Cubicle 7's Uncharted Journeys Reactions

Uncharted Journeys might be the best book other than the core rules you could buy for 5e. That’s my opinion, but there, I said it. It provides an actual system to make journeys narratively interesting and providing your players meaningful choices. Its encounters and advice go beyond anything available in the Dungeon Master's Guide or the Monster Manual, or any other 5e book that I've found. The journey system could even be grafted onto other skill-based systems with some modification and provides a robust framework for making travel and exploration the truly meaningful pillar of RPG play that many have long sought.

With that as my thesis, I'd like to showcase perhaps my favorite find so far of 2024 (although it was released in January 2023), Uncharted Journeys from Cubicle 7. 

Most of the 5e books I have (and I imagine you too) provide adventures or monsters, or perhaps setting material. This is awesome stuff that we all love. Then there are the core rules, detailing how to build a character and conduct combat, or providing additional rules and options. There still fewer that provide a wholly new structure, something that adds a new dimension and option of play to the game. Uncharted Journeys does exactly that for travel, refining the system Cubicle 7 created for Adventures in Middle-Earth for all of 5e.

The first step in the system is to set the journey, determining start and endpoints with the players. It cuts down on the bookkeeping and need to attempt to calculate exact distances by dividing journeys into short, medium, long, and very long. Example distances are provided, but it’s also noted that the system thus allows for abstraction of distance. You can apply the same categories to a continent spanning trek or to a long hike across Sharn, Ptolus, or Orden’s massive city of Capital (there’s even a great cities biome that has relevant encounters for that environment). I think it tends to work better for the former than the latter, but with some adaptation, I think it would definitely enrich a city-based campaign. You also determine the terrain and weather for the region to figure out a Journey Difficulty that will serve as your DC for a group check and the skill checks in the encounters later generated. This system is also great for facilitating a point crawl. 

Map of Faerun

Imagine throwing the 5e large map of Faerun in front of your players. They’ll see a number of cities connected by roads, as well as far flung locations not connected in this way. They may also want to go to a location that you place in one of the empty spaces on the map. With this system, you can determine journey lengths between each node of the pointcrawl, and offer meaningful differences in choice for your players. To get to Waterdeep from Phandalin you can go several ways, either up the trail to Triboar and down through the Dessarin Valley, out West to the Coast and down the High Road through the Mere of Dead Men, or you could try trekking through the Sword Mountains and brave the Kryptgarden Forest into the Southern portion of the Dessarin Valley, shortening the distance taken up towards Triboar. In the journeys system, each of these routes has a different Journey Difficulty. You might not outright tell your characters, but you can signal to them which route might be faster, or slower, or most dangerous based on rumors and discussion by travelers at an inn or tavern. Whatever the characters choose, their choice has real consequences in terms of the number of encounters and how likely they are to fail their checks along the way.

The journeys system, like other attempts at travel systems before it, provides party member roles. Where these succeed are their relative simplicity. They provide simple opportunities for players to make meaningful contributions to the party on the journey. It is easy enough to put these descriptions on an index card or pass the text to each player in a VTT so they can fulfill their party role. Each class or character build can fill roles in unique ways, incentivizing the use of certain skills and tool proficiencies that otherwise are rarely used. I think about the artificer in my previous Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign who had tons of cool tool proficiencies that also served as character flavor, but that I didn’t really engage with from the GM side. That character would have made an outstanding Quartermaster in the journeys system. There are ways that each class can contribute on a journey, but depending on party makeup there can be gaps in capability, which in my opinion simply serves to reinforce the power of player choice by providing real consequences for those decisions.

The preparations that players can take prior to the journey also provide similar opportunities to reward creative play ideas while resolving them within the familiar skill check structure. These are varied to allow many different types of characters to contribute and include doing research, hiring help, prepping a hearty meal for the party, and more. I really enjoy the flavor of these choices, and some of them like carousing offer both benefits and negatives for a failed check that really add to the storytelling.

Perhaps the largest departure from regular play is the restriction of resting while on a journey. I very much like this choice, as it imposes clear and real risks and forces the players to be strategic in when and if they choose to take their one short rest on the journey, incurring another encounter. Luckily except on an extremely difficult journey with very poor rolls the vast majority of encounters that will be generated are non-combat, and the hazards should largely be setbacks that increase the dramatic tension. This also breaks up and varies your encounters, meaning that you can have more than just combat encounters, but still have dynamic and interesting combat encounters. The book also suggests to insert scripted or set piece encounters that enhance your story as you will. So just roll for an encounter like normal in the journey system and insert an encounter that you think is necessary or relevant to your narrative.

Of less precedence, but still very interesting are the chapter about generating NPC encounters along the way, along with ancient ruins. Both are much less groundbreaker, but still provide utility for a GM looking to generate additional content. Between the two my personal favorite is the chapter on ancient ruins, which I think can both help create adventure locations or just for points of interest on a journey. Some other discussion of this section has suggested that it’s too bad that it doesn’t allow for dynamic dungeon generation, but I think this misses the intent. The ruins generated by a few rolls in the chapter don’t necessarily need to be dungeons. They can simply be described locations that provide narrative information or lore. If you are inspired by what is generated and draw up a map, all the better. I will agree though, that this chapter is best used to prompt inspiration during prep time, not dynamically create content during the game.

The encounters section provides many interesting and varied encounters to employ on journeys. Additionally, though it hasn’t been much focused on in examinations of Uncharted Journeys, taking encounters from adventure modules and using them when the appropriate category comes up isn’t hard and is a great way to reinforce your narratives and integrate existing content into the journey system. There are also encounters and journey rules for sea journeys. I prefer the simplicity of these rules to those of Ghosts of Saltmarsh for instance, but they can be combined with the combat rules from Ghosts or even Spelljammer. There are plenty of varied biomes or environments for encounters too (you’ll probably need to build your own for Wildspace or the Astral Sea—which I may do on the site if I feel inspired one day).

I plan on using the journey rules in my upcoming Storm King’s Thunder campaign, and to a lesser degree in my Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen campaign too. If anything new stands out to me I’ll definitely write a follow-up. This system is well suited to any adventure that features significant travel, particularly optimized for overland travel, and I look forward to seeing how my players engage with it.

Piety Rewards

One focus area I’m working to improve as a GM on is providing rewards to my players for their efforts to role play and take their character in interesting directions of their own choosing. 

In my Lost Mine of Phandelver campaign I have a light cleric of Helm who does a great job roleplaying their devotion to their deity. In a recent session the party visited Helms Hold on their way to the ruins of Thundertree, and the cleric took the time to pray in the Cathedral of Helm...while of course the rogue pilfered from the offerings box. How can we reward great roleplaying like that?

Inspiration is a great way to reward players for roleplaying (when you remember to hand it out), but I think that the cleric's efforts deserve a more substantial (and more mechanical) reward.

I found the inspiration for how to implement this from a YouTube video by WebDM on the book Mythic Odysseys of Theros. They suggest that it almost acts as a sort of Deities & Demigods for 5e, just that you can “file the serial numbers off” and take the piety rewards for devotees of the various gods for use with the pantheon of your own world of choice.

As an example, I took the rewards for the god Helios and modified the flavor slightly so they could go to a follower of Helm. The powers from a couple appropriately themed gods became those of the wizard acolyte of Oghma.

I think this tip from WebDM is a great idea, especially to make use of the design work done for no fewer than fifteen gods in Theros. This also happily squeezes more value out of this book than it merely being a Magic the Gathering or a pseudo-mythic Greek setting (I will get around to a reaction post about Theros eventually). The mechanics for these gods effects also provide good templates to create additional ones for more specialized or distinct portfolios depending on your own pantheon. There are other similar systems, like Concordance from Strongholds & Followers, but I think the Theros implementation is particularly robust in terms of design that can reward a player throughout play. 

In the future I’d like to explore the theme of divine power in D&D, along with looking at various products and supplements that look at this topic. There are also only a few of these types of beings that have stat blocks, which is another area I’d like to explore, at the upper reaches of CR where reality and collective play experience start to get thin.

Spelljammer 5e Reactions

The big bearded holiday fellow with the tiny fey and sleigh pulled by animal familiars left me a copy of Spelljammer under my artificial tree this year. Let’s take a look. There will be spoilers about the adventure Light of Xaryxis and the monsters, so jump off the train now if that’ll put a pin in your future fun.

So what do I think of Spelljammer? First off, I’ll agree with one of the big critiques which others have already voiced of the slipcase set (which is beautifully produced with fantastic art). It’s a bit thin, and the material would’ve probably been better presented to the user as one larger hardback. Much as I love the cover art on each of these books, they are about as thick as my kiddo’s picture books, and that’s basically what they feel like when you read them with the heavy, almost card stock paper that’s obviously been chosen to fill out the books volume. It is much easier to sit and read one of these picture—I mean game books. 

The brevity meant that Boo’s Astral Menagerie is the only bestiary on my shelf that I’ve been able to read in an evening and only the second one I’ve read through completely, cover-to-cover (I went on a Monster Manual binge read early during my time in the hobby). Maybe at some point I revisit how the monsters play, but not having used them yet, I can’t necessarily speak to that. The random encounter tables are quite good though, and I would definitely use them. They aren’t organized into separate tables by CR though, only by environment, so they may not necessarily be balanced for your group (and the GM is forced to do their own encounter math if they want to balance it). The tables are however weighted to try to minimize encounters with the high CR monsters. The attitude roll to determine potential hostility or friendliness is a helpful tool though that I think can spur some interesting improvisation. I know it’s a bit low rent to include monsters from another source in addition to the Monster Manual or SRD, but wouldn’t have minded seeing some suggestions using Mordenkainen Presents Monsters of the Multiverse either (it has plenty of monsters that are native or work in the Spelljammer setting—I mean, an Astral Dreadnaught is on the cover!). The ship encounters table is very flavorful and offers some great inspiration for how to flesh out your own NPC Spelljammer ships. Captains’ names and full crews included.

As for the monsters included, I very much enjoyed their descriptions and saw some interesting abilities from some of the stat blocks I read. Most are concentrated in the 0-10 CR range, which is where most of your play happens. There tend to be a lot of low CR, NPC-type stat blocks for various ancestries of spacefaring creatures, which seems designed to allow you to populate a ship with a number of lower CR creatures. As we’ll get to, there’s not a ton of setting details presented in the set, but the monster descriptions do a lot of heavy lifting and might even redeem the product as far as usability. I like the Psurlons as a nasty group of aberrations that work with Mindflayers when convenient. There’s plenty of interesting creatures to populate adventures with as far as I’m concerned. If you need more, grab some wacky monsters from Kobold Press. Some of their weirder creations will gel better with the Spelljammer setting than they do in Kobold Press’ default Midgard setting (and I say that with affection for Midgard).

The adventure, Light of Xaryxis, takes the Astral Elves included in the monster book and as player characters and makes them morally ambiguous bad guys harvesting the light force from other worlds to continue powering their own dying sun that gives them great magic and power. Pretty dope. Even cooler because they give you that summary at the beginning instead of forcing the GM to read the end to actually figure out who the bad guys are. The adventure module is for characters of fifth to eighth level, and this brings up some advice in the book that I quite appreciate; how to set up higher level characters to start a campaign. The advice is to build up to fifth level as written in the Player’s Handbook and then to give them 625 gp to spend on additional non magical gear, and give each character an uncommon magic item of your choice (they suggest the latter if you are “running a high magic campaign,” but I don’t really think Spelljammer is for you at all if you’re into low magic. The magical flying ships and space whales have sailed on that—pun intended and no apologies). It also makes me wonder why no advice on starting at higher levels is provided in the core rules. Might have been helpful…

The adventure is episodic in the style of Flash Gordon (which the writers recommend you go watch to really capture the adventure style). It’s a fairly linear jaunt across Wildspace and the Astral Plane to multiple systems. The adventure’s descriptions of Xaryxis Space and the Doomspace systems does double duty, as according to the Astral Adventurer’s Guide they are intended to be examples for you to create your own Wildspace systems and locales. I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed them as examples, but the taste made me wish that this product included greater GM support in the form of more examples, or blank star maps that could be labeled with your own systems. That leads into my thoughts on the Astral Adventure’s Guide.

The Astral Adventure’s Guide again clocks in at 64 pages. It features sections on the unique rules of Wildspace and the Astral Sea. However, it omits rules on color pools, instead referring the reader to the DMG. The book also includes almost no setting information, instead acting mainly as a catalog of various deck plans and short descriptions of Spelljammer vessels. There’s also the character rules, but no additional subclasses, which feels like a missed opportunity. I also noticed that my set is one of the original printings without the corrected errata and changes to the problematic sections about the Hadozee (I’ll probably print a copy of the errata to stick in the book as a reference at some point). Finally it concludes with a very short section of the Rock of Bral that largely seems to be a rehash of the original Spelljammer accessory product of the same name (which is far more detailed). I do like the Rock of Bral as an adventure or almost extraplanar hub (it sits in Wildspace in whatever system you find most convenient), but the level of detail almost makes this a players guide, not a more detailed GM-focused product as it purports to be. This book could have been much more useful with random adventure seed tables and setting information included with random tables for non-combat encounters, like a Fizban’s or Bigby’s. As is, there is just not much support for the GM to create their own content or inspire creativity beyond the static examples provided by the adventure.

For those interested, the GM screen isn’t terrible in my opinion, at least for my style of play, but it does leave some important Spelljammer rules off. A lot of space is devoted to reprinting the random encounter tables from the monster book, which can be helpful for improv. Relevant rules like suffocating and weightlessness are also included, along with illustrations of the Astral plane and the way gravity works in Wildspace (I don’t know that I think the illustrations are necessary). What is missing is any sort of ship crew roles on the screen and the rules about how long air bubbles last (so basically most of the included new rules that you probably need to run aren’t there).

All in all, I don’t regret getting the set (I have it on good authority that bearded fellow found them for 38 bucks), but I wouldn’t grab them at full price. All that aside, while there’s some interesting details in the set, overall it really is lacking in detail, nor does it tie in will or include additional lore about the creatures to be found in the Astral Sea and Wildspace (you’ll have to find old copies of Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes and Volo’s Guide to Monsters if you want lore about some like Githyanki, Elves, and Beholders beyond their basic monster descriptions). You’ll need to do a lot of your own work to come up with adventure locations in the Spelljammer setting, but if you’re interested in gaining a little bit more information about the setting then picking it up with some of the older Spelljammer titles up from DriveThruRPG is probably worth it.