Far Marches: Travel

A while ago a built the beginnings of a Travel and Exploration system for Fate Core. It worked...OK, but it never quite hit the mark I was aiming for and so I kept working in it. It sat in the back of my mind for a couple years. Every now and again I would sit down and try to figure a better way to get the results I wanted.

I think the reason it was so muddled was that I was trying to do too much with too little. A subsystem, perhaps, needs a little more meat on the bones or else it just falls over. The other day while I was out on one of my walks an idea struck me. It was not that different from the existing system, but I think it adds a little more tactical depth to the system, making it closer to a mini-game, rather than a necessary part of a larger game. This pleased me, so I thought I would try and work out what that would look like here.

Before you start with this mini-game you need to decide if this will be exploration or travel. They each have different explanations and different goals. Travel is trying to get from point A to point Z by travelling through all, or some of the points between them. The goal is Point Z as quickly and safely as possible. You could add a ticking clock or some such to it, but at its base that is travel. Exploration also has a goal, you are out to find something, though that can be as nebulous as what is over the next hill. Exploration is a bit more leisurely in pace, but more dangerous in practice. I am still working on making this really work. I have been digging into the Louis And Clark Expedition a bit to try and nail down what this sort of thing would look like in reality, and what it looks like in narrative. The fiction is usually focused on Travel more than exploration. I mean take a look at The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings , The Prydain Chronicles, and numerous other fantasy works. People are always going somewhere, they rarely just set out to explore as an end to itself. Though I think Maybe Sword and Planet Novels would be closer to exploration, as a great deal of that genre is about explaining and understanding the worlds and cultures of a new world. Maybe exploration should be its own mini-game separate from travel. I will think on this.

First divide your map into zones that stand between the characters and their goal. I think a hex map would work great for this, but if you want the zones to be a little more nebulous and free wheeling by all means lets go with that. I actually have three different ways of visualizing this and I will try and show examples as we go, or at the end, or somewhere in here. Fingers crossed that this will make sense to someone other than me. OK you got your zones? Good.

Each Zone represents an area that would take about a day to cross on foot(somewhere between 15 and 30 miles depending on the terrain type). Each zone will also have a terrain type aspect: Arctic, Desert, Forest, Jungle, Mountain, Swamp, Water(Ocean, Sea, or Lake), and probably a couple others I have not thought of. Make sure to include the terrain type in the aspect for the zone. It could have more than one type, but for now lets just limit it to one type. So we have the edges of our Zones. The edge is either at the edge of a day's travel or the edge of a terrain type, whichever is nearer. I hope that makes sense.

Now each zone has three possible paths to the next adjacent zone. You have the Easy Path, the Hard Path, and the Hidden Path. Each path will have a given skill attached to it(Or Profession, or Attribute if you are using those options, This doesn't really work with Approaches). Each path will have a difficulty attached to it. The Easy Path starts at a difficulty of +2(Fair). However if you take the easy path the next Zone's exits will have its difficulties increased by +2, this is cumulative. If you take the Hard Path The difficulty is +4(Great), However wit will not increase the difficulty of future travel. The Hidden Path is hidden, The players need to find it before they can use it. You can only use a few skills to find it, things like Lore(for research done ahead of time), Investigate, or Notice will allow you to find it. This difficulty is very high +6(Fantastic), to find it(there is a reason no one uses this path, after all) and the difficulty for getting through it is also +6. However if you can pass through the Hidden Path it behaves like the Hard path, but if Succeed with style you may create an aspect on the next Zone and gain a free invoke of it.

Alrighty, we have the zones, the difficulties for travel between them and what success means for each path. Now we must determine what happens when you fail at the roll. If you fail you have a dangerous encounter. I would like to build a random table to deal with these encounters, as I think that would be a bit of fun. Also there is a lot of fun that can be had playing around with random tables in Fate. So what I would do it something along the lines of this, You have a table for each zone, full of random dangerous encounters, these would be based on the setting and the terrain, and would have all sorts of cool things. It would let the nature of the world be a little bit unpredictable, while still keeping it within the bounds of your setting(Also that reminds me, I need to work out a setting building system for this type of game, as it is fairly specific in tone and setting, but it still needs definition by each table). I think I will devote a whole post to the terrain random encounter tables and how to make them and use them, as that seems like it could take up a lot of idea space and I want to focus on the basics this travel mechanic first.

As each zone is a day's travel, that would imply that you would likely rest between zones. Maybe I should make the zones smaller to increase the amount of problems that accrue before you can rest. Also resting should matter and be interesting so here is an idea for how that would work. So you need to find a good place to rest. If you fail at that then you do not gain your stress back and you have a negative encounter the difficulty for finding a good spot to rest depends on whether you took the Hard Path or the Easy Path. On the Easy Path it is more difficult to find a secluded spot, as monsters and bandits also find this to be the easy path. The Hard Path is much easier to find a secure place to rest. You also need to have supplies, Usually this would be a survival or resources roll to ensure you find supplies or prepared them ahead of time. If you do not have supplies then the rest does not restore stress. Also someone must stand guard, and that person does not get rest. Also during a rest period you can initiate a backstory moment. I don't really know what that is yet, but I think it sounds like a good idea.

And that is my idea for travel mechanics in the Far Marches. I would appreciate any thoughts or comments on how to make it work better, or possible pitfalls here.  I think I am on the right track, but a lot of this is pretty far afield, so thoughts are welcome.

Also +Megan Bennett-Burks and I just finished a Kickstarter for A Far Off Land, A Fate RPG in Two Worlds. It is a game about special people chosen by Eldritch beings to travel between the worlds and protect or destroy both. They are shape shifting masters of primordial magics, and they hold the fate of two worlds in their hands. If you missed the kickstarter and would like to check out the game, you can still get it. Check out the Beta Document.