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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6665526" data-attributes="member: 4937">My players are currently trudging through a wilderness and braving the dangers that come with that.  One thing that is very important to me as a DM is giving the world a feeling of being a real physical space that requires real time to journey through, and hopefully at the same time not making that journey be boring and most of all redundant.   I've observed in the past that regardless of the location that a wilderness journey occurs in, there is a tendency for any encounter to occur in a stadium that has at most a backdrop around its edges.  In these open worlds, the scenery tends to change, but the scenery tends to be about like the scenery on a stage or movie set.  It's there, but don't look at it too closely, and certainly don't try to interact with it because its only a representation of something and not a place itself.   I notice in many campaigns, the one place combat never takes place is an actual room with boundaries and features.  These places and the worlds they create to me never feel real, particularly as someone that has spent a lot of time hiking around in the real world and no that empty arenas aren't usually the rule.  The only thing that is real in them is the stage, and the prop of 'deep jungle' no more changes the stages basic nature than 'street in a cosmopolitan city'.And even if there is no encounter that is going to happen, I still want to give a sense of time passing and motion to the players, so that they don't feel that they crossed a couple of empty hexes and camped in an identical empty spot each evening. Of course, I could improvise space and places, but in my experience its leaving it to improv that precisely creates the problem as however easily you think you can create something on the spur of the moment in actual practice your creativity gets exhausted far faster than the needs of the session demand and you are left to stammer or created poorly painted places.What I've decided to do is prep a bunch of places or at least the suggestion of or inspiration for places ahead of time, and record a bunch of 3-7 sentence fragments of journey that I can string together as needed depending on how the PC's wander.   Of course, while I quickly filled up several pages, I'm find this even more challenging than I thought it would be.  I'd be happy for a million of these, or at the least to see how some others would approach this.I'll give some examples, to show what I'm thinking.  These examples represent places on a path through the jungle."The jungle in this area is composed of trees 30 to 50 feet high, which limbs which are frequently so low as to force a tall man to duck beneath them.  The trees are not particularly dense, and a pleasant golden, green-yellow light beams down through the spaces and patterns the shadows.  The undergrowth beneath the trees is quite dense as well, with many leafy bushes or stands of bamboo pushing into the light, and ferns, cycads, rhododendron, and tall grasses growly thickly right up to the boles of the trees.   Flowers are very common, thorny bushes of bougainvillea, broad hibiscus, orchids growing even amongst the branches of the trees, and many other blossoms you do not recognize.  Even some of the trees have a bright plumage of red or yellow flowers.  Except along the hard packed mud path, it is very difficult to see anything at any distance at all.  Occasionally you can see 5 or 10 strides out into the forest, or pass some game trail which cross the better defined main trail, but mostly it is like walking in a low green tunnel.  However, you hear many things chirping, screeching, cawing, or rustling behind the screen of vegetation.""The trail is blocked by the bole of a fallen tree of considerable size, with a trunk perhaps 4’ in diameter.  It’s clearly lain here for many years, too large to easily remove.  Moss and shelf mushrooms grow thickly on its sides.  For it’s top, a line of smaller trees, each probably now 10 or more years old, grows up into the space cleared by the fall of the giant.  There is considerably more light here than usual, and you can see much of an oblong clearing 20 to 30 feet across, which is dancing with white butterflies.  Where the trail is, a few limestone slabs have been laid to form a rough stair.""The trial curves here to pass around a bog or swampy depression about 30 yards across.  The pool is thickly lined with ferns, canes and the tangle roots of trees, but is sufficiently deep as to deter tree growth in its middle.  Swarms of tadpoles teem in the shallow edges of the pool.""A shallow but swift moving stream bisects the path here, scouring the ground to reveal the broken limestone slabs beneath the mud floor of the jungle.  Vines climb across the stream into the heights of the trees to either side.  The stream is quite clear and only about 6” deep and three or four strides wide with a firm bottom.  A series of mossy slabs can be used as stepping stones either here or about 30 yards up or down the stream where it curves out of sight. ""The path here picks it away across a ridge of moss covered boulders 4 to 6 feet across, and jumbled across the landscape.  A few trees sit atop the boulders, sending long roots out to clutch the stones and seek the dirt beneath, but it is comparatively clear of undergrowth and sunny hear, allowing you to see 30 to 80 yards about you with comparative ease.  Travel is no less easy, and the lack of foliage makes it hard to pick out the trail.  To your right, through the sparse branches you are able to pick out a landmark for the first time in sometime – a jungle covered hill so steep sided that it resembles an enormous barrel jutting up out of the ground.""The jungle here parts into a broad bowl shaped clearing perhaps a third of a mile across.  No mature trees grow in the clearing, but thick grass and bushes fill it to a height of 4 to 6 feet, and the tops of thin saplings can be seen poking out of the tops of the vegetation.""The normal trees which line the path give way to a dense glade of bamboo, clustered together in tight impenetrable masses 6 to 10 feet across.  The sense of being in a tunnel is heightened here, and it’s considerably darker than in the hardwood forest.  In places, small clumps of bamboo have colonized the trail, growing in ones or threes right in the middle of the path.  Nearby you can see the red tops of young bamboo shoots piercing the mud and leaf litter of the trail, attempting to reclaim it all for the jungle.""The trial here passes along the side of a great mogote, so high and uncannily steep that it appears almost like a constructed tower that has fallen into disrepair and been covered in ivy.  Although the trees remain, the shade of the formation and broken stone ground largely clears the land of the dense undergrowth of foliage.  Only small ferns, thick hairy mosses, and rope like vines obscure your vision, allowing you to see up to a hundred yards along the sloping group to the denser forest in the valley floor.""The trail here passes beneath a most unusual tree.  As the thick limbs of the tree radiate outwards, they drop new boles to support their weight, so that the individual tree has a very great many trunks of different sizes and heights.   The central trunk is a dense cluster of boles grown together to form a single mass at least 15 yards across, and the whole tree spreads out over not less than half an acre, becoming a jungle all to itself.  The density of the tree and its great size, spreads a darker and higher canopy over you than in the neighboring forest, so that there is no undergrowth and no obstruction to vision save for the many boles of the tree itself."Of course, this could be easily improved to off the trail travel, but it gives the idea.  So, what does anyone have for me?  I could use just about anything: jungle, hills, mountains, swamps, and even exotic alien/fantasy terrain.</blockquote>

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