An exploration of travelling in TTRPGs

A new month rolls around already and June brings with it the topic of "Travels, by Wave, Cloud, or Portal" from Seed of Worlds for the RPG blog carnival.

Exploration is something I love about TTRPGs and something I want to play more of (and get better at) but I always found the rules for it lacking in modern D&D editions.  The hexcrawl-traversal procedures of the old school I find too heavy - I'm more narrativist than simulationist I feel - although not as heavy as the time I played Barbarian Prince...

Image credit: ThemeFinland

So, between these poles of "nothing" and "too much" what is there? I decided to go through my RPG book collection with a lens on the theme of "travel"...

It's hard for me to think about travel-based games without mentioning the hot-mess science-fantasy-wagon-train pointcrawl that is Ultraviolet Grasslands.  The places, people, and art are inspiring - but in a game that is ostensibly about travelling, how do we travel?

A destination is chosen, a known number of days away, and the caravan departs. There's a roll to see how ill fated the journey is, and one to see what is encountered. Time and resources are adjusted (there is caravan management and good-old OSR resource-management) and you've arrived. You could flesh the whole thing out into a multi-scene session, or a single montage.

I talked a while back about Skycrawl/Downcrawl and how much I love the procedures therein, it's literally a game (setting?) built around exploring and discovering new things (for the GM too with all the generation tables).

Travel in these games is heavily procedurised but pretty rules-light; the "difficulty" of the journey is set out in how-many-boxes-do-we-need-to-check-off style and the players go about checking off the boxes.  Each day they can press on (checking the boxes), rest, or retreat - with opportunities to gain and spend a meta-currency called "Tack" which prevents them from getting lost.

There are moves for players to be able to expand the map or add detail to it, which I personally think is wonderful.

Side note: I keep meaning to talk about The Wildsea - which is another game I own which is pretty much about exploration.  There needs to be more hours in the day, or perhaps just fewer working hours.  Travelling the rustling waves feels conceptually similar to Downcrawl; 

Wildsea travel similarly involves setting a track (boxes to tick off) and, similar to the starship combat in Stars Without Number, allocating the PCs to their stations. Rolls are made to see if the ship makes progress, the crew encounters anything notable, the cartographer maps the area/route, and so on. When the track is filled, the party arrives.

I think these are what I like.  I'd like the journey from one place to the next to fit nicely into a session (sometimes) - but this is something I need to explore more.  The journey forms the scenes of the narrative, which I like, but the number of scenes is unknown (due to different levels of success ticking different numbers of boxes) which isn't helpful in this context...

Interestingly, if you crossed these systems with the traditional hexcrawl you would probably get something like Yochai Gal's wilderness rules for Cairn v2...

On a very different tack, I purchased a bundle on itch.io purely out of curiosity about Wanderhome.  It's not my usual cup of tea but it's about travelling, which I have mechanical interest in, and a while back I got hooked into Patrick Stuart's musings on "soft", Ghibli-esque D&D.  This is a much more narrativist game, with places along the road created and fleshed out in play by the players.  It's pretty much all about the journey - but I can't say I fully understand, from reading it through, how it's supposed to be played.

I do like some of its ideas and especially on how to build places, essentially by combining templates, which is something to file away for inspiration...  Of course, every game has something you can steal to make your other games better.  

So, what are your favourite travel mechanics or systems that I can steal from?

PSA: The RPG Blog Carnival is looking for hosts for 2023, you can find out more and sign up here (it's incredibly easy and actually quite fun). Thanks to Seed of Worlds for hosting this one!

RPG Book Review: Skycrawl

Who are the players and what do they do?

Explorers of a "weird, whimsical, endless sky". The main focus is on exploration and travel.

This is a supplement (setting?) for any roleplaying system, packed with systems and procedures for journeying between mysterious lands floating in an endless azure sky, ship to ship combat, and more.

The colours are better in real life!

What's the core mechanic?

The book itself is systemless and provides guidance and examples for how to use it with d20, 2d6, percentile, or FATE mechanics, but could easily be used for dice pool games or other mechanics as well.  The core procedures use standard terms such as "crit", "strong success", "success", "complication" which can be easily defined for any method of generating these outcomes.

What's good?

The procedures here are wonderful; there are systems for:

• Procedurally generating Lands and the Folk who inhabit them, and the ships that move between them
• Tracking the movement of those lands as they orbit in the sky
• Researching, plotting, and executing journeys between these lands
• Ship-to-ship combat
• Orcery, which is an interesting alchemy system 
• Generating and resolving random encounters in the skies

The systems used for play utilise "moves" which will feel familiar to anyone who has played a PBTA game, but these can easily be explained as player procedures at the table if not.

I particularly like the systems for travel; PCs accrue and spend a meta-resource called "tack" to help with navigation and journeys are planned out and executed in several steps (be they days, weeks, or abstract measures of difficulty) which naturally resolve into scenes and encounters as the players spend their tack and decide how best to play out each step.

Lands are mechanically easier to get to if the party have been there before, or if they have discovered three or more rumours about the place - which is something I love as a driver for exploring and interacting with the world.

The main procedures are seemingly based on the designer's other game Downcrawl, which you can get a good feel for in its free HTML version here.

The lore and art, that there is, is evocative and flavourful too. It's a great book!

What's bad?

Honestly, I'm struggling. Some people might find it a little wordy for their tastes maybe (I really don't) but that's just thinking of something - anything - to put in this section!

Bottom line?

Highly recommended. There's a lot here to mine from and adapt to other games (the systems shared with Downcrawl could just as easily be adapted for overland travel and traditional pointcrawls, and these rules could just as easily be applied to traditional sailing ships with a little tweaking) and it feels like it could be run straight from the book. Looking forward to doing so!

Fans of the depthcrawls generated by The Stygian Library or The Gardens of Ynn, traditional OSR hexcrawl mechanics, or the travel procedures in Ultraviolet Grasslands would probably find a lot to like in this little gem.

If you have any favourite procedure-based RPG resources then I'd love to hear of them, either in the comments or by submitting a link to one of your blog posts on this month's RPG Blog Carnival hub, where the theme is "procedures".

d100 #dungeon23 spark table

Happy New Year! I've been meaning to start making some dungeons for a while now, so what better time to start than now.  Whether I actually do or not, I've thrown together this spark table for inspiration; please do feel free to use it:

1	Ancient	Childhood
2	Death	City
3	Sunken	Factory
4	Love	Touch
5	Empire	Fall
6	Heavy	Pit
7	Rural	Library
8	Darkness	Ocean
9	Bloom	Song
10	Rust	Roots
11	Noise	Bones
12	Time	Gardens
13	Excess	Portal
14	Decay	Idol
15	Flood	Door
16	Sleep	Light
17	Cold	Bridge
18	Ash	Mask
19	Meat	Rise
20	Solitude	Galleries
21	Growth	Cliffs
22	Greed	Road
23	Luck	Badlands
24	Chaos	Trench
25	Laugher	Labyrinth
26	Smoke	Passages
27	Forgotten	Junction
28	Song	Causeway
29	Roots	Caverns
30	Bones	Mines
31	Hangman	Riverbed
32	Blood	Crypt
33	Prophet	Vents
34	Stars	Warrens
35	Cut	Meadows
36	Sacrifice	Shafts
37	Incense	Jumble
38	Gold	Crawlways
39	Obsidian	Wasteland
40	Winding	Halls
41	Fractured	Canyons
42	Deep	Shore
43	Flooded	Chasms
44	Dripping	Maze
45	Sulfur	Worm-casts
46	Ice	Edge
47	Misty	Darkness
48	Artificial	Refuge
49	Crystal	Wonderland
50	Gem	Jungle
51	Endless	Arches
52	Fungal	Pillars
53	Lava	Geysers
54	Noxious	Dunes
55	Giant's	Burrows
56	Jagged	Battlefield
57	Ashen	Railroad
58	Steaming	Ossuary
59	Haunted	Nest
60	Ooze	Hunting Grounds
61	Twisted	Society
62	Enchanted	Factory
63	Antimagic	Tonic
64	Pastry	Heap
65	Highrise	Chimney
66	Loud	Debt
67	Overgrown	Crowd
68	Burnt	Museum
69	Disputed	University
70	Repurposed	Office
71	Dirty	Distillery
72	Glass	Art
73	Electric	Canal
74	Murder	Tourism
75	Paper	Lizard
76	Smoked	Graveyard
77	Bombed	Council
78	Fat	Slum
79	Luxury	Music
80	Wild	Ruins
81	Broken	Fort
82	Prototype	Market
83	Artisan	Rookery
84	Antigravity	Holy Site
85	Biomechanical	Lair
86	Cosmic	Homesteads
87	Floating	Boomtown
88	Folding	Harbour
89	Hallucinogenic	Prison
90	Hypnotic	Vaults
91	Living	Town
92	Orbital	Paradise
93	Regenerating	Rain
94	Slippery	Sea
95	Silken	Belt
96	Soul	Fleet
97	Space	Cloud
98	Truth	Titan
99	Vanishing	Worldtree
100	Wizard	Wheel

This is using the words from Sean McCoy's original expanded post, plus some borrowed or stolen from the excellent Downcrawl / Skycrawl and from spark tables I have bookmarked at both Bastionland and Prismatic Wasteland.  Plus a few words I sprinkled in as the mood or inspiration took me, or when I realised I had duplicates and needed to replace them!

Image credit: midgptjourney

This is so intimidating that this might just be it for today for me. If you're looking for more then you may like my 5 room dungeon generator and this dungeon-related RPG Blog Carnival round-up post - good luck.

Comments are always welcome.  If you use this I'd love to know what you rolled, and see the results...