The Travel Scene

Part of Sickness in Springdale involves traveling deep into the woods to find the cure for the disease threatening the town. Adventures often handle travel in one of two ways, as an almost pure mechanical skill challenge where failure results in some sort of immediate loss, such as a healing surge, or it's just handwaved altogether since the travel isn't important to the narrative. In this post, I'm going to discuss how I handled travel, hopefully without giving away too many spoilers.

However, in this adventure, I didn't want to handwave travel because time is important, especially if any of the PCs are sick. I also wanted to make sure the travel checks happened in a fast manner at the table. The travel checks themselves shouldn't take up much time. For this reason, I limited it to 2 in the notes. (DMs should feel free to add more if they wish.) Originally I planned to handle this by averaging the rolls of the players. At first, that sounded like a great idea but then I thought through running it and realized I didn't want to average 4-6 numbers at the table. Instead, I decided to use the three highest scores to determine the level of success. It's simple and still makes sense in the story as presumably those characters would help those who didn't succeed as well.

Great, now that I handled the mechanics of travel, how do I make it fun? I determined that the travel section should be divided into 3 subsections, with 2 waypoints. Those waypoints are when they make the travel group check to see how long it took them to reach them. I added 2 additional scenes to be described as part of that section's journey, with the order determined by the DM.

These scenes are resolved mainly by role-playing, although skill checks may be useful. How the players decide to resolve the scenes determines whether or not they earn points towards the Lady's Favor and also may provide them with smaller boons such as a bonus to their travel check.

Another thing I like about the travel section is that it's a way for the DM to adjust the difficulty level of the adventure. If anyone in the party is sick, a longer travel time is not a good thing, it gives more opportunities to get worse. It also builds tension because the townspeople need these supplies soon.

So that's how I decided to address travel in the adventure. If you haven't already, I really hope you check it out. It is for level 1 characters and includes everything from tokens to maps to pregens. The PDF is available at a number of places, including RPGNow for $1.99. If you bought the adventure, thanks so much! It hit the top 5 hottest items on RPGNow yesterday which is a huge accomplishment for me. Thanks to your interest, Postmortem Studios is interested in having me write more. Also, feel free to let me know what you think, in the comments, on twitter @SarahDarkmagic, or by email tracy [at] sarahdarkmagic.com.