Traveling
Travel by a Party or mobile Factions (such as Armies) is resolved via free movement tracked on a map of the campaign world by the GM.
Duration:Variable
Trigger:When you set out on a route with a destination in mind...
Travel by a Party or mobile Factions (such as Armies) is resolved via free movement tracked on a map of the campaign world by the GM.
In order to travel, you must have a route & destination in mind. The route may be a path or a direction. The destination can be a literal place or a time-based trigger such as "three days north". Announce both to the GM.
Travel Procedure
- The GM determines if the route can actually take you to the destination.
- The GM measures out the path to the destination & determines the total distance that either must be traveled (to reach a target place) or that will be traveled (to travel for a certain period of time).
- The GM determines if there's possible overlap with any other Faction movement based on relative Speeds & routes taken. If there appears to be a point of encounter, the GM (secretly) alters the destination to instead be the encounter & recalculates travel distance & time.
- The GM sets a (secret) Duration as the time at which the destination will be reached.
- For each week of travel (or at the midpoint, if less than one), the GM calls for PCs in a traveling party to check for an Exhaustion Save if necessary & simultaneously rolls on the Discoveries table.
- When the Duration for a Travel Action expires, the Party has arrived at the destination.
Exhaustion Save
Each week, each PC in a party should check if any of the following conditions are true:
- A PC or their followers are carrying less than 2# of supplies each & are also not in a farmland, pastures, or otherwise settled region.
- None at all.
- The terrain is barrens/wasteland where food & water cannot be found easily.
- Your mounts are unfit for the biome (horses in the desert, camels in the arctic).
For each true condition, each affected PC in the Party must perform an Exhaustion Save. Add leadership, quartermastery & hunting skills as +1 bonuses.
| Result | Exhaustion Save Effects |
|---|---|
| Crit ≥12 | You can bump the Result of 1 other PC in the Party who failed up by 1 step — i.e. from a Fumble to a Failure. |
| Pass 8–11 | Nothing bad happens. |
| Seven 7 | Lose 10% of all nameless Followers traveling with you, rounded down. Lose [Power] HP. |
| Failure 3–6 | Lose 33% of all nameless Followers traveling with you, rounded down. Half of them are dead; the other half deserted. For each named Retainer or Follower, roll 1d6. On 1, they're dead; on 2, they deserted. Lose [Power] × 2 HP. |
| Fumble ≤2 | Lose 50% of all nameless Followers traveling with you, rounded down. Two thirds of them are dead; the other third deserted. For each named Retainer or Follower, roll 1d6. On 1–2, they're dead; on 3, they deserted. Lose [Power] × 3 HP. |
Discoveries Table
The GM rolls once on the Discoveries table per week (or part thereof) that a Party spends traveling.
| 1d6 | Discoveries |
|---|---|
| 1–2 | Encounter. An encounter with another traveler, travelers, or local Monsters. There is a 2-in-6 chance it is actually a Lair (mark it on the map as a Location), unless this Route already passes by a Lair. |
| 3–4 | Location. A new formerly unmarked Location is discovered. If the determined Location closely matches the identity of a Location that's already marked along the Route (i.e. if you roll a tower, & there's a castle on the way), there's no new Location; it's the existing one, instead. |
| 5 | Omen. Roll for 2 Encounters & determine the most likely thing that would happen if the two of them met. Traces of that outcome are discovered by the Party. A pointer indicating the identity of the first Encounter rolled remains (i.e. tattered banner, dead body, viscous slime, dropped letter, observant/curious local, paw-print) provided that anyone in the Party would recognize what it meant. |
| 6 | Nothing. |
Measuring distance & time taken
Characters can travel ~1 mile per day across a medium for each 1' of Speed score they possess. A human with a Run of 25' can travel 25 miles per day. A bird with a Fly of 40' can travel 40 miles per day.
| Type | Examples | Distance Multiplier |
|---|---|---|
| Clear/road | Plains, grasslands, farmland, highways & roads | ×1 |
| Rough | Hills, desert, marsh, forest | ×2 |
| Heavy | Dunes, forested/snowy hills, swamp | ×3 |
| Mountainous | Mountain | ×4 |
| Extreme | Forested/snowy mountain | ×5 |
| River | Adds +5 miles of the same terrain type it's located in | +5mi |
Divide the effective distance in miles by the slowest Speed score among all traveling Party members. Remember: If any part of the route is off-road, the Speed of all wheeled vehicles is halved & if any Party member is Encumbered, their Speed is halved too.
The result is the number of days until the Duration (at which point the Party reaches the destination).
Visibility
Aia is a flat disc & Glass is not an exception. Your view is not limited by the curvature of the Earth. Atmospheric scattering, weather, and terrain irregularities are the primary limiter of vision.
The basic determinant of view distance is observer height.
| Observer Position | Base Visibility | Distinguishable at this distance |
|---|---|---|
| Flat ground | 5 miles | Individuals, buildings |
| Watchtower | 10 miles | Formations, buildings, ship types |
| Hills | 20 miles | Armies, towns, fleets, castles |
| Mountains | 40 miles | Armies, cities, major terrain |
| Peak | 80 miles | Only the largest features |
Multiply by the following (all armies carry telescopes):
- Hazy: ×0.5
- Foggy: ×0.25
- No telescope: ×0.5
If some members of the group are not Followers of any PC, one PC must on their Save treat them as their Followers for the sake of determining their fates, so as to prevent them from being immune to exhaustion or starvation.
And it does. With 20lb of gear dedicated towards survival, people & animals have enough in excess capacity & storage to escape starvation & malnutrition 95% of the time. Instead of slowing down the game by explicitly modeling this, we just ask if you have that equipment & if you don’t (or if you’re in a desert where things are harsher), we punish you based on the rate of starvation you’d see versus your PC’s leadership & survival skills.
This may not be to your preference, but God forbid we make people do the rocket equation for equipping an army every time they wanted to go somewhere. I felt that this was beneath the scope of the game. It’s actually the same reason we don’t usually track discrete quantities of cash. When you’re rich & powerful, you rely on the heuristics of cashflow versus expenditures, not on nickels & dimes; penny-pinching is for the poor.