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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6881473" data-attributes="member: 4937">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?</blockquote>

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