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Outdoor Regions
🕑 Added 2025-03-12 17:02:32 +0000 UTCIn thinking over exploration and reading over the comments, I've made some tweaks to the system for outdoor travel.
Dungeon exploration, or any exploration that takes place on a tactical scale, tracks threat and resolves encounters or events in real time as a default. A DM can choose to attach that to a more formal turn order for groups that prefer that approach.
Outdoor travel is based on narrative time. The characters move from region to region on the map. Entering a region might trigger an encounter check, as could spending time there.
Each region has a separate threat level based on the characters' actions there.
A region or domain has its own encounter tables.
Characters use food and water using the core rules (assume the SRD rules). If anything special relating to supplies applies to a region, it notes it.
Each region has a set of encounters that can occur there, along with key events or actions that can cause it to change.
Over time, regions "level up" as their threat increases. As the PCs travel back and forth between town and dungeon, the wilderness around them changes and shifts, too.
If the most powerful creature in a region is defeated, there are notes on how to changes. A power in an adjacent region might move in, or the place might gain a distinct, new flavor.
Some regions can become useful tools for the PCs if they manage to "solve" it.
The attached region might be the one region the PCs traverse in traveling from town to the first dungeon they tackle. The archive might be a place they need to visit to resolve a quest, or they might journey there based on clues that the dungeon yields.
Comments
Joseph Willis
Similar to the "region" idea, some rules (like in Ryuutama and 2024 D&D DMG) frame the outdoor journey as a sequence (almost narrative) of different "legs" of the trip: "Wend thru the hills, pierce the dark forest, come out on the shore of a lake with the town before you". Each leg has its own threat, (possible) reward/secret, and feel, often defined by a biome or landmark. Each leg could also be viewed as a hex in a hex crawl, accommodating both destination-bound journeys and exploration-inspired wanderings. But wait! What if one leg is multiple hexes of one huge forest? It just takes longer narrative time to cross, or one could divide one region into multiple, differentiated by features, threat, and feel: 1st hex is yet hilled, with scraggly, striped beeches pressed closely, haunted by ghostly deer and goblin huntsfolk from the dark places beneath the land's folds. 2nd hex is dense, dark trees sprouted from a graveyard of giant bones. The elves keep what sleeps here dreaming, but sometimes the bones left here grow restless, especially in the barrows of ancient monarchs. 3rd hex is a lowland swamp on the drainage side of the nearby lake. Pale beings slip into the water on approach, waiting their chance when fires and light die down. A dragon raises bog mummies from the flats as guards for its nest in the ruined keep here. For refilling hexes or generating ideas, I use 2 repeatable tables: random encounters (monsters, NPCs) and random features (ruins, cottages, shipwrecks, hazards). I try to make them interactable with hidden treasures and threats for poking around, or with moving parts to be used in encounters by or against the party. I also have separate encounter tables for hunting and foraging, which leads to encounters with roots, mandrakes, healing herbs, boars, monster fish, magical and nonmagical fungi, etc. Fishing could net you rations, or a boot with a ring in it! Rather than a skill check to roll rations, you roll for an encounter to win them! Surely, interactive choice and discovery is key for the open wilderness, just as it is for the relatively closed dungeon.
Jeb Utecht
First of all, I love this example in all kinds of ways. However, what it makes apparent to me is that there is no practical difference between exploration design and adventure design. These aren't rules for exploration, they're guidelines for designing an adventure. I do believe 5E would benefit from some mechanics that aid exploration. I suspect those mechanics vary based on the scale of the exploration. I like the supply and haven mechanics from Level Up for journeys. I also like clocks from Blades in the Dark for locations. I don't believe it has to be one or the other. And they work best when combined with an opened-ended adventure design like you have here in this example. If you could find a way to thread this all together...chef's kiss. I'm definitely going to use this PDF as a template for my own homebrew adventures.
