There.... And back again(??)

So for the last 12 sessions or so, the party has been involved in an epic wilderness trek, across the trackless sea, fighting off sea serpents, pirates, deep one boarders, braving storms and the occasional angry god, hacking through steaming jungles, facing dinosaurs, angry carnivorous apes, blood drinking mosquitoes, parasitic wasps, plants that want to eat you, the occasional rogue modron, climbing over hills and mountains, and so on and so forth.

It's been fun, and a nice change of pace from the heavy cycle of urban adventures that had marked the campaign, and it does some needed leveling up that the party needs to do in preparation for the eventual conflict with the BBEG, but looking forward to the future, after the dungeon is conquered, the PC's are going to want to make their way back.

And I think I've largely milked the journey for most of what it is worth. Fighting T-Rex in a cave so vast that it contains its own jungle and weather once is fun. Doing it two or three times would be lame. So I'm trying to figure out what I can do to avoid at some future point 12 more sessions of something that's been done. I don't want the way back to become a repetitive grind.

Some things I've been thinking:

a) Travel by Map: It's possible that the party will have sufficient spell resources to travel back more quickly by the time they are ready to do so. But if not, try to give the party a flying carpet/boat or something of the sort that will turn 10-12 sessions
into 2-3.

b) The Door Closes Behind Them: One possibility I've been thinking about is trapping the players in the Underdark and forcing them to take a different route back at least part of the way, minimizing the jungle journey. The sea journey will be naturally shorter because part of its length came from some intrigue I threw in on the way down that is now resolved.

c) Always more to See: I could just let them go back. They won't go back exactly the way they came, and there is still plenty of encounters both planned and random they haven't had. A little DM force will ensure minimal repetition of scenes.

d) Cut to the Awesome: I could just say that nothing exciting happens on the way back and handwave the journey, though given how much effort it took to get here that feels very forced.

Any advice? I don't think I've ever had this situation come up before exactly. How have you handled similar problems?

It's kind of funny you mention "There and back again," since the Hobbit largely skips over the return trip. Still, there really is no reason to do likewise in a game campaign. I think, if it were me, I'd look for ways to introduce new complications into areas the party has already passed through (and, presumably, also previously solved/created problems for). Preferably, these complications would arise out of their previous interactions. Of course, this could be done in small doses. You could still, for instance, send them on small detours that bypass sections of the return trip.

For example, if the party discovers that that cave where they fought the T-Rex is now becoming a constant maelstrom of tempestuous weather that is threatening areas outside the cave, they may have reason for (as well as misgivings about) going back in.

Personally, I detest "return journeys" and "treks back and forth". The first trip is fine, but after that... blah! To avoid that very thing, I had my PCs get invited to go on an extraplanar rescue adventure once they found what they were looking for at the end of their long overland/underdark hike, and now they're stuck in another place, and are questing to get back home. Solved the problem neatly, and when they finally do get back to their home, they'll find that a number of years have gone by, and the political situation has changed a lot ... for the worse.

A variation on the purposed "d) Cut to the Awesome:" option would be to give the players some agency and have them make an interlude of some sort to describe the return journey. Throw out an Indian Jones type flight map as they return and have each player tell the tale of what happened in that leg of the journey. I steal the word Interlude from the Savage Worlds settings where the type of tale the players tell based on the symbol from a card dealt to them. Roughly, spade is a fighting victory of some sort, diamond a treasure, heart is a character achieving something they have desired and club is a not so nice result. If while the players tell their tale enough of you at the table decide the idea is cool enough to explore further perhaps it becomes something you flesh out with a few games.

Gilladian said:

Personally, I detest "return journeys" and "treks back and forth". The first trip is fine, but after that... blah! To avoid that very thing, I had my PCs get invited to go on an extraplanar rescue adventure once they found what they were looking for at the end of their long overland/underdark hike, and now they're stuck in another place, and are questing to get back home. Solved the problem neatly, and when they finally do get back to their home, they'll find that a number of years have gone by, and the political situation has changed a lot ... for the worse.

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Thanks. That's the sort of feedback I was hoping for.

I had not even considered that they could return via a different plane, even though in point of fact there are available resources/allies available that could facilitate that sort of journey.

I'm not sure I'll go with that idea, but it's definitely worth thinking about.

Vaslov said:

Throw out an Indian Jones type flight map as they return and have each player tell the tale of what happened in that leg of the journey.

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I personally believe that if the tale is worth telling, then it is worth playing. While I would actually enjoy story chains, I don't find that most players that play RPG are happy to do the equivalent of pass around a notebook and add to the story people are telling. That only fulfills a single narrow aesthetic of play, and most players are into something else.

And, I find that games are enjoyable to people because, as Captain Sisko related, they are linear. We don't know what is going to happen next. If we already know what is going to happen, it removes significant interest from playing it out.

So I'm not saying that your idea couldn't work for some groups, but as a general rule I wouldn't expect it to work for most groups, and in this particular case I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work for this group (whose first question would probably be, "How much XP do we get for that?").