Overland Travel Is a Dungeon Crawl
We don't need to overcomplicate overland travel.
In tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, traveling from one dungeon room to the next is easy. But traveling from one region on the map to the next seems intimidating for game masters. The characters can go anywhere! In this article, let’s examine why that’s not really true and why this problem isn’t nearly as complicated as it seems.
Most of us don’t have every valley, vale, and vineyard mapped out. But our players don’t either. The choices for where to travel are limited to what the game master provides. Our job as game master is not to render every hillside, cave, and valley to video-game level detail. Our job is to present the players with fun and interesting choices. Just like a standard dungeon room, we can offer a “room” with interesting aspects and choices for where to go.
The “Room”
In overland travel, the “room” is just a fantastic location with interesting aspects and choices to be made. The aspects describe the environment, provide additional exploration opportunities, and offer choices. We don’t have to describe everything in the area, just like we don’t have to describe every single detail in a dungeon room. Don’t just arrive at the forest—arrive at something interesting in the forest that presents choices.
You leave the dungeon and head back to town. After a few miles, you come across a shrine overgrown with moss and weeds. The road continues on by towards town. Nearby, a dead tree with a single, golden leaf stands watch over a separate trail leading into the mountains.
The party can choose to engage with the aspects of the area or ignore them. Once they choose their path, they’re either on to town or the next room in our sequence.
You travel for another few hours and come across a massive tree split in half with burning embers. Nearby, a wizard complains about a lost spell book. The sign nearby points west towards town and north towards somewhere called Rebel’s Peak.
To encourage more exploration, we can offer multiple paths that ultimately lead to the destination. It’s best to provide enough details to allow the players to make a meaningful choice. Why should they pick one over the other? The following re-works the above example to offer multiple paths:
You travel for another few hours and come across a massive tree split in half with burning embers. Nearby, a wizard complains about a lost spell book, “Probably those damned bandits near the peak.” The sign nearby points towards two paths: one labeled Coastal Trail and the other towards Rebel’s Peak. Both paths lead back to town.
In this case, we make it clear that both paths will ultimately lead to the destination. But the party’s choice of which path to take will shape their experience. That makes the choice impactful as long as the next leg of the journey is interesting and meaningful. If the quantum ogre1 sits on both paths, we can at least make it meaningfully different. The Coastal Trail might offer more ways around the ogre whereas the ogre near Rebel’s Peak is weak from a recent fight with the bandits.
Simulate the Fun, Not the World
Unlike how we might traverse every square of a dungeon, attempting to simulate actual travel through the wilderness is incredibly dull. Trying to render every hillside, cave, and valley is a fruitless endeavor. We don’t care if after the wizard is a mile of road, two miles of rising hills, a pond, and finally Rebel’s Peak. We can fast forward to the peak itself.
To double down on that idea, we can offer “fast travel” as an option. Fast travel is skipping the journey and arriving at the destination. Games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim provide two good models:
- Fast travel is available between major settlements if the party pays enough for a carriage or caravan.
- Fast travel is available to locations the party has already traveled to.
When operated in these ways, fast travel feels more like a reward than a cheat. We can even offer a quick recap of events that happened during the travel. What did the party learn or experience along the way? We might even say that fast travel is no longer available due to a new threat in the area, creating an adventure hook for the party.
When we use the mental model of a dungeon crawl for overland travel, we drastically simplify how to run it. We can focus on the interesting locations and choices rather than simulating a full journey across the map. Introducing fast travel opens up even more opportunities for fun within our campaigns. Travel onward.
Game on.
- From “On How an Illusion Can Rob Your Game of Fun” on Hack & Slash, 2011 September 11↩︎