Travelling and camping in Tanaheim

Rules for travelling throught the wilds, roads, and geography of Tanaheim.

Plot points/Scenes

The Travel Day Once the party sets out, it’s time to resolve each day of travel. At the beginning of the day, the party decides what kind of pace to set: Slow, Medium, or Fast.
At a Slow Pace, the party is moving carefully and quietly. They gain Advantage or a +4 Bonus to all checks to perceive danger and all hostile creatures suffer Disadvantage or a -4 Penalty to detect the party, thus allowing the party to surprise enemies. In addition, the party can forage for food normally if they maintain a slow pace for the entire day. Finally, navigation checks enjoy Advantage or a +4 Bonus when moving at a Slow pace. The party’s speed, however, is reduced by a third. So every three days of travel count as only two days of travel.
At a Medium pace, the party travels normally. They may forage for food with Disadvantage or a -4 Penalty.
At a Fast pace, the party travels more quickly. Their speed is increased by a third. So every three days of travel count as four days. While traveling at a Fast Pace, the party cannot forage for food at all. They suffer Disadvantage or a -4 Penalty on all checks to perceive dangers and on navigation checks. Hostile creatures enjoy Advantage or a +4 Bonus on checks to detect or track the party.
Once the party has set the pace for the day, they CAN change the pace based on what happens to them during the day. Don’t worry, you’ll resolve all of that stuff at the end of the day.
Now, pick up six 6-sided dice. Each one represents a time-period of the day. Morning, Afternoon, Evening, Dusk, Midnight, Predawn. Roll them all. For each one that shows the Danger number or less, an encounter MIGHT happen. We’ll talk about random encounters. For example, if the Danger is 3, and your six dice show 5, 2, 3, 4, 1, 6; the party will have three encounters that day. One in the evening, one at dusk, and one at predawn. Notice that the danger number is actually the number of encounters you will expect to happen in one day.
Finally, roll one more d6. If that shows the Discovery number or less, you need to tantalize the party with something interesting off the road for them to check out. A ruined tower, a sign of magic, an old tomb, an ancient henge, a shrine, or whatever. The key is that it has to be far enough off the path that the party has to choose whether to waste a few hours investigating it or to ignore it.
Now, you play out the daytime encounters as they happen. After each encounter, the party might spend some time resting, recovering, or whatever. Don’t worry about that. They might also decide to change their pace. That’s fine too. When playing out the encounters, its important to remember that surprise is a definite possibility. If the party is moving slowly and quietly and the enemy doesn’t detect them, they should be able to plan an ambush or bypass the encounter. If the party is rushing, they might very well be surprised and ambushed themselves. In fact, it is entirely possible that neither party detects the other and the encounter never happens. That’s totally fine. Sometimes, that’s just how it goes. That’s why we roll dice.
If no encounters or discoveries happen, the day passes uneventfully and the PCs find a place to make camp for the night.
Making Camp It’s time for some bookkeeping at this point. First of all, you have to find out if the party is lost. To do this, have the best navigator make a navigation roll against the Navigation DC of the terrain. If the party traveled at a Fast pace at any point during the day, apply Disadvantage or a -4 penalty. Make this roll in secret. If they fail, the party has gotten lost at some point during the day. They just don’t know it yet.
Now, you have to figure out how many days of travel the party logged during the day. If the party isn’t lost, this is determined by their pace. They either log 2/3, 1, or 1 1/3 days depending on the slowest pace they moved at during the day. If the party has now logged enough days to finish their route, they will reach their destination tomorrow. If the party stopped to investigate a discovery, subtract 1/3 from their progress unless they spent the whole day on the discovery. In which case, they make no progress. Use your best judgment. Likewise, use your best judgment if the party does something weird like stopping halfway through the day.
Finally, you have to figure out how much food and water the party has consumed. If the party moved at a slow pace all day, allow each of them to make a check against the Forage DC. If the party didn’t move slowly all day but never moved at a fast pace at all, have each make a Forage check with Disadvantage or a -4 penalty. If anyone fails, that means the party didn’t find enough food to feed themselves. Each failure requires someone to consume one pound of food from their supply (one day worth of rations). You can generally assume that, as long as anyone succeeds at foraging, the party turned up enough water to refill their waterskins and drink their fill. But if they are traveling through a desert, you can modify that. If everyone fails to forage, however, they drain their waterskins and are now out of water. If their waterskins were already drained and they don’t have a backup supply, they are now dehydrating.
That whole process should be pretty quick. You roll for Navigation and determine if they are lost and then mark off the progress if they aren’t. Then, everyone rolls a forage checks and marks off food. Done and done. Now, it’s time for the night.
The Night Some groups get absolutely bogged down in details about who is taking what watch shift and when. This is completely ludicrous. It really doesn’t matter. There are enough hours in the night that a party of any size can all get a good night sleep and still have a watch rotation with each character taking a shift. If the party really wants to fight about it or someone refuses to take watch or someone takes extra shifts because they are an elf and require less sleep, fine. So be it. But otherwise, just assume that everyone takes a watch sometime. Now, you play out the nighttime encounters. Remember the possibilities for detection and ambush. Roll randomly to determine who is awake on watch for each encounter. Play them out. If no encounters happen, the night passes uneventfully. Hooray.
When the party wakes up, you do it all again.
Being Lost So, what happens when the party is lost? Well, you can handle it a few ways. The easy way is to assume that each day of travel doesn’t count as any progress. When the party makes camp, log zero progress. However, you should still have the navigator roll a check. Well, you should roll secretly. If this check succeeds, the navigator will recognize that the party has become lost the next morning as the party is starting to set out. Otherwise, the party will just continue to make no progress every day.
However, you can handle it a few other ways. First of all, if the party travels in one direction long enough, they are going to discover an unexpected feature. They will hit a river, a new type of terrain, a lake, a road. If you drew a map, determine randomly what they will hit and where they will hit it or just pick something. Assume they travel in a straight line in a random direction from the middle of whatever terrain or route they were in. Again, use your best judgment.
Likewise, if the party knows the trip should have taken three to five days, and they hit day seven, they are going to realize they are lost.
Alternatively, each day that they travel while lost, roll a d6 when logging their progress. On a 1, they managed to travel in the right direction and log progress normally. On a 5 or 6, they are losing ground and subtract however much progress they would have made based on their route. For anything else, add no progress.
Once the party realizes they are lost, either because they hit a feature they shouldn’t have or because they realized they have been traveling too long or because the navigator figured out they got lost somewhere, they need to figure out a new plan. They might pick a direction they know will lead them to something (“we’ll head north until we find the river” or “we’ll keep traveling in this direction until we find the edge of the forest”), they might try to find a landmark to make toward (“we know that mountain peak is to the southeast, if we keep toward it, we should be able to find our way back to the road” or “can I climb a tree and see if I can spot the lake from here”), or they might try to backtrack (“can we follow our own trail back home?”). You can resolve each of those simply by assuming the party starts a new route and figuring it out accordingly. At this point, the party is no longer lost on the new route. The important thing is that the party can’t just get unlost. They need to have an alternative plan once they are lost. Otherwise, they will just keep wandering.
Random Encounters When designing random encounters, it’s important to note a few things.
First of all, random encounters represent all of the potential dangers and hazards an area might present to travelers. It is not just a list of combat encounters. In fact, even when it is a list of encounters, it is a list of potential encounters. Remember, the party might evade an encounter. Or the encounter might evade the party. And you don’t even have to assume every encounter is hostile although I advise against using random encounters for friendly encounters. Bandits might be willing to let the party go for a price, especially if the party looks powerful and they aren’t sure of the odds. Some monsters might ignore the party if the party throws some food at them before retreating. Orcs might trade threats and insults with the party in social interACTION!, with each side trying to get the other to back down and go away. Some animals might merely threaten the party and try to frighten them away from their nest or other territory. Random encounters can also represent hazards. Quicksand in swamps, flash floods in hills and badlands, booby traps in kobold territory. They can also be obstacles like rockfalls across a road or a washed out bridge.
In general, the party should deal to one to two of them a day unless they start wandering through very dangerous territory. And that means that three days of travel is roughly equivalent to a short dungeon adventure. Keep that in mind as you plan. Your encounters should be interesting, but not complicated. Focus on single creatures or small groups of identical creatures. And, honestly, instead of a list of encounters, you can just have a small bestiary of creatures you can mix and match easily to get the results you want. In goblin territory, you can get a lot of mileage by mixing and matching goblin skirmishers, goblin archers, and giant spider pets in different combinations.
The one thing to keep in mind though is that the party will have the opportunity to rest and recover more frequently in the wild and will probably encounter fewer encounters than a typical dungeon day. To compensate, it’s important to skew your combat encounters toward the hard end of the difficulty curve. Use the guidelines in your particular edition of D&D or Pathfinder to up the difficulty. Hard should be the baseline difficulty for wilderness encounters to keep them meaningful.
Discoveries It can be tough to come up with discoveries on the fly. But, the party should only encounter one or two during an entire trip unless they are wandering through an ancient kingdom lousy with ruins. Discoveries are basically just encounters that somehow bait the party into checking them out. But most of them should offer some kind of reward. Either something interesting or something valuable or both. An old ruined tower with an intact cellar, for example, might have a strongbox in the basement with some money and other trinkets, but it might be protected by a booby trap. Or something living in the cellar. An ancient shrine might reward an offering with a minor blessing or boon and might punish anyone taking from the offering bowl. These discoveries are your chance to give the players something to interact with if they are willing to waste time. Remember, if the rat survives the trap, he ends up with some free cheese for his trouble. You’ll need one or two discoveries for every three days of travel, more than likely. But it’s always good to have a pile of them in case you ever need one on the fly.
A Few Tweaks for 5E As a final note, I need to point out that D&D 5E does a few things that absolutely f$&% up any chance of having good, engaging wilderness travel fun. First of all, the basic encumbrance rules that assume you can carry 15 times your Strength without breaking a sweat completely removes any difficulty in carrying food and supplies. I suggest you use the variant rules for encumbrance on PHB 176. Second of all, drop all that activity while traveling bulls$&%. It disguises nonchoices as choices and drags out the process of setting out. Assume the party will always forage if moving slow enough and that everyone is always paying attention. My system is streamlined to skip a lot of bookkeeping until the end of the day. Likewise, D&D 5E is VERY generous with foraging. F$&% that too. And, while we’re on the subject, some classes and backgrounds have features that also completely ruin any engagement to be gotten from travel. The Outlander background in particular offers the Wanderer feature that amounts to never getting lost and always foraging for an entire party. Replace that with a mechanical bonus to Navigation and Foraging. Like, the Ranger class feature Natural Explorer trivializes absolutely every aspect of wilderness travel, virtually guaranteeing that it becomes a Final Fantasy game of just plodding through random encounters and not sweating anything else. And much of it is tied to the specific, boring rules of overland travel baked into 5E. Instead, change it to having Advantage on Navigation (so that if the party moves at a fast pace, that cancels the Disadvantage), having Advantage on Perception while traveling (so that if the party moves at a fast pace, yaddah yaddah yaddah), and foraging yielding enough food for a second person (basically covering one other party member’s failure).