Skip to main content

Wilderness Rules: The Wilderness Turn

My wilderness rules saw their first use in play tonight. I was pretty happy with the results, they moved fast and made the travel just tense enough. They also gave the players plenty of choices on how to spend their two main resources, time and food. I am going to continue to revise these rules through play, and I have only completed the arctic environment tables (all I need right now). These are not especially original, but they do make wilderness exploration fun. I am heavily influenced by the Wilderness Survival Guide, but I have no interest in its unwieldy nature. My goal was to develop a streamlined wilderness system that still has enough depth to present the players with interesting choices. I am aiming for something like the fun of Oregon Trail.

I am pretty happy with my turn structure. This is my Wilderness Turn (1 day):

  1. Food Phase
  2. Travel Phase
  3. Travel Phase
  4. Camp Phase
  5. Food Phase
  6. Rest Phase
Food phase: Characters must eat 2 meals a day. If they only eat 1 meal they suffer a -1 to all rolls. If they do not eat at all they are subject to starving. All of the Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging table results are expressed in meals.

Travel Phase: During each Travel Phase the characters can move half a day's movement. The can also substitute other actions for a Travel Phase:
  • Extra Rest Phase: This can help make up for not getting a good or complete night's sleep
  • Forage for food and water
  • Hunt
  • Fish
  • Explore: Get more detail about the hex they are in
Camp Phase: The characters roll on the camp table to determine if they find a place where they can get a good night's sleep.

Rest Phase: This is when characters sleep, and memorize spells.

Random Encounters: Random Encounters are usually rolled for twice each day. Once during the Travel Phases and once during the Rest Phase. They can take several forms:
  • Monster encounter
  • Traveler encounter
  • Environmental Challenge
  • Weird Encounter
I will be discussing my rules and the tables that go along with them in more depth.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Hex Crawls

Those of you who have been reading this blog know that I have never run a megadungeon before. I have always used more realistic dungeon settings, keeping all underground areas to a minimum and keeping the over all size of castles and the like fairly small. There is another style of gaming I have never indulged in: the hex crawl. I have never seen hexes as discrete chunks of the map. I always just used them as a guide to find distance if they were present and not worrying about themif they were not. I have always taken a more continuous view of overland maps. This is another streak that will be ending with my upcoming OSRIC game. I will be using James M's Outdoor Map as a starting pont in my campaign. I will be heavily modifying it for my purposes but most of the features will stay the same. I will be adding my own versions of Castles Blackmoor and Greyhawk to the map. I have been struggling with how a hex crawl works. How do I know if they find features in the hex and isn't 5 m

Traveller: Session 5

    This is part of an ongoing campaign. You can find the other sessions over on the sidebar. This session was run on October 27, 2022. This session contains secret communications between me and the individual players. This means that these recaps do not cover everything that happened in the session. I will be reporting only the information that all players had access to.   131-1116   After the council meeting ended, Nashu, Archduke Ishuggi’s chief of staff, pulled him aside. Following the revelation that Yuri Lang, the emperor’s would-be assassin, had been a member of Archduke Adair’s intelligence service and had been involved in a combined operation with Gateway Intelligence, she had the staff run overlap checks on all recent contacts. The goal was to determine if there were any more unexpected connections between people that could be a threat to Ishuggi or the emperor.   She learned that, in 1113, Yuri Lang (“Baron Pazi”), Zurzi (Archduke Bzrk’s chief of st

Wilderlands: Session 36

    This session was run on May 1 st , 2023 They continued heading east towards the beach with the rock rolling along beside them. They were not sure where they had washed ashore with respect to the various port cities on the coast, so the best plan was to reach the beach and then decide how to proceed from there. Around noon, the skies darkened and white flakes began to fall from the sky. As it was around 85 degrees, they realized that it could not be snow. It turned out to be ash. The ashfall was quickly mixed with a moderate rain. They discovered that the rain stung when it hit unprotected flesh and raised small red welts. Drex found shelter in a hollow beneath the roots of a large tree and they waited out the acid rain for a couple of hours before resuming their journey. They reached the water as it was getting dark and spent an uneventful night camped just off the beach. In the morning, they could see masts on the horizon to the north, but nothing to the so