I’ve been running Empire of the Ghouls for the past few months, and one thing it has a lot of is wilderness travel. Like, a lot.

“Road Trip: The Adventure.”

And this brings me back to how difficult it is to run engaging wilderness travel in Dungeons & Dragons.

This is a problem that goes back to the early days of the game. In The Isle of Dread, the characters explored a large island, filling in the contents of hexes on the blank map, until they found a point of interest. There weren’t many points of interest. To enliven everything, you’d make wandering monster checks.

Having a Tyrannosaurus try to eat the party is fun. Especially when one of the players, with a bit of quick thinking, throws his backpack into its mouth. But the problem comes when you’re repeating this for encounter after encounter after encounter. It wears down the players and DM.

So, you want more than just a monster name. Various systems have tried injecting more variety and encounter cues, to varying levels of success.

It should be noted that we’re also dealing with different types of wilderness travel! It has different story purposes, and you shouldn’t always use the same method. Sometimes you’re wanting to progress to the next town as quickly as possible so the storyline can continue; other times the characters are in exploration mode, and wilderness encounters are the entire point of the session.

Why random encounters? It’s a case of how you interact with the game. Some DMs of my acquaintance plan out everything beforehand. There’s no such thing as a random encounter – every encounter the travellers have has been determined beforehand (although the consequences have not been).

I use random encounters a lot. I tend to find a lot of inspiration at the table. I don’t need every encounter to hit. But when the players react well to an encounter, I then can expand on it.

And so, systems that help determine what happens next are very valuable at my table.

I recently had a look at the new Lord of the Rings 5E rules for travelling. As you may know, Lord of the Rings has a lot of travel in it. And so, the game needs structures to handle that travel. Unfortunately, the system that results in this version is too abstract for my taste.

It abstracts away what the challenges are, beyond very vague descriptions and who can solve them. This is not my view of Tolkien’s journeys. The journeys are made up of major set pieces. Nothing abstract about them – perhaps the most abstract is the attempt to cross Caradhras.

The idea of random encounters is mostly antithetical to the planned approach of Tolkien’s books. In a D&D game, it makes more sense – the difference between a book and a game.

What I did like about the new Lord of the Rings rules was one thing: Its method of determining he distance between encounters (events). The party leader makes a Survival check, and that indicates how many hexes the party can travel before there’s an encounter.

The base is 1 hex. 10+ on the roll means 2 hexes, 15+ is 3 hexes, and 20+ is 4 hexes. (You could potentially expand on that).

How big is a hex? The game uses 10-mile hexes. In my games, it would depend on the map. Greyhawk uses 30-mile hexes for major travel. And I use 6-mile hexes for local travel. Funnily enough, I’d keep the hexes component – and just have it apply to different scales.

As I noted above, longer travel doesn’t always mean you want more encounters!

The next thing is to determine the encounter. With Empire of the Ghouls, I want to use three sources:

• Random encounters in Empire of the Ghouls
• Random encounters from Trials and Treasures (A5E)
• Random encounters from Uncharted Journeys

Empire of the Ghouls gives a base level of encounter for the journey. For the most part, they represent the specific type of creatures or experiences you might have in that terrain. However, they don’t go into much detail.

Trials and Treasures is part of the Advanced 5^th Edition from EN Publishing. While I am dubious about their character book, their monster and GM books are very good. And Trials and Treasures has some of the most varied encounters I’ve seen in a traditional book.

What makes T&T even more interesting is that it has environmental and social encounters – and ones that have mechanical weight. The one aspect of the book I am unsure about is how some of the encounters requires tracking of supplies. I will need to investigate that further and see how much I want to implement.

Uncharted Journeys has potentially the widest variety of encounters, with a lot of rather detailed descriptions of wilderness encounters. The main problem it has as a source is that the mechanical underpinnings of it all are very weak. It suggests too few encounters per journey, and they often don’t have enough weight. So, it will require more work to reframe the encounters.

My most recent session of Empire of the Ghouls took encounters mainly from Trials and Treasure in a 600 mile journey to the heart of the conquered land of Krakovar (conquered by undead!)

Well, it should have been about 600 miles – I think the party took longer by going upriver by barge – and the river winded back and forth a lot!

Using the LotR system to determine how far between encounters and (mostly) the T&T book for encounters, we had the following encounters over the course of the journey:

ENCOUNTER 1: Tornado – the party used their superior Athletics skills to ace the challenge, and then befriended a giant crocodile that had been carried by the tornado to their location. (Failure at the challenge would have inflicted damage on the party).

ENCOUNTER 2: Troll – the party were attacked by a troll coming out of the swamp. They slew it quickly, with their new crocodile friend taking it down.

ENCOUNTER 3: Cyclops – as the party set up camp on the river’s edge, they witnessed a cyclops looking for a new club (a nearby tree). As most of the party spoke Giant, they engaged in friendly conversation with the cyclops, before it moved on.

ENCOUNTER 4: Fog – a heavy fog made navigating the river very difficult. The party could either delay their journey or use Survival to continue on with some risk – they chose to risk it and aced the Survival checks.

ENCOUNTER 5: Bunyip – this underwater monstrosity attacked as they set up camp. Not an easy fight, but the party eventually prevailed.

ENCOUNTER 6: Feature (door) – as they passed near to a cliff, they saw a door in the rockface. They really, really wanted to investigate, but chose to pass by.

ENCOUNTER 7: Faerie Ring – mischievous fey challenged the party to a riddle contest, which the party were moderately successful at, winning no prizes but being able to continue unmolested.

ENCOUNTER 8: Cursed Temple – the party came across a shrine raised by the dark forces of the land. They were unsuccessful in purifying it, and the dark forces spoiled many of the potions of healing they were carrying.

ENCOUNTER 9: Feature (vision of Sister Adelind) – the party saw a ghostly apparition – possibly the spirit of Sister Adelind, the martyr they were seeking a relic of.

ENCOUNTER 10: Necrophage Ghoul + 3 Zombies – a combat encounter as they got close to their destination. This one came from the adventure.

ENCOUNTER 11: Antelope – a flavour adventure, this one from the adventure as well.

With that, they finally arrived at their destination. Time to play in real time? About 2 hours. It had been an eventful journey!

As I keep at it, I’ll be refining the system. I hope to report back as it gets better.