That's a lot to a title. It's a lot to tackle in really any amount of blog posts. You could write a whole blog over just wilderness exploration, doing a deep dive on the various parts of the style and uncovering a lot of cool information that's useful for all games.
But that's not this blog, at least not now, and it's certainly not this post. Rather, it's an observation on how random tables (including encounter tables), wilderness exploration, and the setting at large can be tied together to give GMs a worldbuilding platform while not in a city, town, sanctuary, or NPC saturated area.
People on social media and on Reddit in particular often make posts that lament how boring the wilderness is as a canvas for exciting adventures. That's changed in certain circles as West Marches style games and streamers like Matt Colville embrace grittier fantasy, and with it the campaign styles that cater to those sorts of games.
But a GM isn't required to run a specifically wilderness/ survival game to get some meat out of that pillar of play. DnD has shifted to favor roleplaying recently, and that's a great advent. It spells good things for the future of the hobby, and it's due in part to streaming like the aforementioned Colville games, Critical Role, and so forth. Wilderness exploration has always been the last thing people think of when they run or play a game. It's the afterthought. There's a whole chapter of the PHB called Combat. There's a couple pages on exploration scattered throughout the three core books. That signals a stream of thought that trickles down from game designers and eventually ends up affecting the way we run our games. More than that, it affects how we think about our games.
It took me personally a lot of time (I'd say probably the last four years) to figure out how to be a Dungeon Master. I might've said it on this blog before, but I've been playing DnD in some form for over a decade. I've been DMing most of that time. And it's only now, in my most recent campaign, that I've been able to say with confidence that I'm excited to play and excited to help my players tell their stories. The last four years have been me getting to that place, where I hit "flow." That's a psychology term that refers to the place where an activity is challenging enough that you aren't bored but not so hard that you hate it, and where your levels of stimulation are at their zenith. It's essentially a measure of arousal (in the mental, not sexual, sense).
So this brings me to last night. I ran the first part of my six-person, second level party's christening adventure. They set out to recover a cargo plane pilot and her plane, repair it, and bring her home. I'm using GiffyGlyph's wilderness exploration rules with quite a lot of tweaks, and I rolled encounters under those rules. It wasn't until their first combat that everything I listed in the title folded together and the world became alive for my party.
To set the scene:
The party is travelling with Monopoly, their mule, and Ovrum, the hireling they brought along to watch their gear. They're travelling in the afternoon and they see three columns of smoke off the road in the forest. Three party members (sorcerer, barbarian, and seeker) stomp through the woods to try and sneak up on them. They roll some terrible sneak checks, two bandits spot them, and then we drop into encounter mode.
At this point, it's good to shout out to Angry. On his blog, which you can find the link to in the reel on the right side of this page, he talks about how combats aren't encounters -- they're conflict resolution. Encounters are dramatic questions. The encounter as I had set it up was this: "The party sees signs of other people in the woods. Will they investigate and discover that the bandits have scraps of a plane? What will they do when the bandits try to rob them of their silver?" I decided these bandits were hostile, swaggering blokes who were riding high on the thrill of having salvaged parts of Natalia's cargo plane. They had bits of a wing in their camp.
The party didn't immediately attack the bandits. The bandits didn't immediately attack the party. Even when the bandits loosed their weapons from their belts and started ordering the three heroes they could see into the camp, we still didn't roll initiative. The dramatic question still hadn't been answered. The party hadn't acted in a way to answer it.
Once the fight was joined and the players answered the question by deciding to rid themselves of the bandit nuisance, we dipped into the fight. We went around table afterwards, they picked the camp clean, and that's where the three elements of this post came together.
I used the plane wing to pose part of the dramatic question. It was a signpost to my players that they were on the right track and that these bandits might have answers to questions of what happened to the pilot. When they started looting, I pulled up Goblin Punch's blog post on slightly magical items and had them roll three times. One result was a parasol that, essentially, gave its wielder featherfall.
Now, taking that item at face value, it's cool. It's neat and gives the players a cool trick. It makes them feel powerful without "breaking the game." But if you can take what a random table gives you and add it to the theme of the world, you immerse that result in the setting and give players more signposts. So I turned it into a magitech backpack that deploys a parachute. Makes sense for a pilot to have on board their plane, no? But what's more: why didn't Natalia, the pilot, show up with her parachute? Now we have another layer added to the world. My players haven't put two and two together yet, but when they do it'll hit them like a truck full of bricks.
And all that takes is knowing your setting. Not dictating every element of every fight and every dungeon. Just knowing what you want from a fight, or a room in a dungeon, or a conversation. No fight should happen without a purpose, and no room should ever be empty (unless those serve your purpose -- just make sure that's what you want). This is a Zen moment for wilderness exploration, kind of like the Zen moments of Old School Gaming. Once you experience that moment for yourself, you'll awaken yourself to possibilities for your game that will enrich it and make your players come back to the table every time with goals, plans, and desires.
So that's the post for today. And you know what? It might be the first time I've posted something that feels useful to me on the blog. Next post will be about what my players envisioned for some other trinkets they pulled from the bandit camp, and will give you a terrifying low-level construct that can start a riot, disrupt negotiations, and even break enemies out of stealth and reveal their positioning and numbers.
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