The most important element of making successful and impactful travel is to make it intentionally. And first step is to answer – what is the goal of the travel? What is its purpose in the story?

Some time ago I saw on reddit question from someone regarding travel procedures and such. This GM was asking what they can do for travel parrt of adventure as players had a lot of distance ahead. But none of it would be in wilderness – it would just be villages and towns in stable country, nothing explorative or something. So what purpose could playing through the travel could be?

I mean, skipping the travel is totally valid option. What are the other reasons to play out through the travel instead of focusing on adventure? Well, first that comes notion of dangerous wilds outside safe walls of civilisation. Sometimes people do it because of “simulation” or “realism” which are not good reasons. But if it is relevant to the setting and theme then making travel dangerous is fun. There is also notion of fleshing out the setting. This is the situation from earlier – if the travel is long yet not dangerous what to do? Flesh out the world. One may also want to include it in time of scarcity, to show that resources have to be gathered, that planning is important or something.

Let’s take a look from the perspective of whatever I came up last time. Navigation errors are to be added when there are no roads or at least those present are misleading. To show that travel takes place in wild, unmapped environment. Random encounters are less about “if there are random encounters” but more about “what are possible random encounters”. One may actually go with mostly animals and enemies – to make travel dangerous and wild – or random merchants, bandits and wanderers – to show that civilisation is alive. I start to think that “random encounters” are not best name for that. Shouldn’t those be “random events”? I think of how flavourful are such encounters in Adventures in Middle Earth (link). What if extreme weather conditions, random curse on a road or Solar Eclipse or whatever relevant and interesting. Similar conditions go to Discoveries but these, in my mind at least, should be more under GM control. Unless youre going for something minor you may roll dice but putting unprompted dungeon on the way of PCs in a hurry is not a good idea.

So besides the travel being something essential due to danger or scarcity or possibility of getting lost (which is emphisazation of how wild is the region) most travel options are for flavour. I mean, you may come up with some elaborate systems with lots of rolling, random tables of weather and encounters and whatnot but it is hard to sell this type of activity during session without it becoming boring slog or just uninteresting filler between adventure elements. But it is good to have the goal of travel in mind, sparkle it with fluff which didn’t make it to adventure and add some opportunities on top for players to engage with.

And I think that’s it. Elaborating more about this topics would be just me in my room typing the same thing over and over again just using different words and sentences and I learned to value time and not go overboard with writing.