D&D 5E Traveling encounters ideas

[wellerpond]

My PCs are escorting a caravan on an 800 mile trip through the wilderness to set up a secluded trading post.


One of the things we do to indicate the passage of time is, around the campfire, plays dice games, tell stories of their character's past, legends, puzzles,
trivia and the like. I also sprinkle in some encounters and would love some of your thoughts. I won't use all of the one's listed above, but these are the ideas I have so far:


1. torrential rains encourage raiders
2. some kinds of monster looking for slaves/sacrifices
3. monsters take some of the PCs for retribution of previous wrong (Baphomet?)
4. they get seriously lost
5. war on another plane affecting their travels
6. one of the NPCs is carrying a stolen item and the owners want it back
7. there is an agent of rival merchants in the caravan
8. a festival they visit en route has some nefarious purpose
9. druids don’t like travelers through their woods
10. they pass through a planar fold
11. someone poisons the horses
12. past from an employee comes back to haunt him/her
13. they have to travel through an active battlefield (trapped behind enemy lines!) and
14. forced by each side of a war to combat the other (holding people hostage as leverage)


Any other ideas?


Thanks!

 

[DEFCON 1]

I'm horrible with coming up with these kinds of ideas on my own, so I oftentimes will hit up one of my more favored blogs that have large lists of interesting ideas, the Dungeon Dozen blog.

To make searching that blog easier, I go to another blog that has a kind of 'table of contents' for the Dungeon Dozen blog. That's the Blessing of the Dice Gods. I go there to see descriptions on most of the Dungeon Dozen lists (based upon location or scenario), and that links me to the individual Dungeon Dozen list of interesting things to meet.

 

[GMMichael]

Player vs player! Hello!?

Not combat, of course. Although they could use "training" weapons and go at it, in the name of practice. Instead, some PCs might have secrets that they don't want to reveal to other PCs. It wouldn't hurt to have a few conversations, and give PCs experience for finally twisting dirty secrets out of their companions. Another PC might just be antisocial, and the goal of that conflict is to become that PCs friend.

Don't tell me that your group doesn't have an antisocial PC whose primary method of conflict resolution is killing things. Doesn't every group have one of these?