So yesterday we had a great game session where the
characters ventured out into the wilderness in the pursuit of various adventure
hooks, some campaign-specific and some plainly mercenary. There were forgotten
ruins, great stone heads vomiting poisonous snakes, a griffin attack on the
party’s lone horse thwarted by a very fortunate gust of wind spell,
mountain lakes with magical ice, a mud pit full of giant leeches a PC just
walked into, and mysterious stone circles with runic messages. A good time was
had by all. The evening before yesterday, I was panicking over a blank piece of
paper and The Tome of Adventure Design, trying to make a few feeble
sparks of creativity catch on fire while the clock was ticking away. That
happens every time I write a wilderness adventure, and no matter the practice and
the fact that I’m quite good at running them, it doesn’t get much better.
Writing wilderness adventures is surprisingly hard if we don’t fall back on a
few overused concepts (which I’ll discuss below).
There is a good reason so many D&D adventures
take place in dungeons, and that’s not just because descending into a
mysterious underworld full of danger and riches is such a compelling idea.
Dungeons are one of the most successful game structures, balancing
ease of use with a lot of potential for complexity and depth. And of course, a
lot of the rules (including spell descriptions) apply to dungeons, or are
formulated in the context of dungeons. Dungeons gave us the original language
for location-based adventures, and this legacy shows up in most game materials,
even those that don’t describe dungeons per se, but look and feel like
them anyway. “Dungeon-likes” may be the most common form of RPG scenario next
to mission-based ones.
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| Scorpion Swamp: the original pointcrawl |
Sadly, the OD&D booklets never developed a
comparably powerful engine for adventuring above ground. There are a lot of
fascinating ideas scattered in the text of The Underworld & Wilderness
Adventures which outline some kind of implied setting, but I am not sure Gary & Co. ever used them that cohesively or
comprehensively. Whatever its virtues, it didn’t catch the popular imagination
and was pretty much forgotten until interest was rekindled in OD&D in the
2000s. Pretty much the same happened to Judges Guild’s simple and amazingly
functional campaign hexagon system – there are a lot of hex maps in
1980s and 1990s game products, but they are vestigial, used only to
measure distances, and not to structure and run game space. On the other side
of the coin, the wilderness exploration guidelines in the AD&D Dungeon
Masters Guide don’t form a complete system: they are disconnected ideas
which relate to running a wilderness, but don’t present clear procedures you
should follow in play. In the end, more space in the DMG is dedicated to aerial
combat than designing a wilderness. The Fighting Fantasy gamebook series had
the great Scorpion Swamp by Steve Jackson (the American one), which mapped
a swamp on a square grid consisting of “clearings”, each with some kind of
encounter in it. This was perhaps the best model for a non-linear wilderness
game, but it didn’t really cross-pollinate tabletop games.
We know a lot about the megadungeon (“the mythic underworld”), but
we don’t even have an approximately developed idea about the... megawilderness
(Moorcock called it “the exotic landscape” in Wizardry and Wild Romance).
The wilderness as a place of fantastic dangers, natural wonders, monstrous
adversaries and lost history has even more precedents in fantasy literature
than big dungeons, and wilderness maps are a very big thing in fantasy fandom,
but it has not been distilled into a coherent package of rules, guidelines and building
blocks. The closest is the hex-crawl, which gives you large-scale travel based
on day-to-day movements on a hex map, features of interest to explore, and
random encounter charts to complicate things. It is the best way I know to run
grand expeditions. But even the mighty Judges Guild stumbled when it came to
packaging a smaller piece of wilderness into an adventure. Hexes fail when they
are applied to finer terrain (there is both too many and not enough of them),
and that doesn’t even cover filling the wilderness with interesting encounters.
***
The consequences have been with us ever since.
Where running a place consisting of connected rooms and passages has
established standards and a lot of helpful techniques and idea generators, the
same does not apply to running an open landscape. In the absence of translating
the idea of traversing fantastic landscapes and discovering danger and riches
therein into a gameable thing, we have a tendency to reach for crutches and
substitutes.
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| Eriador, land of poor road planning |
One of the big ones is roads. Roads connect
big hubs of activity like cities and dungeons, and they can have interesting
stops (inns, encounters, things to see and roadside lairs to explore), which
makes for an exciting journey. Roads can be concrete or figurative (rivers,
valleys, etc.). Roads are the easiest, but they are also lazy and they make
players lazy. Like the overly linear dungeon, they cultivate bad habits and
lack the true feeling of discovery. For all the care I invest in my wilderness
maps, my players still have an annoying habit of staying on the roads, and
missing out on several points of interest. I either have to point them directly
at the vicinity, or yank the rug from underneath their feet to prod them into
expedition mode. This is a big reason why my settings increasingly lack
developed road networks, and occasional trails taper off after a few hexes.
(Seas and large bodies of water also encourage a sort of open exploration
approach.)
Another substitute for deep wilderness action is to
populate the wilderness with dungeons instead of treating it as one. This
is the classic case of falling back on familiar modes of play to avoid getting tangled
up in a less defined one. Mini-dungeons are easy to develop on a tight time
budget, and they give a good bang for the buck. But the moment you are entering
a mini-dungeon is also the moment you are exiting the wilderness. You can even
see it in Wilderlands of High Fantasy, whose wilderness is populated with
“Citadels & Castles”, “Ruins & Relics”, “Idyllic Islands” and “Lurid
Lairs”. They are very much about non-wildernessy things you find in the
wilderness.
The third substitute is to use monster encounters,
and lots of them. This is largely logical – you stock a dungeon with dungeon
monsters, and you stock a wilderness with wilderness monsters. The monsters
have lairs and they can also be found roaming at random and maybe having
conflicts and interactions with each other. But just like a dungeon filled with
monster closets feels one-note, so does a wilderness filled with monster
closets.
Perhaps we are still missing the forest for the
trees?
***
So then what about true wilderness play? There is
no big solution in this post, and some of it feels a bit obvious to restate –
but here it goes. It should be something analogous to a developed dungeon, but
use the fantastic game logic of the exotic landscape instead of the
fantastic game logic of the mythic underworld. It should be intuitively
understandable and easy to replicate in preparation and play. Here are just a
few things which I think deserve thought and attention.
There should be a robust movement system
to help players navigate. This can be a combination of the point-crawl
(a system of lines connecting encounters in an interesting way, like a dungeon’s
corridors and rooms), landmark-based navigation (approaching, avoiding,
or leaving behind natural and man-made landmarks and distinct terrain features),
and compass-based movement (move in any of the eight cardinal and
ordinal directions). This system should be gamey, but flexible, with broad
applicability. No need to figure movement points or cross-reference encumbrance
with terrain types, but there should be a way to let both the GM and the
players describe the party’s movement through the wilds in simple terms.
It is useful to have good, simple procedures for
exploration. Dungeoneering procedures tell you how to get across a chasm,
keep an expedition’s progress lit, batter down a door and so on. Likewise, wilderness
procedures should tell us about foraging for food, keeping watch at night, navigating
a treacherous mountain trail, taking care of pack animals, and spotting important
landmarks from a distance. None of these should be more complicated than a few
routine player decisions and a few dice rolls – after all, the emphasis is on dangerous
and fantastic things, and the exploration procedures serve to ground them in a
sense of reality.
Connected to the previous point, there is perhaps
some need to reconsider game rules from the wilderness perspective. This
is not a new thing, since things worked differently in OD&D’s dungeons and
wilderness sections, but it has been only inadequately explored. If, say,
spells were written with
the dungeon in mind, how do they work in a forest? In the mountains? Can I
lift a fallen tree from our path with an open doors check?
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| Mapping a wilderness |
But above all, we should reconsider what makes a
good wilderness encounter. Beyond monster encounters, dungeons have flavour
(dungeon dressing), traps, tricks and enigmas. What are the equivalents out on
a wilderness site? This is the main question. Of course, a lot of dungeon accoutrements
have a place in the wilderness. Mysterious statues, glittering pools, or deep chasms
with something interesting down on the bottom feel as much at home in an
enchanted forest as in the underworld. Mechanical traps and secret doors are
harder to find counterparts for. Treacherous ground? Malevolent vegetation?
Something hidden in the roots of a massive tree? These should be encounters where
the characters can observe, experiment, and come up with unorthodox ideas to cut
Gordian knots. How do we get across a raging river? Do we take the
slippery-looking and altogether too convenient bridge, or do we create our own
rope bridge? How do we investigate a seemingly abandoned hut? These open
questions make for memorable adventures full of improvisation and ‘Eureka!’
moments.
The greatest potential lies in putting ideas from
adventure novels, movies, mythology and fantasy into the context of a magical,
gamified landscape, and mashing them up until they are their own thing. These
are the equivalents of the true dungeon trick/enigma, like the enchanted field,
the tree laden with different kinds of magical fruits, the burial grove where
the long dead rise to consult the living, and many such ideas. They are not
about the literal translation of original concepts, but creating something new
through the power of dream logic and loose association. It is somewhere in
these foundations that we will find the true idea of the megawilderness,
and give it a form we can bottle and distribute to other gamers.
