Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imret" data-source="post: 1915292" data-attributes="member: 991">Only in Heroquest is the adventure site limited to a dungeon.  <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/nervous.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":heh:" title="Nervous Laugh    :heh:" data-shortname=":heh:" /> Well, I'm sure some groups approach it that way, and if you do and the group enjoys it more than anything, life to you, and glory.But, to go back to the first point and coming from a group that thinks an adventure site can be anywhere (and believe me, swimming a northern river in the dead of winter is an adventure in and of itself, even it's only 5 minutes of game time; we've buried many a halfling in the Icedrift river), I still don't see many wilderness adventures. I think there are a few reasons for this.1) The wilderness is BLOODY HUGE. Characters without Survival could be lost for weeks and die of starvation. Mudslides, wildfires, predators, flash floods, sandstorms, blizzards...the hazards are almost uncountable. A realistic wilderness adventure, with skills and technology roughly close to the 1100's (more or less, this isn't a discussion of anachronism), a long wilderness trek that leaves a road probably results in lingering death from the above-mentioned hazards. Thus, it's skipped for convenience.2) Most of what lives in the wilderness are animals, magical beasts, and the like. Now, as a DM, I LOVE displacer beasts*, my players hate them and all things of their creature type. Why? Simple. No pockets, no treasure. An encounter with a ticked-off grizzly is a painful mauling and expenditure of resources so the ranger can look spiffy in his new hat and cloak. Assuming you can skin it there. Unless of course you've got a Hackmaster-style guide to the valuable bits of monsters, but that can turn the PC's into ambitious slaughterhouse workers instead of heroes.3) Regardless of how big it is, and barring discussion of endless lava tubes beneath a mountain, dungeons are a finite location. You can map it, you know where everything is, you know exactly what happens depending on the PC's actions and reactions. Even the most fluid setup with contingencies, wander paths (to food, water, etc) is still a specific place with specific creatures and reactions. Thus, it's (moderately) easy to run. If the PC's are careful mappers, they'll eventually find even the best-hidden room.By the definition, wilderness is basically "everything else". When you encounter the above-mentioned hazards, it always feels a little like the DM has decided that of all the places for a fever-maddened dire bear to stumble, he picked YOUR camp just 'cause he can. It's days of boredom broken by mind-numbing terror and a sense of persecution.4) We all know illithids hate the sun, so how are you supposed to get quality brain-eating action in the woods?  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> * I really do love displacer beasts. Probably too much. Does anybody know if Dragon's done an "Ecology of" on them yet?</blockquote>

Verification