Daunting: Party of 5 new players who want a travel/exploration campaign

[Keel_Wintershadow]

(Hello, new poster here.) Anyone have any tips for running this kind of game? At the FLGS I've run a decent number of Shadowrun, 4e, etc campaigns, but those were always story-based and took place primarily in set locations. The main thing is that I'm not really sure how to make overland travel interesting/exciting to the players beyond the occasional strange locale/skill challenge/random encounter...especially for 5 players new to the game.

 

[JoeNotCharles]

One suggestion is to have them hook up with a caravan or exploration party with some colorful NPC's, so that there's some good character interaction while in the wilderness instead of just episodic encounter after encounter.

For 4E, remember that unless they're in a race against time, they're in a position to stop and camp whenever they want (even if you're tracking their supplies closely, one extra day won't usually be life or death) so they'll be able to blow all their dailies and do an extended rest after each encounter. You can either make all the wilderness encounters extra tough, or add a house rule that an extended rest doesn't heal any more than a short rest until you reach a milestone. (If you're travelling through jungle or swamp or something, you can flavour this by saying that the wounds fester or something.)

As far as making things exciting and interesting - just like with dungeon exploration, it's all about the encounters. Since you're not in a single dungeon, you can make an interesting and new setting for each. They can find signs of monsters before they actually meet them, hear them off in the distance, meet survivors and find burned out towns... Each encounter can be far away from the last one so you don't have to worry about making the dungeon ecology realistic.

 

[RangerWickett]

You've seen Star Trek, right?

I ran a campaign that had a heavy travel component. The premise was that the PCs were escorting an apprentice mage who needed to visit many sites that had a lot of elemental air energy in order for her to qualify for a particular order of aeromancers. I usually glossed over the in-between travel bits, and instead had a plot planned at each location.

For instance, they got to a mountain that sang, and had a monastery of vow-of-silence priests tending to it, but someone was killing people there, and they figured out it was an evil bard who wanted to enslave the singing spirit of the mountain.

Later there was a group of monsters who could turn to mist and stole lots of stuff, so the party helped out the locals to thwart them.

And the requisite sea voyage (wind in the sails and all that).

Then they got to a big city that was threatened by a massive hurricane created by villains hiding in the eye of the storm.

So usually the focus was on where they got to during their trip, not on the trip itself, though occasionally I'd do a "stuff goes wrong on the way" session. But yeah, Star Trek is a good structure to follow, I think.

 

[Saeviomagy]

The only real difference between a travel/exploration game and a dungeon crawl is the size of the map.

Both are a set of scenes, connected by dead time in which nothing really happens. Between each little grouping of scenes, expect the players to be full on resources.

Remember that exploration games can still have dungeons, they just tend to be smaller.

Try to avoid focussing on logistics and day-to-day minutae. Dying of thirst in a desert is not suspenseful, interesting or heroic no matter what darksun says.

Resist the urge to introduce mandatory random encounters every day: instead try informing the players about dangers in the region, and allowing the players to choose which encounters they have. I mean sure, occasionally spring something unexpected, but don't always make it a bad thing.

 

[aco175]

I like to provide interesting settings that may have been my own or stolen outright. I have one bridge that the party needs to cross be made out of a giant log that is hollow. It makes a good fight location. How many times have you seen a movie or read an article and said cool, need to cross through the 'mines of moria', cool. Slide down an ice river while being in a fight, cool. There is also the mini-dungeon along the way, something like a roadside shrine, inn, ruined keep, etc...

 

[Iron Sky]

My 4e campaign I've been running for about 3 months (9 sessions, 4 levels) has been pretty much entirely about travel and exploration. Here's what I do:

Before each session, I sit down and thing about interesting ideas. These might be:

Cool locations to explore (abandoned ruins, cursed sections of forest, spider-infested grasslands, etc)

Colorful NPCs (roaming bandits, Kenku walker-villages, extravagant hunting safaris, etc)

Interesting civilizations (Kenku walker-villages, ancient Libraries packed with esoteric tomes and lore, spirit-haunted fading kingdoms, etc)

Events (Godstorms, massive migrations, floods, etc)

Straight-up combat encounters (Young Red Dragon's sulferic bog-lair,
running battles with Hegemony riflemen, orc raiders, etc)

... or any combination of the above. I come up with 3-4 new ideas before each session and flesh out the ones I think are coolest/most likely for the characters to find. The rest go on back-burners in case the party goes "off the rails" or there's some big down time that needs some spice. Then I can just quickly skim my list and plop something down.

I also do a mix of "fixed" and "free" situations. For example, I might look at my campaign map, plop down "The Cursed City of Skajin" on the map or I might hold off the "Locust Swarm Devestation" and plop it down in the character's path when it seems appropriate.

I also have a daily "1 trouble" roll I make: Roll a d20 every morning, if it comes up a 1, they run into a situation from above. Works great if there's a 10-day stretch of wilderness they're travelling through and you don't have anything planned for it.

For combat encounters, if I figure it's going to be the only fight of the day, I crank the difficulty "to 11". I've gone as high as level + 7 for a single encounter to mitigate the power imbalanced of all the players figuring "this is our only fight today" and unloading all their dallies. 4e is designed to be a slow grind wearing down the party's resources over the course of the day's 3/5/7 fights, so if the party is only facing one fight, it gives you a chance to really throw something tough/epic at them.

So far it's worked great for me!

Of course, I've only ever run 1 non-exploratory/travel, "fixed location" game in my 16-or-so years of DMing, so coming up with stuff on the fly is pretty much second nature for me by now in case the above ideas fail me.

 

[Starfox]

Might want to take a look at the Savage Tide adventure path from Dungeon 139-150. Sure, this voyage ends up in the Abyss, but there is quite a bit of travel. I suppose others could recommend other things.

 

[S'mon]

For me, the key is to avoid a linear-series-of-encounters model. For this reason I would avoid "caravan guards" type campaigns, unless the caravan is just an excuse for adventure site of the week, the Rawhide/Star Trek model.

For exploration, there needs to be choice - do the PCs try to cross the river, go upstream looking for a ford, or downstream looking for the rumoured bridge? What if there are trolls in the marshes, but the hills risk dangerous rockslides? Negotiate with the Kawanga barbarians, fight, or detour around them?

I recommend purchasing a predone "sand box" setting, either to use or to inspire your own work. Points of Light I & II are in-print and excellent for this. Wilderlands of High Fantasy box set is huge and very good, OOP but you can get it as a pdf.

1. Select, or create, a sand box environment.

2. Think about reasons why the PCs will want to cross it - searching for treasure, returning home after a 'teleport' trap, questing for an artifact, hunting a villain, etc.

3. Think about some cool areas on the map, focusing on decision-points.

4. Create some appropriate, exciting encounters for different areas; some degree of randomness is good, whatever suits you. Some encounters that can take place anywhere are good too.

5. Finally, think about links between different areas, rumours, develop a few recurring NPCs. Much of this can be done in-play.

6. Profit.

 

[fba827]

I say try and figure out -why- the PCs are exploring/traveling first.

Possibilities:
*guarding a caravan
*part of a circus/etc
* they are part of the first settlers on a new continent and must explore the local area to make sure it's safe and also find resources/etc
* the world has just been nuked. they need to go out and find other survivors/rebuild life
* the are archeologists (be it individually for fame, fortune, glory, etc) and they're following a handful of old maps and prophecies
* they work for a government organization that just found this strange magical gate and when they use different rune configurations, it teleports them to new places every 'session'... but then, who made it, why does it go to these specific locations, etc.

The end result of all that is the same: meeting locals, encountering fantastic creatures, going to new environments, etc


You'll find that the environment itself becomes less interesting so do the whole 'survival skill challenge" only on occasion when things are getting tense or pressed for time and resources, etc.

So it will be a lot more about who/what they encounter. Think, combats on bridges, or in sacred groves, or fighting giants who are throwing down rocks "Donkey Kong style" as the PCs need to get up to a certain cave, and so on.

My point is, I think it'll be easier for you to figure out why they're exploring, and the rest kind of is very similar to dungeon environments, just different scenery.

 

[Keel_Wintershadow]

Thank you all for all of the tips, its been a lot of help, and I think I've got some decent ideas. My session is later today, so I'll update this post with how it goes. Here's hoping it goes well, lol.