Definitions
- Wilderness: anything not in a town
- Known Route: a well traveled route between places.
- Light Forest: any forest area with at least one border not met by more forest.
- Dense Forest: any forest area with all border surrounded by forest.
- Skill Value: the bonus to you'd get to the appropriate travel skill
Whenever you are traveling it holds some ineherent danger. No trip through the wilderness
¶ The Land
Determine the type of land you'll be traveling through; which determines the starting travel difficulty and affects fictional positioning for things like hunting, foraging, tracking, etc.
- Open Plains: 7
- Light Forest: 8
- Dense Forest: 9
- Hills: 8
- Mountains: 9
- Special: some landscape that doesn't fit, is less common, or is a combination of more than one of the above land types.
Then determine the distance to be traveled; which will be measured in days/rations needed. That total gets added to the base difficulty for the region. Larger journeys can be broken up into multiple rolls if desired. For distances less than a day, there is nothing added to the base difficulty of the land.
Determine what kind of travel it will be:
- Known Route: +0 Days, no Wilderness encounter types, more likely to see other sapiens.
- Unknown Route: +50% travel time, only Wilderness encounters, less likely to see other sapiens.
Add factors that would change travel time:
- Travel during the rainy seasons: +25% travel time.
- Traveling with injured party members: +50% travel time to forego additional injuries, +25% travel time to reduce injuries, +0% to travel without concern of injuries
- overloaded with loot, infected with some sort of disease, in a fast carriage with a team of horses, and so on. There will be some affect to the travel time that can be determined on the fly if they would be relevant.
Players then roll a d20+skill value VS the region's difficulty + the # of days traveled.
- If successful, for every 3 above the difficulty, you get an additional success.
- Additional successes can be used to reduce the time, rations needed for the trip, even improve starting reactions for any encounter along the way, or anything else that is reasonable for the trip and terrain.
- If failed, roll to determine how the trip is affected:
- Off course
- Spoiled supplies
- Temporary injury
- Attract attention
- Weather Event
- Obstacle Blocking
After the travel success is determined, encounters are determined as per the rules of the game with caveat that the effects of routes and land are factored into any encounters.