While the appendix to Dark Fantasy X has a small discussion on travel, there's more that can be said about it, of course. Arguably, I already said too much for what is meant to be a rules-lite game (which is why its in the appendix) but also arguably, I didn't say enough to actually be quite useful enough in actual play. The latter is probably too proscriptive and detailed to ever have a place in the game itself, but I think further exploration here on the blog, over a small series of posts perhaps, is the best way to cover it.
I addressed a few topics in particular with regards to travel. First, how far is reasonable to travel. I used rather than the movements of troops and armies, the rates at which people are able to hike who do long-distance hiking, like people who hike the Pacific Crest Trail or the Appalachian Trail. Other than making the point that some the mileages I talked about assume good weather, good trail or road conditions, reasonably flat terrain, lack of natural obstacles, and people who are used enough to walking to not get too worn-out or footsore and are physically capable of walking long distances. (Most long-distance hikers get their "trail legs" after a couple of weeks tops, though. I'm assuming that any traveling adventure party group can walk just fine without getting fatigued just from the walking.) On trails like the Appalachian or Pacific Crest Trail, after they really get moving, hikers routinely log 20+ mile days and when they really push it, they can even do 40 or 40+ mile days. Albeit as one-offs, not as standard.
There's obviously caveats to that. The Pacific Crest Trail is famously pretty easy to walk on minus the climbing and possible snow conditions in the Sierra Nevada if you're a little too early in the season there. It's an extremely smooth and well-groomed trail. The Appalachian Trail is famously easy in other ways; although the trail may go up and down a lot and has lots of rocks and other things that are more difficult to walk on than you'd think, it also is extremely easy to follow, has shelters along its length at relatively short distances from each other, and is serviced by "trail towns" that require little to no effort to reach from trail, enabling easy resupply and breaks from the hiking and camping to sleep in a hotel, eat at a restaurant, pick up a new load of food for the next few days, etc. The Pacific Crest Trail is therefore probably easier to walk on than most fantasy RPG travel would be unless you're on a decent and maintained road through the countryside, and the Appalachian Trail has the easiest logistics of any long-distance hiking trail in America.
(As an aside, my wife is unaccountably annoyed by my habit of pronouncing Appalachian like app uh LATCH un, while she says app uh LAYSH un. My answer to that is that's how its pronounced by the locals, at least in the southern portion. I think her problem is that she spent a few years of her childhood in the DC area, and another portion in Pennsylvannia, so she thinks that pronunciation has "priority" or something. It doesn't, except in the region she used to live in. And because the Yankees militarily conquered the rest of the country and imposed their own culture on the rest of the country, many people who aren't local to either portion of Appalachia hear the Yankee pronunciation rather than the southern pronunciation and assume that it's more correct. Again; no, it's not. And she points out--accurately, although in my opinion irrelevantly--that because I've never actually lived in southern Appalachia, I shouldn't have that preference. However, "my people" are from rural Georgia. The Dukes of Hazzard could almost have been a documentary about the lives of my ancestors. And yes, in the early 1900s they moved west, and I personally grew up in Texas, the southern portion of Appalachia is literally inhabited specifically by my people. In a form of ethnic solidarity with the Borderers against the neurotic cultural hegemony of the Yankees, I refuse to use any other pronunciation anymore. Anyway, personal rant aside...)
So an absolute upper limit should be 40 miles a day, and that would be an unusual forced march situation that would be a one-off. A more normal travel day would be 20 miles, although if you have any complications (weather, encounters, hazards, natural obstacles, rougher terrain, no roads, etc.) that number can fall precipitously. If you're bushwhacking through rougher terrain in the rain with swollen rivers and streams, you can be tremendously lucky to even get ten miles a day without triggering some kind of check to see if you take STR damage from fatigue due to the travel itself. I didn't proscribe how either the check would be done, or how much damage would be taken, but in real life at my table, I'd probably do it as an Athletics + STR check with a DC of 15, or take 1 point of STR damage which would be applied the next day. This recovers pretty easily unless you're still doing the same thing day after day, of course. Even normal, "not difficult" travel that doesn't make you make a check (or a day when you make the check) would have you recover that point of damage overnight.
I know that strength and endurance aren't the same thing, and I've seen plenty of really in-shape, bodybuilder type guys who lacked endurance that much weaker, skinny hikers had, but since m20 abstracts both d20 strength and constitution into one STR score, we just have to live with the abstraction.
The second point I made in the rules was getting lost. In reality, I'd probably use these rules very infrequently. If you have even halfway decent directions or a map, and terrain that lends itself to having visible landmarks, your chances of really getting very lost aren't all that high. If you are in relatively featureless landscape, or in a deep forest where features aren't going to be visible even if they exist, I'd apply this. Or, if the directions the party has are vague, flawed, they have a crappy map, etc. and otherwise just don't have the tools to properly orient themselves. It probably goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, these rules are optional and even my own use of them would be sporadic at best. Sometimes the possibility of getting lost makes travel in game fun. Sometimes it doesn't. Many of these rules make sense in a more sandbox or hexcrawl like game. I rarely run those, as I usually end up with games where there are established objectives and whatnot to pursue, not merely exploration for its own sake. That said, travel is (or at least can be) an interesting complication. Even with secure objectives to chase down, it's not like Bildo or Frodo were able to shortcut the reality of travel across the countryside of Middle-earth, for instance. Both got lost in dark forests, dealt with weather, food, etc. So all of this travel stuff is to be used as much or as little as is fun and no more and no less.
The third issue that I tackled in the appendix was foraging for food and water. In reality, this would be a major consideration while traveling in Middle Ages like conditions, but its one of those kinds of things that you really only care about if its potentially an interesting challenge to deal with for the players. Just because it would be interesting; not to mention actually vital, in real life doesn't mean that it is in game, and you have to read the table and decide if you think it'll be fun or frustrating for your players. If it's not, it runs the risk of very quickly turning into a tedious accounting exercise at the table, which is unlikely to be very entertaining for anyone involved. Nodding back up towards the first issue, it can also take some time, and even if you don't roll for the challenge, you might want to bake some time for it into your travel time. Its unlikely that an adventuring party will be able to hunt anything, process the carcass and turn it into rations in less than half a day (Actually, even that is unrealistic. A couple of days to find, kill, skin, and smoke a deer carcass to get smoked venison or jerky or pemmican or whatever should probably take a couple of days.) The same is true for gathering fruits or nuts or whatever. If the characters were only taking a trip that was meant to last a few days, I'd not bother, but for longer trips, or ones where they specifically plan on foraging, I'd make them spend half a day every three or four days or so. In most conditions, I wouldn't make them make a check, especially if there's an Outdoorsman or similar character in the group, unless they were trying to do it in a particularly harsh or barren landscape. I'd just bake it into the timing of their travel.
The fourth and final concern I addressed was encounters, and I included a bunch of random encounter tables which were very similar to the old Expert (Cook) random encounter tables. I'm not quite sure why I was motivated to do this back when I was making the Dark Heritage rules, but now that I've done the work, I'll probably continue to include them. In reality, I don't use them myself, although I don't rule out that I might some day. I think the tables + derived tables might be a bit over-wrought; maybe I'll make a table for each region in the setting that just rolls on a d12 or something, with a sentence fragment or clause describing what you encounter as opposed to just a creature list. This is how many more "modern" versions of D&D have done it, and while it's probably not quite as flexible, it gives you something that's a little bit easier to work with, and since I use random encounter tables so infrequently anyway, it would be more than enough for me without the flexibility.
Of course, in reality, the flexibility is still there; you can simply ignore part of the result, or change how it plays out instead of not having anything there other than "Orcs" and you have to make up what to do with them anyway. I'll probably issue a version 1.1 where I change these tables significantly. Although I might use the tables that I have here for Hack Fantasy X instead.
Some potential
fifth and beyond concerns that I don't address, but which I might want to think about in actual play might include weather. For the most part, this is just a color thing for descriptions while traveling, but at some extremes, it can impact the characters in other ways, such as causing them heat or cold distress, or making travel slower and more difficult because of driving rain or snow.
I whipped up these three little tables in Excel real quick, and I could see using something like this, or even these exactly to get weather as needed. The temperature table obviously needs some adjustments for season and region, but that can be done via plus or minus to the roll; i.e, if freezing isn't an option, roll it as d4+1 and treat a result of 5 the same as of 4 (or reroll); in the winter, do the same thing with -1. I could also make season and regional variant tables, but that seems like an awful lot of tables; do I really need that many tables when the +/-1 with the simple d4 table already works fine?
In most cases, there isn't really any difference between cool and mild. Cool ranges down to "cold, but not enough to be freezing" however, and if desired, cool combined with rain or high winds can have the same effect as Freezing; i.e., without proper precautions in how the characters are dressed and how they establish camp, etc. they can suffer 1 STR damage per day (applied to the next day; you don't take the damage and then immediately recover it overnight). I'm going to presume that few GMs would want to have their characters risk dying of hypothermia or exposure, so for most situations the 1 point of damage is sufficient, but in some conditions, it can actually apply STR damage at a much higher rate, i.e. per hour or even faster. This would represent exposure/hypothermia, but again, I wouldn't expect it to be used. It's nice to have as a reference just in case such a situation were to actually come up in game, I suppose. Tools, not rules, amirite?
The temperature table needs to be rolled in conjunction with the conditions table. Arguably, this can be tailored to specific regions; the Boneyard and Baal Hamazi being significantly drier than Timischburg or the Hill Country, for instance, would probably have less rain options on it. Then again, I don't love slight variations on tables just for tables' sake; I recommend simply massaging the results somewhat. If I were playing and I got a rain (or snow) result in a desert area, I'd roll another die with a fifty-fifty chance of calling for a reroll. If I rolled a 3 in Baal Hamazi for conditions, I'd roll a d6, on a 1-3 I'd reroll that result, on a 4-6 it would stand. Much easier than having separate tables for each region, but of course, it requires knowing that Baal Hamazi is a drier area of the setting.
If you get a result of extreme conditions, you roll on the third extreme conditions table. I don't have any rules for what happens if you roll up, say, a mudslide or flash flood or tornado. You may have to simply reroll results that don't make sense, like a mudslide on a prairie (although if the prairie is rolling enough, you can still figure something out with it that makes sense.) Regardless, you'll have to figure out as the GM what the specific risks are. If a tornado is heading towards the characters, they'll probably see it coming and hopefully take some precautions. Assuming that they do just about anything reasonable, like hunker down in a grove of trees or otherwise seek some kind of shelter, I'd probably allow them to escape more or less unscathed. Maybe depending on the quality of their shelter they'd risk some damage due to flying debris. You know; that kind of thing. On the fly rulings that add more local color and general interest than actual threat.
If you get supernatural weather, there should honestly be another table for that. I'll have to spend some time looking for examples before I come up with one, though.
Anyway, that's a first, clumsy pass at Dark Fantasy X weather while traveling. Still needs a little work, but it's not really something that would come up all of the time, unless I'm really focusing on the travel aspect of the game, and I wouldn't necessarily do that all that often anyway. And I'd never add this stuff to the document. I might, however, be willing to add a weather table to the inside of my GM's screen and use if if travel is looking like it's going to take more than a day or two in game.
