Making the Wilderness Fun

[MrConsideration]

I am an urban creature as a DM: I like my cities, their factions and their intrigue. In my games, players leave the city to achieve specific goals, and most of my 'dungeons' are in built-up areas (sewers, palaces, fortresses, manor houses, ships). This has been fine whilst my players are resolving their goals in the major cities of Loquista and North Corner - but in a few months time their goals will take them to Zunia, a region of steppe and mountain and desert populated by tribal peoples of fluid loyalty. In many of these regons resources are scarce and terrain is a threat.

I have ideas(The Holgermen control a salt flat called The Holger and trade salt to the neighboring peoples - as all metal oxidises very quickly they make their armour from the chitin of enormous, four-armed land crabs which also function as their steeds....) but I struggle to make adventure have a purpose. If they're moving towards a goal, I often find random encounters or hex-crawling inadequately pacey. If they're exploring, how do you keep narrative drive in place?


How do you structure your wilderness travel to make it interesting, engaging and fun? How do you track supplies without tedious bookkeeping?

[Yora]

Why are they going to that desert? The things to do in a wilderness often depend largely on the reason why there is a wilderness portion in the campaign.

[MrConsideration]

Combatting a major campaign villain and his army and retrieving long-lost relics of the nearby monarchy.

Plus other escapades on the way no doubt.

[Jay R]

If they're exploring, how do you keep narrative drive in place?

Exploring is the opposite of following a narrative. It's no longer a novel, it's a series of short stories. Look at any good detective, doctor, police, or western TV series. The big plot ends at the end of the episode.

How do you structure your wilderness travel to make it interesting, engaging and fun?

Have interesting, engaging and fun encounters. Meet a caravan under attack. Find an old miner all alone near his copper mine. Find a lost child.

Eventually (not immediately), find the goblins that are looking for copper, a family whose child is lost, or the site that the caravan was seeking.

How do you track supplies without tedious bookkeeping?

You track number of days of food, and number of days of water. And nothing else. That's the only important detail, so don't track other details.

[D-naras]

The Angry GM had a pretty good article last week about this exact thing. The gist of it was to offer choices to the wild: travel speed, route and possible discoveries that cost time, are risky and offer rewards.

[MrConsideration]

The Angry GM had a pretty good article last week about this exact thing. The gist of it was to offer choices to the wild: travel speed, route and possible discoveries that cost time, are risky and offer rewards.

This was exactly what I needed - thanks!

[Yora]

I had not been reading Angry's shorter posts in quite a while and so it slipped completely past me. That's great material. I had thought about splitting travel into 2 to 4 segments per day myself, but only about making it path segments. Using time segments instead now opens up a good way to get lost without a hex map. Really like this and makes me want to go back experimenting with wilderness crawling again.

[D-naras]

Yeah, I think it's one of his better articles. This and the other about social interaction.

[Cealocanth]

I ran into this issue when I tried to play a prehistoric tribal-ish game. The answer to making the wilderness fun is to put stuff in that wilderness. Unique plants and animals, environmental features, hazards, random encounters, and allowing the players to show off their survival skills. Let's say that the characters are traveling through a forest, for example, and you want to make the journey interesting. You could:

• Have the weather turn sour and encourage the party to try to fashion a shelter to make their way through the night from local plants.
• Have one of the players get bitten by a strange snake or stung by an odd insect and the players need to look through local flora or fauna to find an herbal remedy or else use magic.
• The players have to cross a raging river, whether by magic, or by fashioning a rope bridge over the river, or perhaps by trying to ride it in a raft.
• The players encounter a society of wood elves or dryads or something that try to attack the intruders.
• The players are in need of food and they spot a hearty, if dangerous, beast to hunt - such as a small drake.
• The players have inexplicably passed through a fairy ring and find themselves in one of the haunting forests of the feywild and need to try to escape before the strange and alien creatures descend upon them.
• There is a forest fire. This is a challenge to all but the most skilled of mages.
• They find an old temple, a ruin, a crashed vehicle, a campsite, or something else off the beaten path.
• They see a strange set of tracks in the snow from an odd and mystical beast with a valuable hide or horde.

Or, if you don't really want a potential adventure hook, you could just skip ahead to when they break camp and allow the players some RP time for character development. Maybe there's a strange beast in the darkness that's spotted the delicious adventurers.

Even if you're a city slicker like myself, you can find out just how much there is to do in the wilderness by watching some survival shows. Finding food, making shelter, and staying alive can be surprisingly difficult, and quite entertaining. Either you can put interesting stuff in the wilderness, or you can put the players in interesting situations in the wilderness.

[daniel_ream]

Even if you're a city slicker like myself, you can find out just how much there is to do in the wilderness by watching some survival shows. Finding food, making shelter, and staying alive can be surprisingly difficult, and quite entertaining.

This. The Scout Handbook is full of awesome survival information for camping, and will give you all kinds of ideas. And if you can find a copy of the Robinson Crusoe and the Cursed Island board game, you will learn all the ways the wilderness can kick your ass.