Help making short travel engaging?

[Strigon]

Exactly what it says in the title.
Next session, my players are going to be exploring the root cause of a cursed forest, and I'm looking for ways to make it interesting for them, beyond simply saying "You travel down the path. You encounter a monster. After killing it and walking five minutes, you encounter another monster."

I'd like to give the players meaningful choices that can be made; does anyone have any ideas?

[Man_Over_Game]

Exactly what it says in the title.
Next session, my players are going to be exploring the root cause of a cursed forest, and I'm looking for ways to make it interesting for them, beyond simply saying "You travel down the path. You encounter a monster. After killing it and walking five minutes, you encounter another monster."

I'd like to give the players meaningful choices that can be made; does anyone have any ideas?

Magical, hallucinogenic mushroom's spores are causing the players to go in the same loop. It takes the players a Nature, Survival or Arcana check to recognize what's the cause.

There's a group of corpses on the ground. They're all stripped down to their base clothes. Empty scabbards and fresh wounds indicate that these were once adventurers who were here a few days before you.

The trees along this pathway are all marked with some kind of animal blood. It's long dried, but you guess it was used in some kind of warding ritual.


The trick is to describe something that's generally meaningless to the overall adventure that's intriguing and worth a few moments of the players' time. If they happen to look into it further, and make it a bigger deal than it should be, you can make up important details as you go while they're busy chasing their tails.

[JoeJ]

Have encounters that are not combat. Maybe a bridge has been knocked out in a recent storm, or they encounter a teamster trying to extract his heavily laden wagon from deep mud.

Navigation is uncertain. There are many paths that twist and intersect. Not all of them are shown on the PC's map. A failed navigation check could have them end up somewhere they didn't plan to go.

Let the PCs know there are several paths to their destination and have them choose between the longer but safer route, or the shortcut though an area known to be dangerous in some way.

Have there be weather. Rain and fog affect visibility. Extreme heat or cold can be dangerous if the PCs go for too long without shelter.

A good chunk of D&D involves managing resources, so give them a few more resources to track. If they can't go back to town every time they take a long rest, track consumables - especially ammunition, water, and food. Enforce the rules for carrying capacity (whichever version you use). Don't just say they have magic and handwave this; spell slots spent on basic survival needs are not available when combat comes around.

Have some encounters that don't require resources to be expended but that help set the atmosphere and that provide a sense of danger, such as bear tracks at a stream crossing, wolves howling in the distance when the party goes to bed, or very faint, distant music in the middle of the night.

[BurgerBeast]

Build it the same way you would build a node-based dungeon. Build “rooms” that are actually outdoor spaces identifiable by landmarks or foliage. Have multiple pathways through the forest and between nodes.

Decide on some cool “scene locations”: an ancient statue, a bridge over a creek, a clearing with flowers, a grove of dead trees... whatever. Seed the mystery Alexandrian-style, using the three-clue rule to allow the players to investigate and discover.

If you have a theme for the curse, you can make the environment interactive. For example if the woods are frozen and inhabited by some ice-monster or spirit, there might be pillars throughout the forest that have disks to let the players “set” the season... and this can affect the environment by changing the season and the monsters themselves. The final battle could involve trying to keep the season manipulated to “summer” to weaken the winter spirit while his/her minions try to dial it to winter to strengthen him/her.

If it is inhabited by a “dark fey,” there might be shrines or moon gates or some such, which allow the characters to phase in and out between the prime material plane and the feywild, where things they do in the feywild can affect the environment in the prime, etc.

[Rukelnikov]

A lumberjack has fallen for a dryad a while ago and has "escapades" with her, he wants to keep it a secret. The PCs may find him with her, or if they hear the PCs before they can see each other, he'll just make up excuses for why he is there (makes for a suspicious character, but has no relation to the actual curse, unless you choose for the dryad to actually be related to it :P)

Some Satyrs are having a feud with some Vegepygmys. Apparently a gang of Elks favored by the Satyrs had been feeding of some Thorny's for a couple days after discovering they provided unending food (regeneration trait). When the Vegepygmy's notice the patter in the gang's behaviour they intervened to keep the Thorny safe, which resulted in a dead Elk. Satyr's were not willing to leave it at that. (If you want replace Fey, Plants, and Beasts for others of appropiate CR, I'd try to choose no side "generally perceived as evil" if you wanna keep the encounter interesting). They may meet either side first "Those Elks have been torturing this poor Thorny!", "Those Vegepygmys killed the poor Elk!"

[Strigon]

These are all really good!
I'll have to tweak some of them a bit to make them fit, but I now have a good framework to use; thanks