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Scorponok
2013-11-24, 03:04 AM
Hi Giants,

I'm in the very early stages of planning a new campaign and wanted your thoughts on this idea.

Basically, the premise is that the starting kingdom the PCs find themselves in has just finished with a war and the king would like to put his resources to exploring the land to the north of the kingdom and seeing if there is anything worthwhile up there.

So he organizes several groups of his troops, and also puts a call out to adventurers to help him map out this new area. The adventurer's and troop's jobs are to go to certain points (say, 300 miles directly north of the kingdom, 500 miles to the north west of the kingdom) and bring back sketches, information, examples of wildlife, and maybe even friendly contacts. This would be compared to what other groups bring back to see if they match.

To me, it sounds like a nice premise, but I'm having a hard time thinking of what the PC adventuring party would do, besides hacking and slashing away through the forest until they encounter a monster or discover a new point of interest. The problem, it seems to me, is that it would mostly be monster encounters until they either run into another adventuring group, natives (hostile or friendly) or new unknown town or civilization. It might be a bit too much avoiding or fighting monsters and it would get boring after awhile.

I'm wondering, from the sounds of this, what other plot points or ideas come to mind from the rest of this forum.

Too Long Didn't Read version:
I need help with ideas for an exploration campaign.

Zavoniki
2013-11-24, 03:37 AM
This sounds exactly like the excellent Pathfinder adventure module Kingmaker (http://paizo.com/pathfinder/adventurePath/kingmaker).

Yora
2013-11-24, 06:25 AM
The first thing I was thinking when seeing the thread was "don't make the players go to every square and put them to a random encounter before going to the next one". Which I see you already realized yourself.

"Exploration" is actually very boring. It's more like making a land survey and doing random encounters for the sake of random encounters. When you make an open-ended campaign, the players need to have a long-term goal they are working towards to. Making a map is a rather poor goal.

Instead of just mapping the area, it would be much more interesting to actually secure the area. For which getting a good survey of the landscape and the local inhabitants is one important step. But it isn't the ultimate goal itself.
Let's say someone discovered some old dwarven scrolls that include a report that a promising deposit of silver had been found centuries ago, but to everyones knowledge a mining opperation was never started. The PCs get tasked with locating the exact area, overseeing the building of the required infrastructure, and making sure the region and supply routes are secured for mining opperations. That means they will first have to do some investigations in the city to learn if anyone can provide them with intel on the general area, then make the overland journey, establish contact with local rangers, loggers, or other people, get them to be friendly or helpful to the PCs, learn more about nearby dangers and possible locations of the silver deposits, neutralize any threats to a mining opperations, find the minning site, secure the site, defend it, and so on.

Pathfinder has a decent exploration system (http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/ultimateCampaign/campaignSystems/exploration.html) originally made for the Kingmaker campaign, but it should work for pretty much any game using any rules system.

fusilier
2013-11-25, 05:04 AM
Yora already said something similar to this, but let them hear rumors of some great wealth -- or rumors of something that could be a well known legend. The Seven Cities of Gold was an old European legend, that the Spanish searched for in the "New World" after hearing some stories that seemed to imply it was in what is now the US Southwest. The explorers could discover clues to the location, or clues as to who or what might be able to describe the location.

Historically, until maybe the 18th century, land exploration didn't involve surveying, instead it just gave general directions and rough distances with descriptions of the land, people, wildlife, etc. (think the travels of Marco Polo). The surveyors usually came later once things were starting to get colonized and taxes had to be assessed, or if a border dispute had to be decided. Naval exploration on the other hand was all about charting coasts and determining latitude and longitude of prominent places -- even if the latter was difficult to do.

You might want to make the initial explorations small, then when they discover something that looks promising, they might attempt to go back and get a larger force or royal support/permission. If they found some precious item that the locals claim came from some distant land -- where there is a lot of it to be found of course -- then that could serve as "proof" that some legends are true, and maybe even spur recruitment and private support for a larger expedition (or several competing ones).

Calinero
2013-11-25, 04:26 PM
This is actually very similar to a campaign I am considering in the future. In mine, the premise is that people from our world will be dropped into a strange place, and will be trying to survive/explore as things get progressively weirder. A bit like fantasy Lost.

I think the main issue is that survival, in itself, cannot be the focus for a long term game on its own. Unless your group is of the sort that has no problem doing dungeon crawl after dungeon crawl--which is a totally legitimate playstyle! However, assuming they will eventually get bored of this, you need a common thread.

I suggest that a plot should develop as they explore. They should find remnants of a civilization, or evidence of a conspiracy, or some greater danger...something that ties the different locations together. Something to provide a sense of urgency and purpose.

Kaun
2013-11-25, 04:54 PM
If you haven't read THIS (http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/) before it is probably worth your time.

But to back up other people statements, explorations can be really boring, make sure to have every new area they explore include its own little story that the PC's can get involved in.