Into the Weird Blue Yonder: Travel into the Sensuous Unknown

Travel is often boring. Travel is boring enough that I often end up scrapping it entirely. I don't think that this is bad to do in all cases, really. There are games where the play framework has never been focused on things like resource conservation or even exploration in some ways. When players want to get to a place and have a road to it, I think that it can be perfectly ok to handwave everything but the arrival. You don't have unlimited time at the table and the destinations are what players want and can tolerate getting lost in.

How do we change this?

Well, players are fine with exploring the space within the adventure location. Why? It's a mystery. The good dungeon is layers of mystery from "What's around the corner?" to "How do we escape this predicament?" and "What happened to make this place this way?" and maybe even "What powers are really at work here?"

People are endlessly preoccupied with mystery, as they should. They love the areas of tantalizing darkness, the sensuous unknown just waiting to be penetrated by the light of understanding, the sword of Truth.

Was that too sexual? It's a sexual experience! Exploring dark moist caverns, delving into holy vaults of ancient goddesses, exerting oneself fully into the vigorous task of mapping every curve, special mark, and hidden source of delight. The dungeon is a romance of bloody blades and delicious secrets.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Italian, 1720 - 1778 ), The Pier with a Lamp, 1780s

What was I talking about? Oh yeah Travel.

Ok. Mystery is our secret ingredient so let's mix that into the soup. The purpose of the travel between two places is thus:

• Give substance to the game world: the game world is a collective dream, a phantasm of sights and sounds but the more it gives way to the disordered manner of dreams, without transition from bizarre image to bizarre image, the more apparent this reality becomes. Put simply, distance is a thing in the real world and it eats up time and resources and you can get lost. It's a pretty basic conceit to reality which can do much to ground the fantasy.
• Offer more room for shenanigans: Travel opens up more room for emergent gameplay. Who or what might the players stumble across on their way to the city? Let's find out!
• Offer the players tools to direct their course in the fiction: for players to really have agency, they must have access to more than: GM: the adventure is there. Players: Ok we go there. 
• This is the important one: offer players the chance to glimpse the greater realities behind the scenes of the world.

Here is a great example of play from my Weird Marches game.

The players were passing through some land fairly close to their home city and they discovered a mound of some strangely marked geometric stones. The mound appeared to be slowly emerging from below the ground, building itself up layer by layer.

The players saw this and began asking questions. They asked if these stones resembled some other weird stones they found in the past. They asked what the marking looked like and if they could take any of the cube stones. They decided they currently didn't have the information to tackle this thing and left it for another time, wanting to keep an eye on it to see if more of the structure disgorged itself. 

This is was a great encounter because it clued the players into a bigger thing happening in the world and future travels in the area will proceed with this in mind to see if the puzzle as to what is happening there can be unraveled. 

So results of an encounter table ought to be more than just monsters but also things and places that hint at what is going on. Is there a bunch of classically trained artist beavers in the forest? Have trees chewed into elegant shapes. 

Here is the Travel Die I use for my Weird Marches game and will be putting into Into the Weird Blue Yonder:

Travel Die: Roll 1d6 each day of Travel.

1. Monster Encounter
2. Monster Sign
3. NPC 
4. Environment
5. Discovery
6. All is Well

The goal was there never to be absolutely nothing. Even All is Well optimally has a small table to things to say when it is rolled, like a beautiful spiderweb, bejeweled with the morning dew or scarlet birds dipping long beaks into a crystal stream or toads singing their croaky songs in the humid night.

Monster Sign is exactly that, it is something left behind by a monster to hint at its existence. I.e. large clawed footprints in mud or scorch marks on a plain or long deep scratches in the trunks of trees. For example:

1d6+1 Fetal Crawlers: +1 Mud Paw (1d4), HP: 2, AC: 12, HD: 1d4.

Climbs: Crawlers stick effortlessly to any surface.

Sign: Tiny muddy paw marks over trees and rocks.

The vessels growing out of the mud sometimes are filled with animal consciousnesses: manifestations of primal instinct brought to a fury by the Neverborns’ disruption of the natural order.

NPCs are generally nonhostile (At least not immediately) creatures which the players will most readily interact with in ways other than violence though violence is not forbidden.

Environment refers to weather and other natural phenomena that generally have an adverse effect on travel, like think mist (I always freaking roll thick mist) which makes it easier to get lost, or heavy rain that causes fatigue and makes it difficult to keep watch, or hot sun that requires a quicker depletion of supplies like water and causes exhaustion.

Discoveries are things which hint to greater machinations like the strange geometric stone mound. Perhaps there is a giant titan slowly rebuilding itself and digging out of the dirt. No that's just crazy talk. Perhaps it is a desecrated shrine, indicating local religious conflict or an unoccupied ritual site.

Let all the world be a mystery! Each new region is its own puzzle and it is up to the players to penetrate this soaking mystery with the throbbing cock of enlightenment!

This turned out to be a longer post than expected so I will be stopping it here. Progress on Into the Weird Blue Yonder has been slow as of late but I am still trying. I think the plan now is to get this whole thing ready for a publisher and shop around to see if anyone will allow me to impregnate them with my brainchild. Tune in next time for some NPCs from the book.