I’ve talked about Numenera and the Cypher System it spawned quite a bit in the past, both here on the Alexandrian and elsewhere. Often what I’m talking about are the GM intrusions, which are one of the best and most innovative elements of the system.

When saying that intrusions are innovative, however, I’m not infrequently confronted by people demanding stuff like, “Have you ever read any Fate game at all?” It’s an ironic comment because it’s an accusation of ignorance which is, in fact, born from ignorance. But it’s happened often enough that I feel a need to just write up a definitive explanation that I can reference in the future.

First: Yes, I’m familiar with and have played (and run) Fate.

Second: Yes, both games feature a mechanic in which the GM offers a point of meta-currency to a player to achieve an effect which the player can cancel by spending their own meta-currency. But the similarity is superficial, in much the same way that saying “in Magic: The Gathering you play cards from your hand and in Dominion you also play cards from your hand” is a superficial comparison of those games.

Let’s break this down.

GM INTRUSIONS

I discuss the GM intrusions of the Cypher System in much more detail in The Art of GM Intrusions, but the short version is that the function of a GM intrusion is for the GM to say, “I’m going to do something that the rules don’t normally allow me to do.”

GMs will, of course, do this from time to time in any system. But there’s generally a limit. For example, if a GM’s response to a successful attack in a typical RPG was to say, “Yeah! And you hit the mammoth-saur so hard that your axe actually gets stuck in its side! And then it rears back and rips the axe right out of hands!” the players would generally say (or at least think), “This is bullshit.” Because punishing people for making a successful attack is bullshit; it’s a violation of the rules we’ve all agreed to abide by.

But hitting something so hard that your weapon gets stuck in it is actually pretty fucking badass. And what the GM intrusion mechanics basically let the GM say is, “Wouldn’t this be cool?” (by offering XP) and for the players to say, “Fuck yeah!” (by accepting the XP) or “No, I don’t think so,” (by spending an XP to cancel the intrusion) within the rules we’ve all agreed to abide by.

We could, of course, just chat this out without the mechanic, but (a) you can really say that about any mechanic in an RPG and (b) in practice, making it an explicit mechanic lubricates the interaction so that play doesn’t bog down on these points.

This simultaneously lets Monte Cook, the designer, keep the system streamlined by binning all the special case rules. The example he gives in the book basically boils down to, “The reason other games have attack of opportunity rules is to eliminate weird edge cases where turn-based combat creates odd and undesirable outcomes like being unable to stop someone from running past you because it’s not your turn. Instead of having a whole heap of special case rules trying to weed out those corner cases, the GM should just use the intrusion mechanic to deal with them when and if they’re important.”

Basically, any time the rules would discourage something awesome from happening or result in one of these weird edge cases due to their streamlined abstraction, the GM instrusion provides a mechanism for resolving it.

FATE COMPELS

Let’s compare this to Fate in which the GM can identify a specific Aspect belonging to a character and compel it by paying a Fate Point to the player. (And the player, in turn, can cancel the compel by instead spending a Fate Point of their own.)

As we’ve noted, the form of the mechanic is superficially similar. But the function of the mechanic has a completely different feature set.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with the Dresden Files RPG lately, so we’ll use that as our primary example. It includes two types of compels: Limitations and Complications. Limitations are the GM forcing the player to take a specific type of action (which, you’ll note, is not something that GM intrusions do at all). Complications are similar to one variety of GM intrusion (by introducing elements that are disadvantageous to the PCs during play), but note how the actual execution of the mechanic is almost completely inverted: Compelling an Aspect isn’t providing mechanical support for unanticipated edge cases; they’re explicitly the core rule by which Aspects (which are one of the primary ways of describing your character mechanically) are mechanically implemented.

Here’s one way to clearly perceive the distinction: If you took GM intrusions out of the Cypher System, nothing on your character sheet would change. If you took compels out of Fate, you’d have a whole bunch of negative-leaning Aspects on your character sheet without any mechanical hook for using them.

WHY DOES THIS MATTER?

Because the misapprehension that GM intrusions are supposed to be used like compels in Fate appears to be causing a lot of Fate players to misuse and dismiss one of the most useful innovations in RPG design in the last decade.

If you believe that GM intrusions are just “watered down compels from Fate” (as one Fate player told me), it means that you’re not only limiting your use of GM intrusions to one very tiny part of what they’re capable of, you’re also saddling the GM intrusion mechanic with an entire ethos (being the primary mechanism for leveraging character traits into play) which GM intrusions are not mechanically capable of robustly supporting (because, again, that’s not what they’re designed to do).

The opposite, of course, would also be true: If you tried to use Fate compels as if they were GM intrusions, the result would almost certainly be a very sub-optimal use of the Fate system. However, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this in actual play or online discussions, which is why my discussion here is primarily focused in the opposite direction.

Here’s a convenient fiction that’s often perceived as reality: That countries as they exist today are immutable truths.

We talk of the “history of France,” for example, as if the borders of France have not been in constant upheaval since… well, forever.

Whether we’re browsing the table of contents in a world history textbook, reading Wikipedia articles, or running our finger along a shelf full of history books, we see this all the time. I just got done reading the Cambridge History of Russia, for example.

We accept this fiction as truth not only because it’s historically convenient, but also because it’s politically expedient: It’s much easier to maintain power if you create the illusion that your power is a fundamental facet of reality.

Look at China, for example, which claims an unbroken legacy of civilization dating back to the 21st century BCE despite any casual inspection of their history revealing that this is nonsense. (Even if you ignore the fact that the current Communist government only dates back to the middle of last century, you can also check out the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period as just one example from the “History of China” in which the entire region of the “oldest country in the world” was a hodgepodge of a dozen or more polities.)

Now, in the context of RPG worldbuilding (because that’s the sort of thing we talk about around here), this can be useful to keep in mind in a couple of ways.

HISTORICAL. Use the “national illusion” when writing the history of your campaign world. How disparate nations are forged together or broken apart can be a vibrant part of that history, with repercussions that directly affect the world as the characters know it.

This rich depth can be too easily overlooked with grandiloquent statements like, “And then the nation of Such-and-So was born.”

But don’t forget the converse reality of this: National identity persists. Rome didn’t die its final death until it was in several different pieces and no longer anywhere in the vicinity of Rome.

IMMEDIATE. The conception and identity of nations isn’t just a matter of historical convenience. They shape and are used to shape the political struggles of today.

Look, for example, at Ukraine: In one narrative it is an independent nation with its own history. In another, it’s part of Russia and has been for 1,200 years. In fact, it’s such a part of Russia that the story of Russian history typically begins in Kiev.

That ideological struggle for the identity of a nation creates a vibrant cesspool of conflict and, therefore, story.

All kinds of stories: Patriotism. War. Intrigue. Scandal.

EXAMPLE: ANCIENT GREECE

Consider Ancient Greece. When thinking of Greek myth, art, philosophy, or theater, I often think of Greece as being… well, modern Greece.

My conception of “Greece” as a thing which exists is strongly wedded to its modern incarnation and how I have encountered it countless times on maps, in news stories, and so forth. But consider this:

Aristotle described the constitutional history of 158 Greek city-states, but there were a thousand more. Each contributed in commerce, industry, and thought to what we mean by Greece.

Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Vol. 2: The Life of Greece

This much grander conception of Greece as 158 city-states cuts both ways.

First, it reminds us that Greek civilization was vast. They founded the cites of Nice and Marseilles, for example, and Sicily was a major seat of Greek culture. Look at the truly old nations and civilizations of your game world and think about where they’ve been in the past. (There’s virtually no nation on the planet today, for example, which did not at one time claim sovereignty over territory which it no longer possesses.)

Nations contract. In my D&D campaign world, for example, the borders of the Seyrunian Empire have been slowly retreating for a couple of centuries: An orcish horde overran their eastern lands. The Elven War drove them out of their colonies in the Borderlands. After another war they were forced to split control of Corinthia and the Southern Pass with the kingdoms of Barund and Arathia.

Second, it reminds us that “Ancient Greece” wasn’t monolithic. Quite the opposite, in fact. The entirety of Greek history was filled with fractious conflict and division between its many parts. What we now perceive as “Greece” would, at many points in its history, been perceived as a much more complicated (and interesting!) morass of competing polities.

Any number of histories of the Hundred Years War between France and England get tripped up on this, for example, because their authors see “France” as an immutable entity. The history begins to make a lot more sense when you realize that the Carolingian empire had been falling apart for centuries and what you really had was an incredibly complicated struggle of both war and inheritance law between the kingdoms of England, West Francia, Burgundy, and Aquitaine as they all sought a post-Carolingian identity.

Nations are complex entities. Think of them as such: Look at how they amalgamated disjointed polities. Look at the cultural and racial divisions that are papered over by central rule and/or national identity. Think about which languages are spoken and where. Think about economic boundaries.

These fault lines are often hidden by the “national illusion,” but they tend to be an ever-present rumble throughout history and break out into full-fledged earthquakes at the most unexpected times.

FLIP IT AROUND: THE ETERNITY OF GREECE

The easy lesson to take away here is that nations are complex entities made up of a lot of different parts and the existence of the nation as a unified reality is an illusion that we should ignore.

But you can just as easily take this in the other direction. For example, I wrote:

Look at China, for example, which claims an unbroken legacy of civilization dating back to the 21st century BCE despite any casual inspection of their history revealing that this is nonsense.

But is it nonsense? Or is it only nonsense if we view it the way we typically view European history?

What if we flip this around and interpret European history using the same memetic constructs that we use when interpreting Chinese history?

Here’s how that might look:

Greek civilization can be traced back to Mycenae in the 16th century BCE. It rapidly expanded until invasions by the Sea People along with economic and environmental factors caused power to become decentralized during the so-called Homeric Age from the 12th to 8th century BCE.

As a new Athenian hegemony began to emerge, Greece expanded into the Magna Graecia (southern Italy and Sicily), Asia Minor, and Iberia. This brought them into conflict with the Persians in the east and the Carthaginians in the west. The Greeks won major victories against both, however, in a series of wars.

Power slowly began to drift west into Italy as the local barbarians adopted Greek custom, mythology, and culture. Rome, one of the city-states of Magna Graecia, grew increasingly powerful. It was actually Roman armies that won the definitive Greek victory against Carthage.

Following the Battle of Corinth in 146 BC, the first era of fractious, shared rule by multiple Greek city-states was brought definitively to an end and a new capital was established in Rome.

By the 4th century AD, democracy had become imperial rule. The emperor Constantine the Great converted Greek’s official religion from the Olympian gods to the monotheism of Christianity (which remains the dominant religion throughout Greece today).

The Roman era of Greek history continued until the 5th century AD when centuries of territorial loss culminated in the capital being moved back east to Byzantium (which had originally been founded in the 6th century BCE by Megaran Greeks).

We then enter an era commonly referred to as the Four Kingdoms, although some argue for Three or Six Kingdoms. During this period of political disunity, Greece was in all respects a multi-state system split between Byzantium (renamed Constantinople), the Carolingian dynasty, the Germanic dynasty, and the Kievan dynasty.

Arguments can be made for including Britain and Spain in the list of Greek kingdoms. Britain’s long claims to the Frankish dynasty along with the significant influence of Frankish dynasty culture certainly argue for its inclusion, as do Spain’s close ties to the shared state religion of Christianity.

Whether Greece was Three, Four, or Six Kingdoms during this period, however, they frequently formed military alliances against the Persians while simultaneously fighting fractious wars against each other. World War I and World War II, of course, are most logically seen as the modern incarnation of the Peloponnesian Wars which have always been part of Greek history.

Following World War II, the era of Four Kingdoms came to an end and a new union once again unified most of Greek civilization. (This is why discussion of whether the Kievan dynasty “counts” or not is seen as politically divisive. Many Greeks maintain a One Greek policy and insist that only those within the union are Greek.)

The Greeks, of course, have never referred to themselves as such. (The name comes from the Greki, a minor tribe that colonized Italy in the 8th century BC.) Today, they actually use the Greek word “Europe” for their polity. Weird to think about, right?

When I’ve brought this up in the past, some people have misinterpreted this as some sort of alternate history. Not at all: This is exactly history as it occurred in the real world, just interpreted using a different memetic lens. If you can draw a line of identity from the Shang Dynasty to the People’s Republic of China, you can use the same perception of history to draw a line of identity from Mycenae to the European Union.

This, too, is a useful exercise when it comes to worldbuilding. This view of history makes it easy for you to lay out the history of your world in broad strokes and establish major lines of cultural influence.

For example, imagine that you’ve created a fictional world and laid out the history of one of its major civilizations as per the above. You want to add a couple new continents and you decide that the modern nations are primarily descended from colonies established by the Greeks (probably during the Four Kingdoms period so that you can get a bunch of colonial conflicts between the kingdoms). You don’t need to work out all the details of that, though, to know that, for example, the government buildings in North America often feature Greco-Roman architecture.

Robert E. Howard’s “The Hyborian Age” takes a similar approach, summarizing the history of Conan’s world in broad strokes as cultures sweep back and forth across the world in fiery competition with one another.

At any point in this history, of course, you can drill down into the details and find not just “the Greeks”, but all the complexity of the 158 city-states (and beyond).

As described in The Art of the Key, the first published module for D&D was Palace of the Vampire Queen. It used a very simplistic, tabular key:

A year later, Judges Guild would release Wilderlands of High Fantasy, the first published hexcawl. This book keyed only a fraction of the hexes on its map, also using mostly tabular methods:

Different table formats were presented for Lurid Lairs (above), Villages, and Citadels & Castles.

These tablular entries are supplemented with short, one or two sentence entries like these:

1002-Above Ground Ruined Temple-3 Windwalkers

2822-Overgrown Antique Paintings-Copper Dragon

1418 Isle of Grath – Abode of four huge Ogres which relish human flesh. Every Ogre has three eyes, and flaming red hair. A pet giant crocodile follows them to feast on the leavings.

(“Overgrown Antique Paintings” is just a typo. Based on the format of other entries, it should be specifying an overgrown something in which antique paintings are the treasure to be looted from a copper dragon. The image it conjures of a copper dragon living inside magical antique paintings that one can presumably enter is just too fantastic for me not to call it out here. But I digress.)

But whereas the published presentation of dungeons has significantly developed and improved over the last 40+ years, the presentation of hexcrawls largely has not. If you pick up virtually any of the OSR hexcrawls released over the past few years, you’ll still find:

Incomplete keys, in which lots of hexes aren’t keyed at all. This is generally an indication that your hexcrawl is at the wrong scale. This creates two problems in actual play. First, it tends to create very poor pacing (with long spans of time in which navigational decisions are not resulting in interesting feedback in the form of content). Second, the lack of content equates to a lack of structure. One obvious example of this is that hexcrawls with vast spans of empty space lack sufficient landmarks in order to guide navigation.

Underdeveloped keys that aren’t ready for actual play. Telling me that there is, for example, a dungeon in a particular hex with “Hobgoblins 42” in it doesn’t actually give me any meaningful information for bringing that dungeon into play.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this sort of thing are products like Carcosa, which feature keys almost entirely generated by rolling on the random stocking tables found in the back of the book and jotting down the result. There’s zero value in such a key. Why? Because you could just as easily roll on the random stocking tables yourself.

Transitory keys, in which the content keyed to a hex is something you only encounter once and then the hex is functionally empty the next time you go there. (For example, from Isle of the Unknown, “A 9^th-level cleric… in a red surcoat with a white cross rides southeast to take ship upon a holy pilgrimage.”) Because this content effectively deletes itself from the key, over time this transitory content turns even a complete key into an incomplete one. It should instead be encoded as a random encounter (or similar structure).

SO WHAT?

Why is this a problem?

Well, imagine if we designed dungeons this way.

THE TOMB OF SAGRATHEA

Level 1: 12 skeletons.

Level 2: The original laboratories of the lich Sagrathea, now divided into a tribe of 17 ghost eaters and a kingdom of 46 skeletons locked in war with each other.

Level 3: The walls of the Bloodpool Labyrinth are of pinkish flesh which bleeds a grease-like substance if injured. There are many traps here. Patrolled by 2 flaming skulls.

Level 4: [intentionally left blank]

Level 5: [intentionally left blank]

Level 6: 121 skeletons + 4 ogre skeletons.

Level 7 – Sagrathea’s Gardens: A collection of 27 caverns each rendered as a miniature biome. Sagrathea has recorded his spellbook in these gardens, with each garden cavern recording a single spell of the 4^th to 9^th level of potency.

Level 8 – Sagrathea’s Manse: The lich Sagrathea sits upon a throne of black stone with his wight bride.

You can add in a side-view illustration of the dungeon showing each level’s vertical elevation, but if you can imagine looking at this dungeon “key” and being asked to run the Tomb of Sagrathea, then you know how I generally feel when I open up a typical hexcrawl and see the “key” inside.

There’s a real “draw the rest of the fucking owl” vibe to it.

WHAT SHOULD A HEXCRAWL LOOK LIKE?

Published hexcrawls are, in my opinion, providing a poor example of the value a hexcrawl structure is actually capable of providing.

At a basic level, I want to be able to pick up a hexmap and its key and have a fundamentally playable experience.

At a more advanced level, once you have a fully functional hexcrawl, there’s all kinds of cool utility that you can leverage out of that hexcrawl. For example, in Thinking About Wilderness Travel I looked at how the basic scaffolding for rich route-based travel basically just falls out of a properly designed hexcrawl key. Hexcrawls can also provide the context and tools for rapidly restocking empty dungeon complexes, as described in (Re-)Running the Megadunegon.

You can see the sample hex key I included as part of my longer series on hexcrawls.

If you’re looking for something like this on the market right now, check out The Dark of Hot Springs Island by Jacob Hurst, Gabriel Hernandez, Even Peterson, and Donnie Garcia. Every hex is keyed with content. Every lair and dungeon is mapped. And it’s paired to the incredible Field Guide to Hot Springs Island, an incredibly rich handout that’s designed to be given to your players as a kind of rumor table on steroids. It’s not just everything I want in a hexcrawl product; it’s more than that. And it’s the absolute gold standard to which any hexcrawl supplement should aspire.

Back to Hexcrawls

Go to Part 1

“If once we shake off pursuit, I shall make for Weathertop. It is a hill, just to the north of the Road, about half way from here to Rivendell. Gandalf will make for that point, if he follows us. After Weathertop our journey will become more difficult, and we shall have to choose between various dangers.” – Aragorn, Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)

UNPATHED ROUTES: The basic route system described above assumes that the route follows a clear and unmistakable path — a road or river, for example. Some routes don’t follow paths, however. These generally take the form of a landmark chain: Head north to Archet, then turn east to Weathertop. Turn south from Weathertop, cross the road, and then head west until you hit the road again.

To handle unpathed routes, you’ll need to add mechanics for both (a) getting lost and (b) getting back on track after you’ve become lost. (This may also include a mechanic to determine whether or not you realize that you’re lost.)

A single route can also include both pathed and unpathed sections.

HIDDEN ROUTE FEATURES: The gansōm bridge was washed out by the spring floods, releasing howling water spirits into the Nazharrow River. Before arriving in the Bloodfens, the PCs were unaware of the presence of goblin rovers. They’re pleasantly surprised to discover that the Imperial checkpoint at the Karnic crossroads has been abandoned, its regiment summoned north to deal with peasant rebellions.

Although I mentioned before that PCs need to be aware of distinctions between the available routes in order to make a meaningful choice between them, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they need to know everything. Some aspects of a route’s speed, difficulty, stealth, expense, landmarks, or hazards can be initially hidden from the PCs and only discovered later.

In some cases, hidden route features can be uncovered before the journey begins if the PCs research the route or can get their hands on better maps.

FORKED ROUTES: Sometimes the choice of route (or additional choices of route) can appear after the journey has begun. These can include detours, in which the fork in the route eventually collapses back into the original route.

Detours are often made in response to hidden route features discovered along the way (the gansōm bridge has been washed out, so you need to figure out a different way across the river). PCs can be both pushed and pulled by detours, however: In addition to trying to avoid bad things on the original route, they might also choose to turn aside to gain some benefit (from an advantageous landmark, for example), usually at the cost of time.

PROCEDURAL CONTENT GENERATORS: Procedural content generators are generally nonessential to a scenario structure, but properly designed they can be large boons in content creation and can even unlock unique gameplay. Other than a random encounter table, what other content generators could we potentially develop?

I think one thing we can immediately rule out is trying to develop a map generator. Nothing wrong with a good random map generator, but it doesn’t feel like it’s directly connected to route travel. The assumption of the route system is that you know where Point A is, where Point B is, and what the general routes between them are going to be.

However, you might occasionally faced with a map like this one:

And need to ask yourself, “How can you get from Secomber to Dragonspear Castle?” There’s one obvious route that goes down the Delimbyr River to Daggerford and then along the Trade Way, but is that the only route?

So our first procedural content generator might randomly determine a type of route:

• Road
• River
• Landmark Chain
• Magical

You could bias that so that 1-5 is Road, 6-7 is River, 8-9 is Landmark Chain, and 10 is Magical on a d10 roll. If I literally roll a d10 while sitting at my desk here, I get a 1 and discover that there must be an old, disused road that crosses the High Moor. (It might be a remnant of the Netherese Empire.)

Let’s go back to the Secomber-Daggerford-Dragonspear Castle route on the map above. Remembering that a route is largely defined by the sequence of landmarks spaced along its length, we can see at the moment that the only landmark we know about is the city-state of Daggerford. So perhaps we develop a landmark generator. You could randomly determine a number of landmarks (perhaps 1d6+1) for a given route, and then generate specific landmarks in various categories:

• Settlement (town, village, fortress, shrine, inn)
• Ruin
• Lair
• Route Feature (bridge, wall, tunnel, toll, fork in the path)
• Natural Landmark

There’s likely other categories to be explored, and you can also easily dive down into any number of detailed sub-tables for each of these categories.

Now that you have a list of landmarks for the route, you might want to think about how those landmarks relate to the route itself. A landmark doesn’t necessarily need to be directly on the road, for example, so we could randomly determine the landmark connection:

• On Route
• Detectable From Route (sight, smell, sound)
• Detour (you have to leave the route in order to visit/see the landmark)

As you’re generating landmarks, you may want to get a better sense of how they connect to the wider world. So you might use a path generator to determine if the landmark is functionally a crossroads for many different routes or if it can only be reached along the road, river, or other route that the PCs are currently following.

You can use any number of methods to determine the presence/number of routes connected to the landmark, then randomly determine the type of route (see above), and then use a d8 for compass direction or d6 for hex direction to randomly determine the rough direction of the route.

Where do these other routes go? Unless the PCs express interest, you don’t necessarily need to explore that, although it can often provide good local color. (“About midday you come to the Inn of the Prancing Fairy. It lies at a crossroads with the road leading to Elegor in the north.”) Often you can just look at your map and get a pretty good idea of where they might go.

For example, if the PCs are travelling down the Delimbyr from Secomber to Daggerford and they come to a ruined tower that you determine is a crossroads with a route heading to the southeast, you could pretty easily conclude that there must be a small tributary river flowing out of the Misty Forest that joins the Delimbyr here.

As you’re describing the PCs’ journey, it may also be useful to describe the changing terrain they’re passing through. A terrain feature generator could use a simple mechanic like having a 1 in 6 chance each day of the terrain changing, and then tables to determine the new terrain features that they encounter (likely based on the base terrain type they’re traveling through). Terrain features could include vegetation, debris, obstacles, things seen on the horizon, etc.

RUNNING WITH ROUTES

As you begin running games with the route system, here are a few things to keep in mind.

First, the structure does not inherently make travel interesting. If you think of the structure as a way by which specific scenes (the landmarks and random encounters) can be easily framed, then it follows that you still need to make those scenes meaningful.

By default, the route system will lead you towards a generic travelogue (“…and then we went to X and then we went to Y and then we went to…”). But the best travelogues find ways to elevate the sequence of events. You want your game to resonate with the powerful journeys of The Lord of the Rings, rather than plodding along in the dull procedural of something like The Ringworld Engineers.

If you’re of a dramatist bent, think of what kind of story you want to be telling with this journey: Exploration, a race, escape, survival, self-discovery, edification. Or is the journey simply a convenient framing device for a number of individually interesting and complete short stories? Journeys can set mood (think of the emotional toll of Frodo and Sam’s long trek across Mordor), emphasize a theme (sure are a lot of goblins in these fens), establish current events (passing caravans of refugees from the war), or provide hooks to side quests.

Regardless, think about the agenda of the scenes you’re framing to. Why are you framing to these moments? What’s the bang that forces the PCs to make one or more meaningful choices in that scene? (These topics are discussed at more length in The Art of Pacing.)

If you can’t think of any agenda or bang for a particular landmark, then consider demoting that landmark to a part of the abstract description of the journey or even drop it entirely. (The truth is that the PCs will see a lot of stuff on the road. You’re going to skip over most of it. The important thing is to figure out what stuff you need to focus on in order for the journey to be meaningful.)

THE PROBLEM WITH MULTIPLE ROUTES: A fundamental problem with the route system is the choice between routes. This inherently creates a choose-your-own-adventure structure in which you’re prepping a lot of material for two different routes and then immediately throwing out at least half of that prep as soon as the PCs choose one route over another.

There are, however, a few ways that you can mitigate this problem.

First, you can often minimize wasted prep by having the players choose their route at the end of a session. You still need to broadly prep each route so that a meaningful choice can be made between routes, but this is fairly minimal and you only need to prep the chosen route in fully playable detail.

Second, in many cases there may not actually be a choice between multiple routes. We talked about this briefly before, but if the decision of route boils down to a calculation rather than true choice, then you only need to prep the route that’s calculated to be best.

Third, you can focus your prep on proactive elements that are relevant regardless of which route is chosen.

Being chased by the bad guys is an easy example of this: With the Ringwraiths chasing them from the Shire to Rivendell, the hobbits — and, later, Strider — make a number of route choices balancing speed, safety, and stealth. The threat of the Ringwraiths (and their other agents) make these choices interesting, but you only need to prep the Ringwraiths once.

You can also feature content that the PCs carry along the road with them. For example, you might prep a murder mystery and/or romantic drama that features the team of hirelings the PCs have brought along on the journey. For the “Battle of the Bands” scenario in the Welcome to the Island anthology for Over the Edge, Jeremy Tuohy and I developed an interlinked system of road talk and encounters on the road that create an evolving drama with the NPCs the characters collect along the way.

Fourth, you can find ways to reuse, reincorporate, and recycle material so that even if the PCs don’t see the stuff on Route B on this particular journey, you’ll still end up using it at some point in the future.

BACK TO HEXCRAWLS

Which actually brings us all the way back to hexcrawls.

Because it turns out that a lot of the stuff we’ve built into our route system — landmarks, navigation DCs, terrain, travel times, etc. — actually just fall out of a fully stocked hexcrawl with no additional prep whatsoever.

This is one of the many reasons that a truly ready-to-play hexcrawl would actually be one of the highest value supplements a game company could publish. The utility of the hexcrawl is incredibly high to any individual GM, particularly if you can eliminate the inefficient nature of most hexcrawl prep by spreading that value across an audience of hundreds or thousands.

(Unfortunately, most hexcrawl products aren’t fully stocked and ready-to-play. They just provide a very high level overview of the would-be content of the hexcrawl, leaving a lot of the actual work in the GM’s lap.)

To be clear here, I’m not saying that we should abandon the route system and go back to hexcrawling. The hexcrawl system is still optimized for exploration, not travel. What I’m saying is that if you map a route across a fully stocked hexcrawl, then 99% of the work in defining that route for us in the route system can just be directly yanked out of the hexcrawl content.

If you’re working from a hexcrawl, you can also begin experimenting with trailblazing structures in which the PCs create their own routes through the wilderness. In fact, whether you have a system for trailblazing or not in a hexcrawl campaign, you’ll probably find that the PCs just naturally create routes for themselves: They want to get back to the Citadel of Lost Wonders so that they can continue looting it, and they will figure out how to make that happen. These routes almost always take the form of landmark trails, and will often feature the PCs making their own navigational landmarks to fill in the gaps.

THE ROUTE MAP

Whether you’re working from a hexcrawl or not, if your campaign regularly features travel then you will, over time, begin to accumulate a collection of planned routes that crisscross the local region. Over time, it is likely that this route map will evolve into a pointcrawl: As the routes intersect and overlap with each other, the map will develop enough depth that the players can make complex navigational decisions and begin charting out their own routes in detail.

If this is a style of play that appeals to you, it may be tempting to imagine sitting down and planning this elaborate route map ahead of time as part of your campaign prep. There may be a few major, obvious routes where this makes sense, but for the most part I recommend resisting the temptation. Partly because the thought of all that wasted prep makes the little winged GM on my shoulder wince, but mostly because it’s intrinsically more effective to let the players (by way of their PCs) tell you where they want to go and what the important routes are.

In transportation planning there’s a concept called the desire path: These are the paths created by the erosion of human travel across grass or other ground covering. It’s the way that people want to travel, even if the planned or intended paths are telling them to take a different route.

It has become quite common for urban planners to open parks, college campuses, and similar spaces without sidewalks, wait to see where the desire paths naturally form, and only then install the pavement.

You’re doing the same thing here: Following the players’ paths of desire and developing the campaign along the lines that they have chosen.

FURTHER READING

If you’re interested in delving deeper into this sort of thing, I recommend checking out:

• Pathcrawls from Detect Magic
• Pointcrawls from Chris Kutalik
• Subhex Wilderness Generation from 9 and 30 Kingdoms

Let’s imagine that your players are in the city of Dweredell and they need to go to the village of Maernath to study the ancient crypt of the founder of the Verdigris Order.

How does that trip play out at the table?

The first option is the easiest: Skip it. Look at your map to figure out the distance between Dweredell and Maernath, consult a table of wilderness travel speeds to calculate how long the trip will take, and then say, “Okay, having journeyed northeast across the Viridwold, a week later you arrive in Maernath.”

There’s nothing wrong with this approach. In many cases, it will be exactly the right way to handle travel. Following the precepts of The Art of Pacing, you’ve determined that there are no interesting choices to be made during the journey and so you’re framing past that empty time to the next set of interesting choices.

But often you’ll reflect on this and feel vaguely unsatisfied. Perhaps you’ll think of any number of fantasy stories you’ve read in which the act of journeying from one location to another is a significant feature of the narrative and feel like you’re missing out on an opportunity. (These stories aren’t limited to fiction, either. Xenophon’s March of the 10,000 would be really boring if the Anabasis was just, “We left Cunaxa and, long story short, we were back in Greece two years later.”)

This line of thought — “Something should happen on the road to Maernath…” — often leads to some variation of Vaarsuvius’ Law of Random Road Encounters:

Of course, this still feels a trifle unsatisfying. You can see this in the expression of the “law” itself: Rather than being an awesome part of your game, the random road encounter feels like some sort of obligation.

(I will also briefly channel my grumpy grognard long enough to point out that if you’re handling random encounters properly they should be neither tedious nor a waste of time, but that’s a separate topic.)

Nevertheless, it feels like you could be doing more.

TRAVEL BY HEXCRAWL

At this point, with the rise of the Old School Renaissance, you may have heard about hexcrawling. That’s supposed to be a method for handling the wilderness in your campaign, right? So obviously the solution to your lackluster travel scenario is to build it as a hexcrawl.

I’ve written a whole series about how hexcrawls work, but the basic version is that you draw the wilderness as a hexmap, key each hex on the map with interesting content, and then trigger the content when the PCs enter the hex. The hexcrawl structure is primarily designed to support exploration, and if you’re prepping a single journey from Point A to Point B it is not the structure you want to use.

To demonstrate why, consider this hexmap from the Wilderlands of High Fantasy and imagine that your PCs want to take a trip from Warwik to Forcastle:

In order to prep that chunk of map as a proper hexcrawl, you would need to key every hex on the map. If you limited yourself to just the main peninsula of land shown here, that would mean prepping more than forty hexes of content. As the PCs journey from Warik to Forcastle, however, they would only visit a fraction of these hexes. In other words, you’ll end up prepping a lot of content that will never be used.

It’s clear that this is not an efficient way of prepping a specific journey through the wilderness, and it touches on a more fundamental truth, which is that the prep load for a hexcrawl really only makes sense if you’re going to be re-engaging with the same patch of wilderness dozens of times.

(This is trivial to achieve with an open table, where you can have dozens of players and characters traipsing across the same chunk of the world, but can be more difficult in a dedicated campaign with a single group of characters.)

The obvious rejoinder here is that you could theoretically prep this hexcrawl without prepping content for all these hexes. You could instead focus only on the hexes the PCs are likely to pass through. For example, in a journey from Warwik to Forcastle it’s relatively unlikely that they’ll end up at Wormshead Point.

BASIC TRAVEL ROUTES

As you begin zooming in on the most likely paths that the PCs could take from Point A to Point B, however, you’ll quickly discover that the hexcrawl structure itself is filled with procedures that become irrelevant if the PCs are following a predetermined route. What we really want is a structure dedicated to route-based travel that can focus our prep and be run efficiently at the table.

CHOOSE YOUR ROUTE: When beginning a new journey, the first thing the PCs must do is choose which route they’re going to use. This choice is only possible, of course, if the PCs are aware of what routes they can use to get where they’re going. They might gain that information from things like:

• Maps
• Local guides
• Mystical assistance
• Personal experience

If the PCs don’t know of any routes from where they are to where they want to go (and can’t find one before departing), then what they’re actually doing is exploring and you can default back to hexcrawling or a similar structure.

In order for the choice of routes to be interesting, there must be some meaningful distinction between the routes. “Meaningful” in this case means that it’s something the PCs care about. Common distinctions include:

• Speed. One route is faster than the other. (You will always need to calculate how long each route will take.)
• Difficulty. One route is more difficult to navigate. It might require special knowledge, special tools, or special skills to successfully traverse. (Climbing through the mountains or being able to answer the riddle of the gate-sphinx.)
• Stealth. One route will make it easier for the PCs to avoid detection. This can either be in general or a particular route might make it more difficult for one specific NPC or faction to detect them. (You can also conceptually invert this and instead think of it as a route making you vulnerable to detection from a particular faction: If you take the High Road you might be pressganged by the king’s army. The army’s recruiters don’t go into the Bloodfens, but if you go that way you’ll be at risk from the goblin rovers.)
• Expense. The cost of traveling the route. (This can be as simple as the price of a ticket.)
• Advantageous Landmarks. A route can have beneficial pitstops long the way, making it potentially more appealing than other options. (Visiting the Oracle of Delphi or seeing an old friend.)
• Hazards. Conversely, there might be a significant hazard along one of the routes. (You can enter Mordor this way, but you’ll have to figure out some way past Minas Morgul.)

In order for this to be a choice rather than a calculation, you’ll want to have the routes distinguished by at least two incomparable characteristics.

For example, consider a journey from Waterdeep to Neverwinter.

You look at the map and say, “You can take the High Road or you can travel by sea.”

“What’s the difference?” they ask.

“Well,” you say, “You’ll get there faster by sea.”

This is not a choice. It’s a simple calculation: The routes are identical except for the speed with which they’ll get you to Neverwinter, and so you take the route which is faster.

But if you instead say, “Well, it’s faster to sail, but there are reports of Moonshae pirates hitting ships along the coast,” this is no longer a simple calculation. The PCs have to choose whether speed or safety is more important to them.

One solid set of incomparable distinctions is all you need for this to work, but you can always add more (and you will generally find them arising naturalistically out of the given circumstances of the game world). Watch out, though, for inadvertently turning the choice back into a calculation as you add complexity. For example, you might say:

• The sea route is faster and is dangerous due to pirates.
• The road is dangerous due to the hazards of the Mere of Dead Men.

If the pirates and the restless undead of the mere are known to be equally hazardous, then you’re back to a straight-up calculation: There’s equal danger on both routes and one route is faster.

(This doesn’t happen if the PCs can’t be sure of the relative hazard posed by the pirates and undead. In that scenario it becomes an incomplete information problem. This is one of the subtle ways in which My Precious Encounter™ and similar design methodologies that always adjust the difficulty of the game world to the level of the PCs so that all challenges are identical degrade the depth of play. It creates a meta which eliminates incomplete information problems. But I digress.)

This is also why the PCs have to care about the distinction between routes. If speed isn’t actually important to them (they need to be there before June and either route will get them there by April), then Faster + Hazardous vs. Slower + Safer is still just a calculation, this time of which route is safer.

Don’t feel like you need to create stuff to make a particular route a viable choice, though. Just recognize that it’s not a choice and don’t present it as such (or explain why it isn’t if that’s relevant). For example, if you’re trying to get from Chicago to Indianapolis, you wouldn’t consider “first drive to St. Louis, then turn around and drive back to Indianapolis” as an option. (Because why would you?)

TRAVELING THE ROUTE: You’ll want to break the journey into a number of turns. I recommend multiple turns per day (so that it’s possible to have more than one encounter per day), and if you’re also doing hexcrawling in the campaign I recommend using the same timekeeping. (This consistency will make it easy to swap back and forth between the two travel structures. More on that later.) If we were using my structure for hexcrawls, this would mean six watches per day (two of which would generally be spent travelling and four resting).

There are three things you’re tracking as part of your procedure:

• Landmarks. A route is fundamentally defined by the sequence of landmarks that are spaced along its length. This might be permanent structures (cities, statues, etc.) or they might be programmed encounters that only apply to this specific journey (a broken down wagon, an ambush by goblin rovers, etc.), but either way they’ll be encountered at specific points along the route.
• Random Encounters. If you’re designing an encounter table specifically for the journey, I recommend keeping it pretty simple unless you’re planning to use this route repeatedly.
• Resources Used. Food, water, etc. This is optional, and there are many types of trips in which it won’t be relevant. (For example, if food and board are included in the price of your ticket.)

What about distance traveled? If you’re familiar with my hexcrawl structure (and many others), you’ll know that a key part of the procedure is determining exactly how far people have traveled each day. When traveling by routes, though, this is unnecessary because this is built into the design of the route: You know the total time it will take to traverse the route, you know at which times along the route you’ll encounter landmarks, and travel along most types of routes will generally be far more predictable and consistent than traipsing through the wilderness. (At a meta-level, variable travel distance creates an additional variable that complicates mapping and navigation in wilderness exploration. This is largely irrelevant if you’re traveling along a known route, which is another reason to ignore it.)

If the PCs take actions which vary the speed of their travel, you can apply those modifiers directly to the route timetable. If you really want to do the simulation of variable distance traveled per day (and there are scenarios in which this could easily be relevant), then it’s fairly easy to add this into your procedures.

On that note, let’s talk about additional features and levels of complexity that you can add to this basic, streamlined structure.

Go to Part 2