy to prep: fun and fast to create.
• Evocative: a player should feel like a fantasy hero.
• Short and Sweet: I tend to find that lengthy travel procedures correlate with boring travel procedures.
• Informed Decisions: The core fun of an RPG is an informed decision between many (sometimes infinite) choices.

In short, hexcrawls have trouble with “Short and Sweet” and “Easy to Prep”, and pointcrawls struggle to simulate exploration and getting lost.

Dark Pupil’s Zone Crawl

The great Dark Pupil published an excellent post about Zone Crawls for overland travel. They work like this:

• Divide the map into geographic zones. Each zone can have multiple points of interest.
• Travel within a zone takes 1 watch. Traveling between adjacent zones takes 1 day (except for difficult terrain, impassable obstacles, etc.).
• Each zone gets a write-up: landscape features, landmarks, faction activity, random encounter tables.

Dark Pupil’s beautiful summary:

This is lovely and checks all of my boxes, but of course I need to noodle with it. My problem is that everything, including the zonecrawl, is a pointcrawl.

Dark Pupil writes “I suspect the abstraction in distance between two points will be a bit too much for some people to handle. It sacrifices fidelity in spatial relationships for ease of use much like a Pointcrawl, with the added benefit of allowing easy exploration procedures and systems for getting lost.”

I agree, so I’m taking as much ease-of-use as I can and throwing out the point crawl. Tested last week!

inkblot gibberling’s Zone Crawl

The Stonetop RPG Player Map with some zones (the Great Wood, the Flats, Steplands, etc.) and points of interest (Stonetop, Titan Bones, Blackwater Lake, etc.).

So the inkblot gibberling zone crawl works like this:

Setup

1. Divide the map into geographic zones. Each zone can have multiple points of interest.
2. Assign each zone a travel speed in real units (for example, 3 miles per hour). Roads/water have a fixed travel speed.
3. Each zone gets a short write up: landscape features, landmarks, faction activity, random encounter tables.

One important thing: tell the players about the zones! This will become the core of the informed decisions they make regarding travel. They need to know that it’s faster to go through Mirkwood, but safer to go around — otherwise they are just picking a path randomly, which is the same as not picking at all.

Travel Procedure

1. “Draw on this map the route you take.” If the PCs don’t have access to a map, “Describe the path of your travels.” Basically, real orienteering.
2. Using the travel speed of each zone calculate the total time of the journey. So again, real orienteering.
3. For each zone they travel in, roll for a random encounter (+ number of days in zone to increase likelihood on long journeys) and describe the landscape and nearby points of interest. If desired, check for getting lost, exhausted, etc. (see below).

Exploration Procedure

1. PCs circle the region they want to explore. Note the area (in sq units) of the region.
2. It takes time to explore relative to the travel speed of the zone (with units adjusted for area, so 3 miles/hour becomes 3 sq miles/hour). So an area of 36 square miles in a zone with travel speed of 3 miles/hour would take 12 hours to explore. They discover all points of interest in the region.

Art by Karl Sisson

What I like

• Ludonarrative consonance. Players will say things like “Let’s avoid the Blackfens and cross through northwestern Aloria instead. Then we’ll find the road again and follow it to Brandonsford.” That’s verbatim what their character would be saying!
• It’s fast. Exploration costs in-game time, not real-world time. A journey through one environment only has one roll and gets described once, even if that environment would’ve otherwise been several hexes of rolls and descriptions.
• Zones can be vastly different sizes. This is one of the big changes from a hexcrawl or Dark Pupil’s zone crawl. The Infinite Desert will take more time to cross than Bitsy Bog even though they are both a single zone.
• Spatial Relationships. Two points of interest in the same zone will take different amounts of time to travel to based on their actual location.
• Clear decisions. Are we going through this zone or that zone? “What if we take a detour south to avoid entering the Badlands?” Macro-level decisions are obvious to the players.

What I don’t like

• The referee/players are going to have to do some math. But it’s pretty easy math, and it only has to be done once per zone. For the players, it is also in character: their PCs are somewhere in the world pointing at a map saying “well, the city is 20 miles by road, and we travel at 3 miles per hour, so it will take us a day to get there.”
• Possible nitpicking. “No, that route looks more like 32.5 miles long, not 34.” If this occurs, I think the playstyle of the table does not match the spirit of this procedure and a hexcrawl may be better suited.

In Play

You should expect to spend around 15 minutes planning and executing long journeys, and less on short journeys.

Expand me: Here's a relatively complex travel example with long distances.

1. Players: “We leave Lothlórien heading east, ford the Anduin, and continue east across the Anduin Vale until we see Mirkwood. Galadriel told us to hug the edge of the forest, keeping it on our left as we curve north, eventually reaching the Celduin River and following it upstream to Laketown.”
2. Referee: “Traveling from Lothlorien to the edge of the Lorien zone is 10 miles at 2 miles/hour, so 5 hours. The Anduin river is an obstacle that takes a day to ford. Crossing the Vale of Anduin zone and along the edge of Mirkwood is 100 miles at 3 miles/hour, so 33 hours. Moving along the edge of southern Mirkwood in the Berennyr zone is 50 miles at 2 miles/hour, so 25 hours. Moving north all the way to Laketown in the Rhovanion zone is 500 miles at 3 miles/hour, so 167 hours. So a total of 230 hours. With 8 hours of travel per day, that takes 29 days, plus 1 day fording the Anduin.”
3. Referee: For each of the four zones, roll a random encounter. Then for each zone, describe the journey by using the zone’s landmarks and descriptions.

Done! 15 minutes at the table with four rolls to complete a journey of over 600 miles and 30 days. Hexes would’ve required far more rolling, and a standard zonecrawl would’ve broken down at these long distances.

In Prep

All you have to do is prep each zone! For a local area, this is probably around 5: some farmland, a forest, a swamp, mountains, and hills.

Expand me: Here's an example zone!

The Mogglewood	Travel Speed: 2 miles/hour

Features: An airy forest of oak festooned with garlands of fungi and mycelia. Morels squish underfoot, sending bursts of spores into the air. At night, the woods glow with thousands of luminescent mushrooms. Streams burble.

Landmarks:

• Glowing Oak: City of the nutcaps.
• The Barrows: An ancient tomb complex, now overgrown with fungus.

Factions:

• Nutcaps: Tiny flying fey with acorn heads that live in their magical trees.

Random Encounters: 2-in-6 chance. If yes, roll 1d4.

1	A sprite, looking to steal an acorn from the Glowing Oak. Wants help.
2	A patrol of 3d6 nutcaps protecting their grove of oak trees.
3	A miles-long trail of bones and writhing mycelia oozing from The Barrows.
4	A fungal ogre, grazing on acorns, 2 nutcaps nearby helpless to stop it.

It takes around 15 minutes per zone, so around an hour for a local area. That’s a lot faster than hexes!

Difficult Travel (Getting Lost, Hurt, Exhausted, etc.)

Art by Vladimir Motsar

Sometimes traveling through a region should be difficult. Part of the RPG should be making choices to overcome those challenges! Just like above, we want to make this fast, informed, and evocative. Here’s the system:

Setup

1. For each zone, list some obstacles.
2. Each obstacle needs a difficulty class (for D&D 5e, that means a DC between 5 and 25).
3. For each obstacle, decide a setback if not overcome.

Travel/Exploration Procedure

1. Each time the PCs travel through a dangerous zone, show them the list of obstacles.
2. Each PC selects a different obstacle and explains how they attempt to help the whole party overcome it.
3. Each PC rolls with the relevant modifier against that obstacle’s difficulty class.
4. If a check is failed, apply that obstacle’s setback.

Examples

Expand me: The players are traveling through the Salt Flats, a vast open expanse of salt on the edge of the Infinite Desert.

Art by Denis Gordeev

1. Referee: "Here are the obstacles you face on your journey through the Salt Flats:"

   Obstacle	Setback	DC
   The featureless expanse provides no landmarks for navigation. Lost travelers wander in great circles.	1d6 extra days of travel.	10
   Sunlight reflecting off the white salt creates intense heat during the day.	2 levels of exhaustion.	13
   Giant antlions lurk beneath the salt, lunging out from burrows to grab prey with their mandibles.	3d6 damage to all travelers.	15

2. The players strategize about how to divvy up the obstacles and which setbacks they care the most about avoiding.
3. Player 1: "Rowena the barbarian will overcome the heat by simply toughing it out and carrying my comrades on my back so they may rest. So I'd like to use Constitution as a modifier for my check." Referee: "That makes sense to me, go ahead and roll." Rowena succeeds!
4. Player 2: "Zaar would like to avoid the giant antlions by sensing their vibrations in the ground. Can I get a bonus because I'm a dwarf and attuned to detecting movement in the earth?" Referee: "Yep! How about +4?" Zaar fails! Antlions ambush the party, dealing 3d6 damage to each of them. A mule takes enough damage to be killed, and the Referee narrates how Bill the pony is dragged thrashing beneath the salt leaving only a bright red bloodstain behind.
5. Player 3: "Vorazaks the Occult would like to navigate by the stars to avoid getting lost. Could I use Arcana instead of Nature, because my magic comes from astrology and I've read lots of books about the stars?" Referee: "Makes sense to me." Vorazaks succeeds!

Here are some example setbacks to use:

• Damage: to PCs, NPCs, animals, max HP. Which people take damage? Can it be mitigated by taking some other bad effect?
• Time: The journey takes longer than expected. Can represent getting lost. Results in more rations being used and potentially missing important events.
• Debuff/Corruption: Exhaustion, conditions, ability score drain, curses, etc.
• Resource Drain: Losing gold, weapons, tools, etc. Maybe you also gain a resource: a rare herb or natural resource.
• Knowledge: Failing to find a point of interest. Stumbling upon a point of interest as a side effect of an otherwise negative setback!
• Politics: You were caught trespassing! Maybe the area is sacred/taboo or a demilitarized zone.

More

Art by Raja Nandepu

Here are some posts that inspired this design:

• Make sure to check out Dark Pupil’s zone crawl.
• The Alexandrian’s thoughts on navigation by landmark and compass heading.
• A Knight at the Opera on how the inside of hexes are represented.
• Bastionland’s spark tables for how players and referees might think about a zone as a conceptual region of unified geography.

I think there is more to think about here, and want to explore the following ideas more:

• How zones can be expanded beyond geographic boundaries to represent other ideas.
  • Maybe the battle-torn region around an advancing army is considered a separate zone, invisible to the players, that the referee tracks travel into.
  • Maybe certain zones can “overlap” each other, move across the map, or mark political boundaries.
• Is it more evocative to not even demarcate zones to the players and just have them travel off of hearsay and vibes? “We heard that there’s a marsh roughly in that area, lets just skirt the edge of it, no matter how far it takes.”
• I think that tacking on systems for foraging and weather in different zones seems fairly straightforward and fun to brainstorm about.