This is a response to:

• Brian Ashford‘s post about wilderness travel by points
• Aaron Griffin’s post about point-crawling

I’ve been planning a game in the Symbaroum setting. I have been waffling about how to run the forest. I had thought about trying to break it into hexes, but the forest is very large and that seems tedious. The system seems to assume I will be playing it very “trad” and planning each session out ahead of time, but that is not how I prep my games.

I really like running point-crawl one-shots, but I have not thought through about how you might slowly evolve a point-crawl over the length of a campaign. I think that I will have a point crawl map with two main elements, nodes and paths. Both nodes and paths will have a variety of tags, that will have mechanical implications. I want to flesh out some of those implications over a series of blog posts.

To start, paths might simply have the following tags:

• Rumored Path – Traverse in 1d4x the standard time. 2x Random Encounter chance.
• Rough Path – Traverse in standard length. 1x Random Encounter chance.
• Trodden Path – Traverse in half time. 1x Random Encounter chance.

Rumored Paths might be overheard in a tavern, hinted at in a notebook, or sketched on a rough map. Rough Paths would be described by an experienced adventurer, depicted on a detailed map, or shown to the party by a tracker. A trodden path is a commonly known and traveled upon.

Likewise, nodes might have a variety of tags to describe the likelihood of treasure, danger, competition, and corruption. I am still thinking about what number of tags is useful versus just being overkill crunch for something I would be better off not having written down.