It’s kind of a tradition now - every time there’s a journey we use a different Travel Hack.
- Goblins: Biological Warfare
- Goblins: City On A Hill
- Ocean: Not Just In The Ocean Anymore
- Goats: Goats Goats Goats
- Mountains: Have You Worked Out What We’re Looking For?
- Octopuses: How’d It Get Burned
- Goblins: Who Loots The Looters?
- Pen: Crabby Wizards Through The Ages
Players: Choose to roll 3x 1d6 or to roll 4x 1d6 and open up a ninth option “camp” where you get to camp. The numbers you roll will be the encounters you will have on your journey. The numbers you don’t are encounters you hear rumors of rumors about. If you roll duplicates, reassign dice to results as you choose until you have no duplicates. e.g. if you roll 1,1,3,5 you could choose 1,3,5,8. Note that 1-3 are bad for you, 4-5 are opportunities, and 6-8 are good for you.
GM: Each encounter is one turn’s worth of obstacle kind of like a twist where you impose a test on the player(s) but some of these twists are good e.g. Octopuses gave them a super-useful piece of plot-relevant unique utility loot. Try to make each require a different skill/ability. Try to make the titles evocative to the extent that the players get the same amount of useful information from reading them without encountering them as they would from a rumor of a rumor of the encounter.
Alternate version I’d try: Get rid of the dice rolling, add in 9. Camp, randomize the order so they don’t know which are bad and good (but can make educated guesses based on the descriptions (make sure the descriptions don’t completely give it away)), let them choose 4 as they wish.
Results: fairly fun and quick. I had a lot of fun thinking of the titles and watching them read the titles and deliberate over their one choice of what to turn the extra 1 into. They ended up at the destination with 1 player Sick, 1 player Angry, minus 1 ration, plus one great piece of unique utility loot, plus one free pass from anywhere on nearby mountains to anywhere in nearby desert or ocean (map), 4 turns in. It felt like about the right magnitude of changes for a long journey.
(Pen is a known demon baddie, tree octopuses are a known bogeyman, they’re traveling along an ocean toward mountains, organized goblins have been assaulting human cities, and goats are an inside joke but also like mountains)