Wilderness Travel Rules

Order of a Journey By its nature, adventuring involves delving into places that are dark, dangerous, and full of mysteries to be explored. These rules offer a new way for characters to interact with travel and gives substance to their harrowing journeys. A journey is a wilderness trek between two locations, ordinarily between civilized settlements. This rule organizes a wilderness trek into a cycle of rounds and turns. A travel round represents 1 day in the game world. During a round, each participant in the journey (including the environment) takes a turn. The turn order between players is determined at the beginning of the journey, when everyone rolls initiative. On your turn, you either take a Travel check or a Secondary Skill check. You then expend one day’s use of rations. After all players have taken their turn, the environment takes its turn. Once all participants have taken a turn, the journey continues to the next round if the journey has not been completed. A journey is completed when the environment’s Journey Length is reduced to 0.

Travel Checks The most common action to take during a journey is the Travel check. The Travel check moves your party forward in a journey. Travel checks represent navigating, foraging, and all activities necessary for wilderness travel. To make a Travel check, make a Wisdom (Survival) check. If the check equals or exceeds the environment’s Survival Difficulty, you roll a movement dice. After four characters have succeeded on a Travel check in a given round, all future successes on Travel checks instead result in all party members gaining one use of rations. The movement dice is determined by your party’s travel pace that round. The party can change their pace each round. The results of the movement dice reduce the Journey Length by the amount rolled. If a character rolls three or more “4s” on their movement dice, they overexert themselves and must succeed on a DC 10 Constitution saving throw or gain one level of exhaustion. Pace Movement Dice Effects Fast 4d4 -5 penalty to Wisdom (Perception) scores Normal 3d4 -- Slow 2d4 Able to use Stealth If a Ranger is traveling in their favored terrain, their Natural Explorer feature allows them to automatically succeed on the Travel check and the party’s movement dice results are multiplied by 2. If a character has the Wanderer background feature, they have advantage on Travel checks in environments they have been before or if they have seen a detailed map of the environment.

Secondary Skill Checks A character can make a Secondary Skill check by making a skill check that is tangentially related to the journey to help the party. For example, a Wisdom (Nature) check to identify poisonous mushrooms, an Intelligence (History) check to recall which road was washed out by a flood and not rebuilt, or a Dexterity (Sleight of Hand) check to pick berries along the road. The DM determines the DC for these checks based on their difficulty. A success grants one other character advantage on their next Travel check. A character cannot use the same skill more than once per journey to succeed on a Secondary Skill check.