(A) Speedy Traveling in OSR world
I’m trying to make my mountainous pointcrawl for “minimum viable donnut project number five”. And I’m deep diving into blogposts about pointcrawls, travel procedures and that stuff. And I wanted to combat some discourse elements I think are misconceptions about travel. Considering how uneven is conversion between kilometers and miles all distances are more or less rounded up or down.
So B/X DnD tell us one person can make 38 kilometers (24 miles for US-based readers) per day of travel. Which is 58 kilometers (36 miles) on the maintained roads, 26 kilometers (16 miles) through forest, hills and desert and 19 kilometers (12 miles) through jungle and mountains. It all seems to get along very nicely. Average human walking speed is something between 4 and 5 kilometers (or 2.5-3 miles) per hour which gives us 32-38 kilometers (20-25 miles) in 8 hours. And you can do forced march to speed up 50%, giving us whooping 87 kilometers (54 miles) per day on a road in the best conditions. But there is something always itching me about these distances.
My points in this post won’t be anything more than anecdotal. Well my first issue with these is… reality. We can check ourselves how fast we travel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69Ny6TYfPZ4. And I can tell you I walk around 4 km (2.5 miles) per hour (at least this number comes from walking my dog). Which would give us 32 kilometers (20 miles) per day. But here lies the problem. I am a modern person. What differentiates me from ancient or medieval person? I walk in comfortable, well made shoes. On comfortable, well maintained road. Medieval adventurers didn’t have access to such shoes and as for the roads… yeah, maybe sometimes, the main arteries, “royal roads”. But when you’re a traveling adventurer you’re doing it more often on countryside roads or even wilderness trails. These speeds should be slashed.
In order to be somewhat more credible I have checked some historical data. As I am Polish it is data about Poland. And you may even know Poland used to be known for bad state of it’s roads for centuries, there was even saying about Polish bridges (comparing it to German fast [as in not-eating] and Italian worship service) XD So let me say the B/X speeds are a little bit optimistic? Generous? It seems king Bolesław III Wrymouth (middle middle ages) was beating records of travel with one noted in 60 kilometers (37,5 miles) per day. And he was a king, with whole loads of people jumping around to make such fast travel possible. They had horses and stuff. Bolesław I the Brave (earlier but still middle middle ages) traveled from Krakow to Kyiv as fast as 30 kilometers (19 miles). Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, 10th century traveler, noted that merchant caravan took 3 weeks to travel from Prague to Krakow. It’s 420 kilometers (261 miles). It’s 20 kilometers (13 miles) per day. On the best road in Poland at the moment (maybe Czechia had some better ones). It’s comparable to B/X pathless mountain travel! Next person to mention would be king Władysław Jagiełło (late middle ages), who was noted to travel around the country with 40 kilometers (25 miles) per day speed. A king. On maintained roads. On horseback. Making as much speed as average adventurer on foot through pathless plains.
I found also information that in early modern period people traveled on average 20-25 kilometers (13-15.5 miles) on foot per day and on horseback around 30-40 kilometers (18.5-25 miles). It is 600 years after Bolesław the Brave and 300 hundred years after Jagiełło. Fastest coaches made it up to 70 kilometers (44 miles). It still doesn’t beat average unencumbered B/X adventurer on foot forcing march on a road. WITHOUT EVEN A HORSE!
So where are these differences coming from? Well, first of all everything I mentioned earlier. Shoes. And if you travel with baggage – backpacks. I cannot overstate how ergonomic and durable is modern backpack in comparison to whatever flour sack full of gear you’d have in middle ages. Also roads, and more importantly – bridges. Remember what I said about this saying about Polish bridges? Yeah. Besides the royal roads between largest cities where you had maintained bridges (tolled, of course) there was none. Maybe some makeshift footbridges in places often traversed by locals but that’s it. We don’t feel it now. We have our asphalt roads going over every stream, every natural ditch and bump. It wasn’t the case for all history. Travel was hard. And after rain? Even established roads turned into mud. And if it was dry and windy you had indecent amounts of dust all around.
What am I going to do about it? At the moment nothing. It is true B/X speeds are overestimated. But they arrange neatly in 6-mile and 4-mile increments. I don’t have ready answer. But as it is I would just change the speeds by one increment. So 24 miles per day is for the unencumbered travelers on maintained roads. 16 (I would make it 18 to keep only sixes relevant in the game) miles for pathless but easy terrain with good visibility. 12 for bad visibility or difficult terrain. 6 for difficult terrain and visibility, mountains, jungles and swamps.