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.
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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment