Honestly, if you thought I wasn’t going to come back to Advanced Fantasy Dungeons, you were being optimistic. Marcia’s Mosaic Worlds neatly matches with AFD’s counties, and then she wrote about Fast Travel using these counties, which provided me with impetus to trial an option where the words “watch” and “hex” are excised, when they never existed in the original text. And, while I’m at it, let’s incorporate the pathcrawl rules.
Travelling typically takes place on a trail in the wilderness.
Each day you travel on a trail in the wilderness, travel one county. Each day you travel on a road or along a river in a boat, travel two counties. If you have directions through impassible or obscuring terrain, but no trail or road, travel one county every two days.
You cannot travel through impassible terrain without a trail, road, river or directions.
If you travel through obscuring terrain without a trail, road, river and directions it is both unnavigable and dangerous. When you exit the county, randomly select which county you exit into. Roll twice for each die on the wilderness grid, taking the highest each time.
Each day you travel, the GM rolls on the wilderness grid. Roll 1d8 for the type of encounter, Roll d100 for what encounter, and 1d6 for when the encounter occurs. An encounter does not necessarily prevent a day of travel from being completed.
What type of encounter: 1-4. Nothing; 5. Monster Traces; 6. Monster Tracks; 7. Monster Encountered; 8. Monster Lair.
What encounter: 1-40. Nothing; 41-53. Common; 54-65. Common; 66-74. Uncommon; 75-82. Uncommon; 83-88. Rare; 89-94. Rare; 95-97. Very Rare; 98-100. Very Rare.
When is the encounter: 1. Dawn, 2. Morning, 3. Noon, 4. Afternoon, 5. Dusk, 6. Night.
For each day of travel, each character can choose one action to take while they rest, such as heal, memorise spells, prayer, or repair armour, forage or hunt. All characters can choose to force march, forgoing their action to spend 2d6 HP and travel a second county in a single day.
Using vehicles or mounts does not allow you to travel further, but limits or facilitates your ability to travel on certain terrain and allows an expanded inventory.
If you are stranded in the wilderness at the end of a session, each PC rolls to return to the nearest settlement. Roll fortune or an appropriate proficiency, against a target equal to the number of days travel to the nearest settlement, plus the number of turns traveled to escape the dungeon. For every point you fail by, choose either to spend that amount in HP or ten times that amount in GP.
Smush! This is my combined, non-anachronistic, PC-facing wilderness travel for Advanced Fantasy Dungeons! Honestly, it doesn’t appear much more complicated than the previous rules, and it’s definitely faster and has clearer stakes (although may need supplementing with a GMs guide for path rules and generation).
Paths lead to interesting places. Don’t improvise these places!
They are sometimes off the path! If they are, there is either a branch that leads to it, or it is perceptible from the path.
Always signpost paths in some way, be they actual signposts, tourism guides, maps or rumours!
Interesting things lie along the path! To identify what is along the path, roll 1d6: 1. Ruin; 2. Lair 3. Settlement; 4.Wonder ; 5. Hazardous Landmark; 6. Fortuitous Landmark. To identify whether a path continues, roll 1d6: 1-2. Detour to another path; 3-4. Shortcut to another path; 5-6. New path and new location.
Some interesting places have no path apparent! Make finding the path for these places a reward or the goal of a quest.
Look, potentially too many exclamation points, but I really like pithy principles for GMs, I don’t know why. I mightn’t incorporate this straight into AFD 0.2, but maybe I will?
Idle Cartulary
1st July 2022
Playful Void 