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Rowan was dying. Not that they would say as much. They hadn’t, not in nearly a week of suffering on the road north from Oakhurst. Instead, they had gritted their teeth and allowed their wound to fester. They had walked themself ragged until their body wouldn’t, couldn’t carry them a step further.
The party was trapped now. An Ordinian blizzard loomed at the northern horizon, and the Silver Company bore up from the south. Over all this lay a single ruinous thought; they needed to reach Blainestown by the solstice or it would all be for nothing…
I feel like this is a rite of passage for D&D writers – every one of my role models has done a piece about how to run travel in D&D. I think it’s because travel is where a lot of DMs encounter their first big gap between the systems of the game and the fantasy that they are trying to evoke. Mainstream fantasy fiction (looking at you, Lord of the Rings) gives a very particular kind of attention to journeys, and when a game promises to let you tell your own stories in that same genre, its players expect journeys to feel impactful.
The people expect demand vistas.
To put it simply, D&D 5E does not have particularly impactful rules for travel.
And that’s as much as I want to linger on critique of other peoples’ work. It’s also as much time as I’d like to spend on things that I don’t think are going to make your game better. So instead, this post is about the system I built to run travel. For just the rules, jump to the attached document! The rest of this post will be talking about the process of arriving at that system, explaining its elements, and giving a bit of advice for using it.
So…
Let’s build a travel system
To start with, let’s identify what it is that we actually want out of this system; what fantasy of travel is this system trying to evoke?
In the games that I want to run, travel as a part of a fantasy adventure is meaningful, but it is not normally the central tension of the adventure. Journeys provide context to moments of action, and journey obstacles threaten the characters’ ability to achieve their goals outside of travel. Often the context that I am trying to establish is that the world is dangerous and difficult to traverse. Traveling thoughtlessly can seriously inhibit a party. To me, a large component of travel lives in preparation. The provisioning, scouting, and preparing that precede a journey are as critical as the decisions made on the road...
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