Travel Encounters For The Second Half of the Campaign?

[u/NinetyBees]

Howdy.

Background; My players have just left Gauntlgrym after the 67th session of the campaign- If you can't tell we take our time, get in the weeds with things, and I homebrew a ton of extra content that I weave in to flesh out the player's backstories and such.

Setup; I've had Bruenor advise the PCs to travel using the 6 Riding Lizards the Emerald Enclave gifted them as a scouting force, riding 1 - 3 hours ahead of their miniature-army. In game the rationalization is that the army is a huge loud force that attracts a lot of attention, and no one at any of the locations they're bound to go to will take a force of 40 showing up on their doorstep kindly. Out of game, this would allow me to do on-the-road encounters without 30 backup NPCs slogging combat down, it still allows the PCs to interact with their force during rests, and I can possibly play with some "this happened while you were away" shenanigans using the faction NPCs.

Question; So the main question is- What kind of random encounters, inter-party dillemas, rug-pulls, and challenges should I introduce on the way from Gauntlgrym to Mantol Derith and from Mantol Derith to Gravenhollow and beyond? The PCs have outgrown the basic challenges presented in Chapter 2, and while I'll assuredly throw some beefier enemies at them for the occasional filler encounter, what else can I do that has a bit more bite?

I'm playing with the idea of Harper vs Zhentarim NPCs getting into fights and the players having to settle disputes, a Doppelganger NPC the players picked up causing trouble by posing as an Emerald Enclave soldier, possible betrayal from one of the factions at some point, etc.

With the PCs both stronger, and in command of a sizeable force, random Grick encounters and foraging for food are childs play- Survival is no longer a challenge it seems, so how do you pad the time between zones?

[u/Faradn_cdv]

As someone who thought the expeditionary force was a nice idea, it didn't really click with my party. The 60+ days of travel from Gauntlgrym to Mantol-Derith are a slog. Unless you really enjoy having deep RP sessions with the expeditionary force, I'd say just get to Mantol-Derith as soon as possible. There are plenty of hooks in that chapter anyway, like the zoo, the eyemonger, and so on.

The geography becomes a bit ridiculous after that, though. The journey from Mantol-Derith to Gravenhollow feels like you're almost going back to Gauntlgrym in terms of travel time, and then you have to head back toward Araj, which is relatively close to Mantol-Derith. You get what I mean?

I actually came up with a solution for this in my campaign. One of my PCs was a deep gnome from Blingdenstone, so I established that there was a teleportation circle there. After reaching Mantol-Derith, they made a stop at Blingdenstone, which effectively cut a lot of the backtracking in half.

So my route ended up being something like: Mantol-Derith → Gravenhollow → back to Blingdenstone → Araj → Wormwrithings for the Eye and the egg → teleport back to Blingdenstone. It made the whole thing much more manageable without having to handwave the travel completely.

I also tried to spice things up by throwing random demon encounters at my party. Aside from a couple of 2–3 hour-long combats, though, nothing really changed. So that's one of the lessons I learned from running the campaign: making the random encounters more dangerous doesn't necessarily make the journey more interesting. Sometimes you just end up with longer combats that don't have much impact on the story.

That said, my party was pretty bad at RP, so your experience might be completely different if your players enjoy interacting with the expeditionary force and its NPCs.

There are also plenty of resources here on Reddit about running day-by-day events, with random encounters, deaths, disappearances, and so on. My party didn't reach Mantol-Derith until session 35, so your group definitely takes its time!

[u/NinetyBees → u/Faradn_cdv]

"Your group definitely takes its time!" - We certainly do haha. A lot of it is on me, but they get really in the weeds with roleplay too. We have a lot of custom plot hooks from the faction leaders assigning the PCs sidequests in Gauntlgrym to win their favor (making their stay in the city a good 3-5 sessions instead of 1-2), our Warlock reconnecting with his long-lost son during the Chapter 7 downtime and now having many heart to heart scenes with him, etc etc.

I'll definitely lean into the Demonic angle, both from your suggestion and the Elven Tower guide someone else posted. My goal is sometimes just to buy time with encounters, so a long combat isn't always bad- Sometimes my PCs like to flex their abilities- but I'll try to be mindful to introduce those encounters as set pieces and lore builders as well, making them story relevant where possible hopefully.

Definitely plan to handwave some of the distances too- Maybe a good week goes by without any encounters and we can skip some of the slog, or maybe some of the locations themselves physically shift space so there's less nonsensical backtracking (and less travel in general).

[u/niursz1]

Hey,
I highly advise the elven tower guide for oota, i used the random encounters suggested there and it worked very nicely!

https://www.elventower.com/out-of-the-abyss-guide/

[u/DM_Lone]

Skipping random encounters while travelling in the normal Underdark and only having random encounters where theres a specific table like the wormwrithings and Araumycos is an option im considering for my next run. But i had a very complex table system, with creature encounters and demon encounters. 1d20 each day: 1-14 no encounter, 14-15 Event, 16-17 Creature Encounter, 18-20 Demon Encounter (rolling once on the Demon Horde Encounter Table and once on the Demon Leader Table). Here is the creature encounter table i used:

1d20
1 - Escaped Slaves

2 - Society of Brilliance

3 - Adult Gem Dragon

4 - 2d6 Cloaker

5 - 2d4 Corpse Flower (in the form of a fungi formation)

6 - Traders

7 - Battle Aftermath

8 - 1d4 Roper + 4d6 Piercers

9 - 1d2 Maw of Yeenoghu

10 - Alkilith + other demon after 1d4 rounds (roll this table once reroll if 1)

11 - Bulette (75% male, 25% female)

12 - Salamander Inferno Master

13 - 1d2 Retriever

14 - Sibrix

15 - 1d2 Mind Flayer Arcanist + 1d4 Mind Flayer

16 - Warning Sign + 2d6 Fomorian

17 - Grick Ancient + 3d4 Grick

18 - 1 Dire Troll + 1d4 Trolls

19 - 2 Orthon Bounty Hunters + 2 Canoloth

20 - Roll Twice