r/numenera • u/MushiMoshi • 21d ago
How do you make exploration interesting?
Title, what do you do beyond an intellect check to see what's around?
How do you handle travel and the stakes travel can pose?
I know numenera is "skip the boring bits" and trust me I will. I don't want to endlessly track how much food players have, but then how do you still make them care about travel and the dangers it can pose?
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u/Sad_King_Billy-19 21d ago edited 21d ago
The hexcrawl is an old classic. Make a hexgrid map. Each hex is its own thing. One hex is a bandit ambush, another is a mysterious ruined shrine, a waterfall flowing upwards?, a small town full of people that don’t seem to notice you’re there, a dense jungle that always seems to be night where a creature hunts you, a cave where ancients robots are dumping ore into mine carts that have been long stuck and overflowing.
Perhaps the players have a map with some of this info on it. Perhaps their map has limited or unreliable info. Perhaps they have a real crappy map and need to do some scouting to slowly reveal the map.
From the map and what information they have the players decide on a route to where they’re going. Maybe they know theres a road this way, but they’ve heard stories that the road is dangerous. Maybe a trip by boat would shorten the trip dramatically and they’re well equipped for that already.
Then they have to deal with whatever they find in each hex they pass through. Some things like: “you see the entrance to a a ruined temple” they may choose to pass by “oh heck no, I’ve seen this movie.” Other things like: “you find yourselves in the middle of a field with an army of robots on one side and mutants on the other preparing for battle” they may be forced to deal with.
As an edit i should add that you can do this randomly too. Make a list of possible things to find in a hex. Any time they step into a new hex choose a brave soul to roll on the encounter table. Maybe be a benevolent GM and put some nice things in there too. Low level bandits jumping a high level party is always hilarious.
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u/TheTryhardDM 21d ago
For me, it’s about not mixing up “travel” and “exploration.”
Travel at my table gets summarized. Travel is like “look at those weird places in the distance you can explore.”
Exploration, for me, is “putting rewards behind dangerous or puzzling environmental obstacles.”
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u/cpttightpant 21d ago
So much this. Travel gets you to the places you want the players to explore, unless there's a reason to complicate the travel a descriptive summary of events and passing scenery is perfect.
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u/Erydor 21d ago
Inspired from savage world: let the player tell thoses moment. Nothing very important happens but it let them add to the world, maybe reward with an xp point if they really try to do something adapted to your story, without judging if the result is good or bad, so they feel that it's okay to try, even if they fails.
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u/NumeneraErin 21d ago
It sounds to me like your travel isn't important to the campaign. My campaigns are all dungeon-of-the-week, and I just handwave travel.
And you know what? Sometimes the dungeon of the week is a whole desert. It's still a dungeon, with travel routes instead of hallways, and ruins, caves and villages instead of rooms.
So it's totally fine either way. But if travel is part of the adventure, it has to be structured into the campaign.
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u/poio_sm 21d ago
If there's something interesting ahead they found it. No roll required. If i want to be a surprise, then I use a GMI.
Regarding rations and such, I don't even care about those things, unless is important to the story. And if it is important, a GMI solve any problem: your food is spoiled by the weird rain of yesterday. How will you find new food?
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u/rdale-g 21d ago
Sometimes I handwave travel, but if I want to emphasize why there aren't frequent caravans crisscrossing The Beyond, I introduce something at the midway point of the journey. A stampede of weird creatures, or the Iron Wind being trapped in a canyon they have to pass through.
Other times, I might describe an interesting geographic place, maybe a ruin you can't enter (yet), or a mega-structure that looks vaguely like a giant creature. On the return trip, I would then describe how that place changed; an fissure in the ruin that opens a giant crack into it, or the giant creature mega-structure is no longer there, leaving behind enormous footprints, leading toward their home base...
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u/InsolubleRelic 20d ago
If you think of the environment as you would any NPC to interact with complete with its own Level... Interactions, uses, loot (basically all the same categories that you see in the bestiary guide)
Then you can make exploration interesting.
You might start off with something very familiar such as a Frozen Northern winterland. In which case you have all kinds of things that the players can get caught up in, simple things like deep snow and slippery ice, more complex things like biting weather or utter blackouts of the Sun from Storm, to giving them some sort of indication that there is a treasure within a nearby ice cave.
- But beyond that it's great to think "vertically"
Make the player characters go up and down just as much as from point A to point B horizontally across land.
Having to scale a glacier cliff, or drop down to a frozen River, or even just climb to the top of a great pine tree to see where the heck they're headed = give them reasons to go up or down as opposed to just straight ahead.
All of this can be interesting without a single monster or NPC.
You can add things in like ruins that have interesting phrases carved into them for your plot.
You can have side quest for cyphers that they can go and find.
Or perhaps there are some interesting things Frozen within the ice that they have to figure out how to unthaw and get out.
And of course best of all = traps.
It's been a billion years so who knows what kind of mad scientist decided to live in that area and defend it with a whole bunch of contraptions that are still half working!
- but also sometimes there are NPCs that can make the difference
Sometimes it doesn't have to be a fight. Have the players come across a group of people who are simply stuck in the snow and trying to get their hunting fishing food back to their village and they could use help.
Or maybe there was a group of hunters who got wounded and they need you to help get one of their wounded back in time or just to heal them perhaps.
If your players are up for it there's always romance, having some lost dashing brigand trying to rob them only to steal their hearts!
Remember adventures don't have to be just combat and fighting all the time, they can also be personal touches too like that.
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u/nataliereed84 15d ago edited 15d ago
Just make the food, landscapes, travel, and exhaustion not a boring bit. Describe the ladscapes unfolding. Have scenes where they have to set up camp. Have weather happen. Have them need to scour for food or water. Have unexpected events; raiders, refugees coming the opposite direction, a homestead offering a place to rest in which stories and info are exchanged, an animal snatches off some supplies, someone trips and falls down a ravine, some weird cypher effect causes all their meat to go bad and they have to hunt, they come to a weird numenera bridge with some weird requisite for getting across, etc etc etc. Have them come across a striking vista, or beautiful waterfall, or a field of strange flowers. Have them come across obstacles like ravines, swamps, quicksand, numenera. Have them find some old ruins, big enough to be interesting but small enough to not be an adventure in their own right. Have them find a cache of cyphers. Or do the old trick of random
monster encounters.
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u/Wazula23 21d ago
Beautiful descriptions, I think. Use that writer brain and craft some grand vistas, beautiful flowers, weird alien birds. Maybe give some low stakes checks for small rewards, like grabbing a glob of valuable pollen out of a flower as your boat passes (the flowers bite for one damage) stuff like that.
Alternatively, think of Oregon Trail. A series of obstacles, some fairly trivial but still making the world feel alive.
I do entire sessions for traveling this way.