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“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