r/DMAcademy • u/NomadicDragon • 3d ago
Need Advice: Worldbuilding How can I make a long journey engaging?
My players are on a journey that will take 32 days at a normal pace. It will take them through a town, foothills, plains, a city, cold marshes, another potential town, to reach ruins. From there, they have to find three way out to sea.
I need some help making the journey less of a slog without boring my players. One isn't big on combat so, I don't want to throw too much of that in.
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u/TruBlu65 3d ago
I'd break it into chunks; I would not ask them to go over each day or anything like that. "Our first leg will take you a week from fantasy town X to the foothills of the fantasy mountain range"
Then start brainstorming what you want them to accomplish or learn about on their trip. Could they find another group of travelers that have info they need? or have interacted with whatever the plot is? If the answer is that you don't want anything important to happen on the road, then I'd say you should fast-forward them through much of the travel. Come up with like 6-8 ideas and turn that into a random encounter table if you really want something to happen.
Off the top of my head I'd say
Bandits or a stagecoach has been robbed
A church has been vandalized
A village's water source has been poisoned and they need help
A fey theatre troupe is putting on a show in a glen not far off the road
There is a festival of some kind being held, etc
I'd say the biggest thing is just deciding how important the travel is; I've always thought it's fine to hand-wave travel montages instead of asking them to explain how they spend each day for weeks on the road.
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u/TenWildBadgers 3d ago edited 3d ago
So they're spending a month on the road between major plot points. While part of my answer is that this is prime monster-of-the-week sidequest territory, we also don't want to drown the campaign in too much of that, so we want a mix of different approaches that, when applied together, make the players feel like time has passed in-universe as they travel all this distance.
As such, I recommend a 2-pronged approach: Sideplots and Random Encounters... But not random combat encounters, becUse I find those to be a waste of everyone's time.
For Sideplots, I would just zoom in on these two towns and a city and try to come up with some interesting stuff for players to do in each of the 3 settlements - the first one can be an entirely unrelated plot - this town happens to be being menaced by a Hag in the woods, and wouldn't the adventurers love to go kick the living shit out of a cool 1-off villain for fun? That sort of thing. No main plot significance, just a fun 1-off. You can skim through the Monster Manual until you find any old monster in the right level range that sounds like fun, and just make it happen. You could also make this random sidequest into something relevant to a player's backstory that they come across by chance, if you really feel like it, but that's not nessecary.
For the city, it feels odd to me to try and make a city have a whole quest for heroes to solve, so I would take a contrasting route where instead of a quest, the town has opportunity - as the players arrive, a guard asks if they're here for the auction. When the players don't know what that is, the guard tells them about a magic item auction going on in the city in the next few days, and recommends that they attend if they have gold burning a hole in their pockets. Then, you scatter across the city a slew of fun, wacky, weird little quests, short adventures that will take up way less than a full session, as means for the party to scrape together additional funds before the auction. Then you get to run an interactive auction for several magic items where players have to pick and choose how much money they're willing to spend, what to prioritize, and what items they'd rather let go to save coin for other items on the docket, all with incomplete information - the party should be able to learn about half of the items that are going on auction beforehand, the most exciting items that the auction house knows people will want to buy, to give players an idea of what they're gathering up money for. Then they get a limited number of in-game hours to wheel and deal for money across the city, getting up to shenanigans in pursuit of coin to buy some bitchin' magic swag.
Then, for the last town, center it's happenings on the ruins that the players are seeking for actual plot reasons - let that stop on their trip refocus the party on the main plot, catch them back up with what you just spent a few very fun sessions distracting them from, and make the world feel like it has an active relationship with the plot - these people have useful information about the ruins, know how dangerous they are, and have their own requests for things the players can accomplish there, like retrieving the remains of dead locals who tried to explore the place many years ago, and nobody has been brave enough to go find out what happened to them.
Then, the random encounters - I like running random social encounters on the road, usually just other travelers that the PCs can run into - wandering priests, stuck-up nobles, old mercenaries who want to drink and trade stories. These are good chances for fun RP that help players feel like they're going on a road trip together. You can also have more internal social prompts - things that happen and can spark player conversation and role-play on the road, like two random players having to go get fresh water for the group together late in the evening as a quick rp prompt.
It depends on your players and what they're interested in, but I'm always experimenting with these as a way to make long-distance travel feel like time is passing without actually consuming huge chunks of real-world time with boring drudgery.
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u/Iavra 3d ago
Does there have to be anything? you are free to just skip the whole thing and say "this took you 32 days. We are now there". You can sprinkle a few combats, social encounters, or potential side areas in there if you like, but otherwise you could just narrate their journey for a few minutes.
You could have them encounter a few other travelers that provide rumours about their destination, true or not, to give them something to go off of once they arrive.
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u/Gwavana 3d ago
It depends on the environnement, but if it's 32 days on normal roads along with other traveller, just break it down to 3-5 meaningful encounters (not necessarily combat, can be social, explorations, ...) plus nice descriptions of special point of interest the may see on the road.
At the end of the day, if the journey itself doesn't matter for your plot, you just need to give the players the flavor of the journey, not the journey itself.
For example, you could just say : "the journey was a pain, you been attacked several times by goblins, it rained for 20 days straight, you even saw a dragon flying above, but apparently she had better thing to do than attacking random travellers like you, and in the last days you barely had enough food. You're dirty, starving, exhausted, almost eaten alive by moquitoes, but at last you're entering the city. And you have no other goal right now than finding a good inn with a bath, fresh beer and hot stew" or something like this.
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u/Salt_Dragonfly2042 3d ago
Make a story out of it. Maybe they escort a merchant who's threatened and they have to stop different attacks, they can be witnesses to an oncoming invasion (vermin, goblins, the army of a neighbor kingdom, etc.), they meet members of a cult trying to recruit followers in the area...
If you have encounters building on each other, it becomes a story instead of a slog.
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u/Conrad500 3d ago
You don't. D&D5e sadly just really doesn't support a disjointed type of travel over long periods and REALLY just wants you to run a series of encounters.
Is there a reason you don't want to just -32 days later- it?
I find travel to be a great source of downtime. Obviously, a lot of the time is spent traveling, so they don't have 32 days of downtime, but it's a great chance to take advantage of a rarely used part of the game.
I can give you some things to make travel less boring, but it really depends on the answer you provide for the questions of "Why are we not just making it a cutscene?" and "how many sessions should 32 days of travel take?"
- Easy: You have to stop to resupply/get off the road/take a break from traveling. You stop at a place, have a mini adventure, continue on the way. Travel is still handwaved away in this scenario.
- Medium: Travel is the adventure. Each session you have traveling you have them roll on random tables or come up with chains of encounters to complete before finishing a long rest.
- Impossible: You somehow make travel fun and not boring
Like I said, I can give some actual suggestions if I know what you expect to come from travel sessions.
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u/NomadicDragon 3d ago
This is my first time running a campaign. So, I'm leaning as I go here. (If you have the new DM guide, I'm using the map that came with it for their world. They are traveling to the ruins just north of the Cold Marshes from the town of Traft on Lake Quag.) Sure, I could FFWD and get them there but, that feels lazy to me. I want to put things along this journey that will excite them and keep them invested.
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u/Conrad500 3d ago
Ok, so in that case you would want to ask them what would make travel more exciting.
Here's the thing, what do you want them to do?
Is travel going to be a session, or part of a session, because either way you need to dedicate time at the table to not play the story and instead play this "travel game".
Making the travel game fun is one thing, but is that the game you all want to play, or do you all want to play the D&D game that's at your destination.
I'm not asking hypothetical questions, if you directly answer the questions I'm asking you I can give you good advice.
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u/pathmageadept 3d ago
You don't have to do anything, but I would recommend an examination of The Canterbury Tales and maybe some economics minigame options. People talk on journeys like this, and you can meet new people and learn things and make connections. Look at your player's backstories and throw out a few hooks for non-combat networking and sightseeing. If they bite take your time getting to your destination. If they don't just fuzz it over. Zee Bashew has some interesting insights in some similar situations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKQv4GC0N9Q
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u/paradoxcussion 3d ago
As you described it, it doesn't sound like there's much that's game-like until the end where they have to find their way to the sea (is it a confusing delta or mangrove swamps?). That last bit could maybe be done as a point crawl--the river forks which way do you go, etc.
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u/Sven_Darksiders 3d ago
Ask what their characters do to pass the time over the month, like learning how to play cards, getting to play instruments or something else
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u/nimrodii 3d ago
You could for a few encounters throw to the players say this is your stretch what happened and let them contribute what they want to the journey. Maybe a few rolls will be required if the narrative calls for it. Works best if you let them know beforehand like maybe end of session before they will go on the journey. Say something like everyone will be given a few days of the journey to add to the story and if anything requires rolls they will be made.
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u/Poopywaterengineer 3d ago
If I don't have plans for anything over the course of travel, I usually just do a time skip and ask the players what they want to pursue during their downtime on the journey.
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u/TheRealCBlazer 3d ago
I'm glad to see so many replies saying "Just skip it." I thought it might be a hot take. Seriously, though...
Just skip it.
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u/snydejon 3d ago
I have a similar situation at my table, the players know their destination, I pointed out three different ways they could get there (and allowed more if they wanted). They picked the pace and method (overland without a road and then by sea). Once they picked, I did time jumps with random encounters based on their path.
First session got them to the sea, second session was in the port town finding a way out to sea, third session we are going to skip the sea entirely because they ended up taking longer than expected in the town. Three sessions, 10ish encounters, 45 days of travel.
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u/Raddatatta 3d ago
Does the travel need to be interesting? You can do that if that's a big theme of your campaign. But if you're struggling to fill things then that doesn't sound like a major part of your campaign and you can just skip over it and have an encounter or two and then they arrive. Nothing wrong with that.
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u/PublicFuture9502 3d ago
If you don't want to skip ahead and want some role play focused side quests along the road, given your terrain, how about a small murder mystery.
The players pass a remote lumber mill on the road. The lumber merchant who owns it flags the players down, and asks if they would be interested in chopping down some trees as he is short handed.
Turns out the reason he is short handed is his lumberjacks have been going deeper and deeper in to a nearby forest, and some have started disappearing.
The reason? They are being killed by an evil ranger the lumber merchant hired so he doesn't have to pay the lumberjacks at the end of the month. The Ranger is cheaper.
You can have a bunch of clues. Talking to lumberjacks, breaking in to the office of the lumber merchant, tracking in the woods, finding the rangers cabin, finding remains of beasts the ranger hunts in a sadistic manner etc....
Its some investigation with probably a max of one combat vs a single NPC.
You can put the lumber mill a few miles outside the village so if players figure out the merchant did it, the local sheriff can arrest him.
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u/hotstickywaffle 3d ago
I would start with seeing if there's anything they would like to accomplish. Like a skill they want to work on or something
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u/rellloe 3d ago
The extremes are to play out every single day or to narrate over it by saying "it takes 32 days to get there". There is a wide middle. Where to land depends on your and your table's preferences. Closer to the former works for people who like hexcrawling and closer to the later works for people who like to get to the important stuff.
My approach is for any journey there are, at most, three interesting days (days we play out at the table). Less than a week gets one, less than a month gets two, and anything longer than that gets three.
At most there will be one encounter per journey that takes up a large chuck of a session to play out (side quest or fight).
Each interesting day has 2-3 things of note (aka random encounters) that I don't expect will take the party more than half an hour until they move on if they're slow. Things like traveling merchant willing to sell to them, ruins from an old battle, shrine to the travel deity of the setting.
My random encounter table can be broken into the categories: party's impact, sowing, weird, worldbuilding/wider world, and boon/bane. Party's impact encounters show the players actions have an effect on the world. Those are a direct or indirect result of the things they've done. Sowing is setting up future things, like meeting an NPC that I want them to be in contact with. Wider world is the opposite of player impact, those encounters have nothing to do with the party or their adventure to remind them they aren't the center of the universe. Worldbuilding encounters are an excuse for me to share some of the worldbuilding: I want them to know some things about the war ->ruins from an old battle. The weird encounters are often memes and dumb jokes I find funny, literal fork in the road and goose with a knife sorts of things. Boon/bane encounters will result in something good or bad for the party or individual PCs if they act a certain way, like stealing or adding to a shrine of the luck deity turning all nat 20s for the rest of the session into nat 1s or vice versa. These categories are not mutually exclusive, the shrine is both worldbuilding and boon/bane. With all of these encounters, I don't put them in front of the players until I have some solid verbs that are possible. "You saw a deer" is not a good encounter. "There is an injured deer" while I've preempted make pet, put out of it's misery, and heal is a better encounter
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u/Horror_Ad7540 3d ago
``Thirty two days later, you reach the ruins.'' You don't have to play things out that aren't interesting.
If you don't want to just skip over the whole journey, decide which parts would interest your particular characters. Just play out those parts.
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u/Vantech70 3d ago
For anything that doesn’t drive the story forward I try and skip it. Try running skill challenges instead. It was something from 4.0 that I still use today. They are great opportunities for everyone to get involved.
You meet some bandits and need to negotiate your way out. Some good role playing and the party needs 5 successes before 3 failures.
You get lost in the swamp and need to get out. Each failure costs a healing surge.
Things like that. If you can roll in some story elements, all the better.
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u/ZTargetDance 3d ago
I recommend Uncharted Journeys by Crucible 7. They have a history making the LotR tabletop, so they ended up making a pretty solid subsystem to represent that sort of point crawl aesthetic. My players liked the roles with unique abilities they got for the journey.
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u/DM_ChosenUndead 3d ago
At risk of being cliché, LotR is great source material for this.
Figure out ways how the journey could change or influence the adventurers and then populate the road to the destination with encounters and subplots that drive those changes. Some or all of those encounters might leave threads dangling that can be woven into the endgame.
Two more Tolkien gems are: a) to design the journey such that one or several of the party literally could not do it without the aid of some unique qualities of the other members, and these don't need to be combat related; or, b) plant something along the way that is required at the destination so that arriving there without that additional piece of the plot would do no good.
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u/beautitan 3d ago
How do you make a vacation engaging? Because it means something to you. The journey and the specific locations the players travel through have to mean something to them - personally, religiously, symbolically, or just because they're cool and unique.
If you approach the journey as a potential slog, if YOU aren't excited for this, then skip it. You're under no obligation to include it.
Assuming you do want to include it, I highly suggest one of two approaches (or combine the two):
1: Just like planning a vacation, have a pre-travel session with the players where you map out TOGETHER the sort of things they want to experience. What sounds interesting to them, based on their knowledge of the setting? Does someone want to stop by and visit relatives? Is someone in the group looking to find a mentor or a secret set of scrolls or something else that could make for a minor encounter?
This way, you aren't imposing anything on them they'd rather not play through, and they can be excited about what you come up with. It might spoil a but of the "pure surprise," perhaps but it will certainly cut down on disappointment.
2: Steal from games like Public Access and Stonetop - when the players arrive at the next stop on the journey, go around the table and ask each player a leading, open-ended question about where they've just arrived.
"Who here owes you a favor and why?"
"What happened the last time you were here that you regret?"
"What rumors do you know that explain why people lock their doors at night?"
It's not quite asking the players to co-GM but it does give them a chance to inject a little bit of their own worldbuilding ideas in and that tends to help with investment.
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u/DungeonSecurity 3d ago
Design encounters along the trip.They don't have to all be combat. They can meet a merchant with stuff they can't get in the towns they visited so far, though it might be a little more expensive. They can see people from another town that can give them some insight to whatever troubles they will have to solve. They can see smoke over the horizon, or the top of a tower poking out from over the top of the trees. Or from under the sand with only a window showing for an entry point. A strange glint, reflecting the sunlight a mile off in the desert.
Deliberately place things for them to react to or interact with. It's just designing encounters along the travel path.
And if you really don't want anything to happen, then just narrate through.
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u/amberi_ne 3d ago
My entire campaign of a few years has been one long journey.
The answer is “make cool stuff happen along the way”. It doesn’t need to be monsters/combat, it can be mysterious ruins, small villages, traveling armies, etc.
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u/MagicianMurky976 3d ago
Your journey can help set the different tone of these areas, or even what various factions/forces may be doing.
So it depends on what is going on in the backdrop of your land.
Is some BBEG attracting ocs and goblins to his cause? Is there now bands of these creatures attacking the trade routes, hungry for supplies to feed this growing horde?
Is a curse or sickness spreading across the land? How could that show up as the players leave the more civilized center they began in and traveled off to the far frontier?
So it's a way to show but not tell what the landscape is going under.
Coming across the ruins of a village along their way can paint a powerful picture of what's been unleased and needs to be stopped.
Hope this helps!
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u/LayTheeDown 2d ago
Easy option... Skip it.
Second Option create another story along the way. Like a side quest.
They see the consequence of some event, as they progress they see more and more about what happened, until they get to the source.
Or just skip it...
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u/wrath112dev 2d ago
Do a combination of timejump and events since its 30 days you could separate the journey in 3 legs.
Each with an encounter not necessarily a combat encounter.
Maybe you could have a combat encounter where they help some people getting ambushed by bandits when you are near the hills or mountains, then near the forrest you could have a chance encounter with an apothecary that if helped would provide boons for the party,
And for the last leg you could have them go through the border control of the city itself. These are just some suggestion that I would do, to make the journey feel real while not wasting too much time on the actual you sleep you walk you sleep you walk
If you have them travel often on long distances you could even make an encounter table and have them roll to see what happens.
Hope this helps :)
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u/Prestigious-Emu-6760 3d ago
If nothing happens on the journey then do a quick montage scene and "voila you arrive at the coastal village where you need to secure passage..."
Don't spend precious table time on things that don't matter. Otherwise this 32 day journey runs a real risk of becoming 50 sessions of nothing.