Notes from class:

Yup, these are my notes.

Wow, so good. For sake of getting past scribd paywall, behold an absolute mess of things posted from
the Angry Dm:

And that’s the problem with real life. You’ve got to actually wait through the passage of time.

No time for a Long, Rambling Introduction™ today, though. We’ve got a long trip ahead of us.

Warning! Long Article Ahead!

This article is a f$&%ing beast. It’s almost twice as long as a normal article. And there’s a crapton of
images making it look even longer. Sorry. I do cover a lot of ground and I didn’t want to split this article
up. Thing is the article itself is only about 5500 words. About normal. Normal for me. The remaining 3000
words are all examples of how to do the stuff I said right. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, I figure an
example’s worth at least 500. So, 3000 words of examples plus 5500 words of text and eight actual
pictures means this article actually contains 1.5 million words worth of solid information.

In other words, quit pissing and moaning. It’s a miracle the final thing doesn’t even top 9,000 words.

How to Get to There from Here

Angry, how do you handle wilderness travel? How do you resolve it and play it out at the table?

I get that question a lot. And today, I actually think you might be ready for the answer. I’m going to tell you
how, exactly, I resolve wilderness travel at the table. Or how I would, anyway, if I were running D&D 5E.
Because I know that’s the system you’re all running. But it’s not the one I’m running. I run the best edition.
Doesn’t matter though. The process is the same.
There’s a lot to cover here. And I don’t want to split this s$&% into two articles. I just want to get it done.
And I want to be thorough. So I’m even going to provide not one, not two, not three, but four examples of
treks that might happen at my table. Yeah. Four. Because I’m f$&%ing awesome.
Trouble is, that ain’t gonna leave me a lot of time for extraneous bulls$&%. So, I’m not going to spend a
lot of time telling you why I do s$&% the way I do. I mean, in the end, there’s only one reason for
everything I do: because it’s the best f$&%ing way to do it. Want to do it a different way? Fine. I don’t
care. Think there’s a better way? You’re wrong. There is nothing better than the best.

You might be shocked to learn that I run wilderness travel mostly by the book. My process is 90% RAW.
The 10% difference comes from using my Time Pool to track time and Complications, my keen
understanding of the Arbitrary Game Turn, interpretation of unclear rules, a willingness to fudge s$&%
toward good enough, and years of handling wilderness travel under other, better rulesets.

I do this s$&% because I want wilderness travel to matter. I want it to feel like an important part of the
game. My game’s about trekking across a world of adventure and then having adventures. Trekking’s a
big part of that. It’s easier to just gloss over s$&% or just let the characters fast-travel at the speed of plot.
No one disputes that s$&%. No comment is necessary. Yes, there’s bookkeeping and plotting and math
to this. The price of meaningfulness is effort. Nothing easy means anything. Suck it up, Buttercup.

Frankly, it ain’t actually that much math and bookkeeping. It’ll look like a lot because I’m explaining the
math and bookkeeping in excruciating detail and taking away all the context and adventure and
engagement. But it actually isn’t. Most treks are pretty easy to resolve in about ten minutes of table time.

That’s all the disclaimers I can think of. Now, let’s talk about making wilderness travel matter.

Knowing the World

If you want the wilderness to be an actual thing in your game, you’ve got to know it. Know the wilderness.
Know it accurately. You have to have a map. A good map.
A good map has an accurate scale, shows the terrain at every point, shows where all the important
destinations are, and shows a few prominent territories.

A good map doesn’t have to be pretty. No one gives a s$&% if it looks like art because no one but you will
ever see it. Because we’re talking about the super-secret, accurate and precise, for-your-eyes-only map
of the world. Never show it to the players!

A good map is accurate and precise, but it doesn’t have everything. First, only mark s$&% that you know
exists and know can only exist in a certain place. You can update the map as the game goes on and add
more locations.
Second, only plot the big s$&%. Major features and destinations. There’s all sorts of tiny s$%& all over
the world. There’s streams, ponds, hamlets, farms, roadside shrines, caves, insubstantial ruins, monster
lairs. None of that s$&% goes on the map. It’s the stuff of wilderness encounter and Complication and
flavor text. Generally, if it ain’t a place the players will spend more than a few minutes on one time, don’t
plot it. And if a minor nothing turns into a destination? Plot it then.

Back to what makes a good map. You need scale so you can easily determine in-world distances and
travel times and s$&% and so that you can plot the party’s exact location in the world at any time.
Because, yes, you have to do that. You keep track of where the party is in the dungeon, right? Why
wouldn’t you do the same in the overworld?

You need terrain so you can determine what the world around the characters looks like. But also because
terrain affects visibility, travel time, the kinds of random monsters that will attack the players, whether
certain characters can use certain abilities, and so on. The D&D 5E world includes seven terrain types:
arctic, coast, desert, forest, grassland, mountain, and swamp. At the very least, you must divide your map
up into those seven kinds of terrain. You can subdivide the terrain types up if you want to. You can create
cold deserts and moorland and differentiate between swamps and marshes, but make sure you decide
which subtypes fall under which types because terrain’s important for some D&D rules.
The easiest and best way to handle this s$&% is to get yourself some hex paper and make hex maps.
Pick a scale per hex and put one kind of terrain in each hex. I highly recommended the Adventurer,
Conqueror, King regional map templates.
Creating a good campaign map’s outside the scope of this article. There’s a lot to consider. Climate,
geology, how far apart the settlements should be, and so on. I’ll tell briefly how I handle that s$&%
though. I handle it by absolutely not giving any kind of a f$&% at all about it. It never f$&%ing matters.
Just draw a map that looks fun.

Maps also show locations. I talked about those above. And maps show territories. Territories are regions
controlled by or patrolled by some non-civilized entity. Regions big enough to warrant inclusion on the
map. You’ve got the territory of the apex predators like dragons, the stomping grounds for the savage
races like orcs, the stomping grounds for tribal and insular groups of wood elves and human barbarians,
and s$&% like that.

Territories ain’t a thing that exists in the core D&D rules, so I’ll explain a little more. Territories are
particularly dangerous regions of the wilderness with special Complication lists of their own. Usually
related to the controller. When the party enters a territory, there’s a chance they’ll notice it based on
Intelligence checks keyed to particular proficiencies or Wisdom (Perception) checks or because it’s super
obvious and impossible to miss. Orcs mark their lands with bloody orc signs on the trees and skulls on
pikes. You don’t miss that s$%&. But, recognizing the signs of a green dragon’s hunting grounds might
take an Intelligence (Arcana) check. If the party does anything in a territory — travel, camp, search,
adventure — it’s Reckless. They’re just inviting trouble.

Here’s an example of a good, useful GM map. It’s from my AOWG. Sort of…
It doesn’t have labels so that it’s easier to read and add stuff to. I keep a list of the locations by numerical
code. Notice how each hex has a code number?

 0704 The Village of Highgrove

 1112 The Sunken Swamp Ruins of Swampiness
 1309 The Hamlet of Perrin’s Mill
 1507 The Ruined Draconic Temple
 1608 The Broken Wheel, A Roadside Inn
 1702 The Town of Graybridge
There’s two territories in the woods between Highgrove and Perrin’s Mill. The smaller one belongs to the
orcs of the Burnt Eye tribe. The larger one’s a green dragon’s hunting ground.

On Map Scale
I said I wasn’t going to explain a lot, but I will explain this: the best map scale is six miles per hex. It’s the
absolute best. Why? Because six is half of twelve. And twelve is easily divisible by two, three, and four.
So, it’s easy to compute travel times for PCs who generally travel two, three, or four miles an hour. And
it’s easy to cut travel speeds down to three-quarters, a half, or one quarter to account for rugged terrain.
The math is just super-easy when you use multiples or fractions of twelve.
But six miles is also a great scale because on a clear day, in open terrain, the horizon’s about three miles
away. That is, if an average-sized PC passes through a hex of clear terrain, they can see all the big,
obvious stuff to the edges of the hex. So visibility’s easy.

By the way, if you don’t have a good, intuitive grasp of visibility like I do, you can fake it by referring to this
excellent article entitled How Far Can You See? by someone named Ronny over at the site Dungeon Master
Assistance. It’s a very good reference.
In short: there is one correct scale for D&D maps. It’s six miles per hex.