Just Wandoren Thru

[Asperion]

One common feature about RPGs is that characters will need to travel from where they currently are to where the BBEG is.  While most of the time this gets waved away,  it can be the source for many mini adventures. In addition to the common bandit,  raider,  monster, whatever,  what are some things that you have used to make travel more interesting and unique?

[HeroGM]

Different cultures along the way. Modes of company, say an Arabian type caravan in one adventure while a "gypsy" style wagon train the next.

[unclevlad]

More D&Dish, but dimensional travel may cause powers to misbehave.  Something like the plane of shadows might, for example, cut healing in half...including recovery.

[HeroGM]

3 hours ago, unclevlad said:

More D&Dish, but dimensional travel may cause powers to misbehave.  Something like the plane of shadows might, for example, cut healing in half...including recovery.

 

Alston's Hollow World for D&D played with the idea that magic was harder to learn, cultures were "locked" and didn't evolve, and a lot of surface magic was unusable.

[Lord Liaden]

Although I've never used it for this purpose, I think that the Champions Universe dimension of Tatterdemalion would be... interesting... to traverse:

 

This Qliphothic dimension might be better described as an agglomeration of leftover dimensions. As planes of reality decay or corrode and become Qliphothic, sometimes they tear apart or shrink. By a process not even mystics understand, dozens of these “dimensional fragments” have become attracted to one another by some gravity-like extradimensional force and coalesced to form a patchwork reality Humans would call Tatterdemalion.

In Tatterdemalion, the “landscape” (such as it is) can change entirely over just a few miles as a traveler crosses from a fragment of one dimenstion to a fragment of another. Where the two fragments were previously similar or have “knitted together” well, this change may be gradual and subtle, but in most cases it’s as abrupt as a cliff ’s edge. And since they’re rotten pieces of ancient dimensions, none of the “zones” of Tatterdemalion are in any way pleasant.

The creatures and beings who once inhabited the various component realms of Tatterdemalion have mingled and interbred throughout the eons, creating things monstrous and strange even by Qliphothic standards. Some of them that Champions Universe Earth superheroes have encountered include: Carrionites, whose semi-undead flesh constantly remolds itself into different forms; the Foul-Skinned Men, humanoid warriors whose very touch is corruptive both physically and spiritually; Orons, invisible things who seem to be composed entirely of fanged mouths; Skeinrippers, who have the power to harm living beings by attacking their destinies; and Zodiac Beasts, predators said to be made of the stuff between constellations.
 

Passage quoted from Book Of The Empress p. 146. The creatures mentioned above have full write-ups in a mini-book, Tatterdemalion Terrors.

[unclevlad]

Good horror realm there.  The essence, IMO, of effective horror is sharp incongruity, keeping everyone off balance.

 

Love the Zodiac beast notion, but I dunno if I wanna deal with that many levels of Growth....

[mallet]

20 hours ago, Asperion said:

One common feature about RPGs is that characters will need to travel from where they currently are to where the BBEG is.  While most of the time this gets waved away,  it can be the source for many mini adventures. In addition to the common bandit,  raider,  monster, whatever,  what are some things that you have used to make travel more interesting and unique?

 

It all depends on the "type" of campaign you are running and what the player's expectations are. You are right a lot of travel time is waved away in lots of games, as everyone is excited to "get to the evil temple and get all the loot." 

I think this comes from most RPG's being "goal orientated" and historically in game travel has been "aimless", in that it was often left to random encounters, book keeping food and water rations, etc... 

 

If you are not just GMing an "adventure", but rather a "campaign", then to keep travel interesting you could look at the route the journey will take, and not only come up with a few adventures along the way, but design each of them to specifically target/be of interest/challenge at least one member of the party. Maybe have them provide items or skills or experiences that currently seem unimportant, but the players will later need in the "main adventure".

 

As so many things, it often comes back to The Hobbit. Imagine if Tolkien cut out the entire journey to the Lonely Mountain where the real "Adventure" was? Half the novel would be gone. There would be no tricking the troll's on the mountain top, no giant spiders of Merkwood, no daring escapes by barrels from a goblin keep, and Bilbo would never have found "The Ring".

 

In RPG terms, maybe all of those mini adventures gave the party enough xp to be powerful enough to survive the "main adventure" at the end, and gave Bilbo the ring that he would need to complete the adventure later. 

 

I guess what I am getting at is that any travel "mini adventure" or encounter is going to feel boring or a "Waste of time" to the players if it doesn't seem to organically fit into the story, and if it isn't of some interest/challenge to at least one member of the party. (for example, come across a small roadside church that has been getting raided by bad guys. Well make it a church to the same God the cleric of the part worships so he/she has a religious and personal goal to help defend this church (heck, maybe the pastor of the mini church is an old friend from the religious seminary where the cleric/priest trained?). Or something is poisonings the  plants and animals in an area, so any druidic type character, or a hunter or barbarian (or any character type that likes nature, animals, plants or what not) feel invested in finding the source of the poison and stopping it. 

 

TL;DR Do something, anything, to make any mini-adventures seem non-random, and important adventures in their own right. 

[Steve]

To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, life is a journey and not a destination.

 

When playing an RPG, we should all try to make the journey memorable, not just rush to the ending of the story.

[Lord Liaden]

When Emerson wrote that, the average attention span was much longer.