Into the Wilderness

“The Cavern of Unending Woe? Subtitled ‘Abandon all hope, all who enter here’?” said Yara. “Surely you can’t be serious.” “Yara, I’m always serious,” said Kareem. So your players have explored a region: climbed its highest peaks, overcome its greatest challenges, or at least got all the stuff done that they were interested in getting […]

The goal of a map is threefold: to facilitate the mechanics of travel, to illustrate the world your game is taking place in, and to provide choices for your players and characters. As the standard function of a map, making a map that facilitates travel is intuitive. For ease of use, you want to delineate

However, they can also bog down pacing and damage that verisimilitude just as easily. As such, you want to ensure that your random encounters are making your wilderness a more vibrant, interesting place to adventure in. Your random encounters should accomplish some of the following: Save you time Save you work Push characters toward interesting

For our purposes, we’re going to focus on three elements of giving a location character: What defines this place? How does this place interact with your setting? What can characters do in this place? You should start with the first question as it will guide you toward the others. There are exceptions. Such as, if

Wilderness exploration has always been integral to the game. Even in its earliest forms, Outdoor Survival was considered an important addition while campaign structures like hex crawls and the West Marches setting have kept that tradition alive. In a genre dedicated to diving into the new and unknown, this is no surprise. The wilderness is