Exploration is a vast concept. And that’s good and bad.

Hey, friends. It’s been two days. I am finally back home, and I needed a couple of days to recuperate and organise a bit. So expect three posts back to back today, to cover the ground I lost. But let’s get to it.

As I said, exploration as a concept is vast, and that’s good and bad. It’s good because you get so many options and possibilities of what you can do with exploration. Done correctly, you basically have infinite possibilities to entertain yourself and your group. It’s bad because its vastness requires work in order to shape exploration into something tangible to put into your game. It’s not always easy to come up with locations and exploration scenarios. At least, it’s not as easy as coming up with a simple combat encounter, or with an NPC the characters can have a social encounter with.

While running Out of the Abyss, the most difficult part for me was to make travel a bit more interesting. Travel time between locations was brutal, and I decided almost from the start that it wasn’t something my players would enjoy, so I just stopped rolling for encounters 2 times per in-game day. Instead, I used some of the better encounters the adventure included between destinations. Since that wasn’t enough, I had to come up with a few more myself. These took the majority of my prep time. I couldn’t come up with all the encounters I needed in one go, so I would take some time each prep session to make a couple more. Thankfully, the book had a few roll tables, so I could use them for inspiration and to keep the theme of the encounters true to the campaign.

That left me with a small habit of noting down various locations when they come to mind. I have a couple of notebooks with random ideas written down in them, and a few online apps that I use. Are they all usable? Probably not. Is this a good exercise? It sure is!

And that’s all for now regarding exploration. Maybe I should share some of these ideas at some point. But I will have to bring them to a state that is usable by others. Next on the prompt list is “inspire”. See you in a bit!

And until next time, have fun!

P.S.: You can find all of my posts for this year’s RPGaDay here. Thanks to AUTOCRATIK and Casting Shadows for hosting another year of the event.