Sense-of-Wonder Travel Campaign?

[Gez]

Good timing, there just was this (sense of) wonderful quote about sense of wonder travel in RPG campaigns:

On another note, there comes a time in every GM's life when they have created something marvellous and just want the players to listen for a minute while they read out the vivid imagery that conjures up a magical world of fantasy and adventure in the imaginations of all the participants in this shared experience. The players, inevitably, will want to skip this boring bit and get on with the game.

 

[S'mon]

I'm finding that the Wilderlands of High Fantasy is a great setting for an exploration campaign. The way WoHF is crafted, the GM is often exploring it along with the players, which keeps things fresh and exciting for me. At the same time there's plenty of opportunity to insert my own setting elements, adventures etc, or borrow from other sources, modules et al. I think maybe the biggest challenge is to ensure you have PCs and players who like travel & exploration; some prefer to establish a secure home base and 'turtle' there.

 

[GlassJaw]

I also like this idea a lot. One of the earliest campaigns that I had started to write was definitely along these lines. I think it involved the finding the pieces of the Rod of Seven Parts but one of my goals was to be able to use a wide range of settings for adventures: desert, snow, forest, ocean, etc. All those settings definitely give the DM a lot of adventure options.

 

[JPL]

There’s a great book called the Encyclopedia of Imaginary Places, which covers a huge number of fictional locales. I’ve thought that there’s a great “real world” campaign waiting to happen there...maybe a Victorian era campaign in a steampunk submarine a la Nemo, traveling from Atlantic to Lemuria to Mu to the Hollow Earth...

On a lighter note...the Hope/Crosby “Road” movies could make for a great pulp era campaign. Seriously. A mismatched duo stumble from exotic locale to exotic locale, getting into trouble and back out again.

 

[Kahuna Burger]

I started a one on one campaign that was something of a travel and diplomacy adventure. The PC was a prince barely smuggled out of the palace as it was taken by an ancient enemy of his family. He had to travel to neighbors and allied nations, trying to build a coalition to take back his kingdom.

Another travel campaign was based around a disappearing river, and the PCs traveling along the path where it had been trying to determine what had happened.

 

[Ry]

I'm reminiscing about the voyage of the dawn treader.

I think you'd want to design a particular kind of PC for this sort of game.

What kind of things do you yearn for?
When your fellow travellers head off for the horizon, what keeps you together?

 

[GreatLemur]

Whoa, this makes me think of the exploration campagin Stormborn just started. Or, at least, it makes me think of the cool opportunities in the basic concept he mentioned. I might be reading too much into his post, but the idea sounds like it would put the focus on just travelling to new places, and perhaps actually avoiding fights along the way instead of seeking them out.

It also puts me in mind of a Spirit of the Century game I'd like to run, where the PCs are some kind of "adventurers' club" bunch who journey to strange, almost Fantastic Four-ish locations. I've even been putting together a campaign setting based around the theme that there have to be underground kingdoms, sunken continents, lost cities in jungles and deserts, a dead civilization on Mars, a hidden "counter-Earth" world on the other side of the Sun, a mindbending "in between" dimension that's a little bit like the Far Realms and a little bit like the Bleed, and other stuff.