Can't see the path for the trees.

 Okay the title for the post is a lie and that's becasue part of what I'm doing with a Woodland Pathcrawl is using a more "dungeon" nature to locla scale outdoor adventuring. The paths serve as a means to direct players from point to point, regulate travel speed, and make choices matter and what's off the path is and isn't the same thing it is in a dungeon corridor: the wall.

Of course saying off the path is a "the wall" doesn't really cut it when it's actually the whole darned forest that's off the path. Players and DM;s don't generally worry about what what is between the paths that isn't room... it's almost always stone and that as we most of us realize is typically laborious to move and even less convenient to walk through. Having the woods itself beign what next to paths and between clearing is a lot less restrictive some of the time.

 

The density of the woods off the path encourages the PCs to stay on the path, visibility and travel rate are reason enough to stay on the path BUT those woods not generally being a solid wall make it much easier for things to hide and wait. The wandering monster becomes much more palatable, it can come from anywhere, it might have even made the path. So the nature of what surrounds the path can't be ignored in a Woodland Pathcrawl. The density of trees, related undergrowth and other features pathside and beyond will shape how the players respond to the paths and how they work in the adventure.

 

I feel it's necessary to reflect on what is immediately on the side of the trails and further away. 

Possibilities as to what can be on the side of a trail:

• Fences and Walls- Not all woodlands are howling wilderness, or they were not always so. The immediate roadside (perhaps) on both sides can have wooden fences or low walls of piled stones. The function in game play is to dissuade leaving the path and to provide tactical cover in encounters. The path also serves to remind the players that their charcetr are walkign through a dynamic area where there are or were other folks.
• Hedges- Essentially an (originally) manicured wall of dense foliage. It's still a wall or fence like above but much more obstructive to travel and viewing what is beyond. Particularly old and studrcy hedges can slow or stop armored vehicles in the real world and they can certainly do so with adventurers, their steed s, and pack animals as well.
• Vines- Dense clusters od vine growth can make stepping off the trail troublesome. Vines also produce a sense of fecundity and oppression as well.
• Ditch- A ditch or trench at pathside doesn't seem like much of an issue and often it will not be at least until yuo are tryign to get your stubborn mules across or out of one. Trenches also offer the chance for cover as walls and fneces but are of course nowhere near as obtrusive. Fill these trenches with water that is being drained away and they are much more bothersome, in some regions people still travel with poles specifically to ease travel over the ever present flooded ditch. The heavier a party of PCs travel the more a trench (and more so a flooded trench) is going to direct and discourage going off trail quickly.
• A Brake of Trees- a row on closely growing trees with close and dense undergrowth. Such features are either planted or encouraged as border markers, wind brakes, and to restrict rapid travel (It's difficultly to charge a company of horsemen through an area a horse simply can not pass).
• Drop-off or Hillside- the path passes along side a steep drop-off or an steep hillside (maybe one of each on either side). This obviously restricts travel and creates choke points to make players nervous.
• Bracken- Dense undergrowth, you can see through it (mostly) but a man or beast will flounder about and find an impressive amount of greenery checking their progress.
• Waterside- the path travels alongside the water whether it is a brook,stream, or river is of little matter to anyone without a boat it's not getting crossed without difficulty.
  

Possibilities as to what can be further away from a trail:

• Dense Thicket- Trees so close together visibility is cut short and moving at a rapid pace just impossible, a thicket can be so dense horses can't even be lead through them.
• Root Gnarl- no so much a problem to agile folk but a virtually impossible forest floor covering anyone with a mount, cart, or pack animal tryign to travel between the exposed ancient gnarled roots among great old trees.
• Brambles and Briars- dense tangles of thorny and dense undergrowth that discourage travel.
• Bog- Sodden mucky land often with deceptively deep spots that could swallow the unwary. Rapid travel afoot is impossible and nobody in their right mind will attempt to go into one with a mount or cart.
• Water- More obviously flooded than even the bog. A deep water logged forest , a pond, or a bend in a local river can certainly check travel on foot.
• Hollow- Whether it is a trivial dingle or a sinkhole there is seldom a reason to travel across such a feature as entry and exit are difficult and there is little to be gained. Sure there might be somehting hidden down there but yuo know what is also down there.. twisted ankles.
• Overgrown Grove- not so much a barrier but a reminder of the transient nature of man and his attempt to conquer the woodlands.

The above are not meant to be exhaustive but simply suggestions and how terrain nearby and afar can be used to funnel and direct travel along the very obvious trails. Mechanically paths are where you get "lost" by not being sure where they go while going off trail is how you get seriously lost and have a much harder and longer time reaching destinations.

 

As this project matures I'll produce some tables for what's on the sides of trails and further away. It's important to understand the "walls" of the paths are a part of the setting and adventure in a woodland pathcrawl.

Scale and the Woodland Pathcrawl

 On working up my procedures for the Woodland Pathcrawl I had to contemplate scale in both time and distance. The 10 minute classical dungeon exploration time-frame could be used but it would take forever to explore the are designated by a typical wilderness hex and while I do want to slow things down but getting in closer I don't want it to drag on and on, so 10 minutes and feet traveled are out. Next up the rules generally only cover daily movement rates across fairly big hexes, I certainly don't want adventurers exploring forests at the rate of 12 miles a single day long turn so that's right out.  Determining the scale of action is going to enforce the flavor  a woodland hex crawl isn't a constant race agaisnt the clock and while paths resemble a dungeon corridor in some manner one also has to consider the impact the terrain and distance really has.

An oddly useful measure that helped me zero in on the much smaller measure I eventually settled on for further calculation and signifigance is the league. Now this measure is specific in the modern world but in older times when measure were not uniform a league came to be identified in the distance a man could walk in an hour and this typically falls somewhere between 3 and 3.5 miles with a healthy unburdened person on a fairly easy route. Interestingly the Japanese have a unit of measure figured similarly to a league but here it is how fast a man can carry a load on a mountain road and this Ri comes in a bit under 2.5 miles. So two hourly travel based distances within slightly different parameters made it easy to zero in on the lower measure of 3 miles for the league I'll be using.  A league is still a large distance for small-scale travel but it also serves becasue t isn't one tightly tied to us in modern life and a league is a league to those of us that travel mile after mile or kilometer after kilometer.The league is also a handy measure if using 30,24,12, or 6 mile wilderness hex maps becasue they all break down evenly into 10 league, 8 league, 4 league, and 2 league hexes. The league measure let's us see how quickly a distance could be traveled in hours if everything was relatively ideal.

 

The league was however only useful for a larger big measure  scaling down we have miles and kilometers both of which are too large and too tied to modern measures for me to be comfortable with so time to go in closer.  Feet, yard and meters are all too small as we'd quickly be using 100's of those in covering ground in any meaningful fashion even when wanting to use a more granular measure. This led me to look into traditional units of measure which got hammered into imperial units later in history but also had some bearing on how people related to the distance and time in the pre-modern world. 

 

Looking into the pre-modern agriculturally derived measure led me to the useful measurement of the furlong. A furlong is traditionally defined as the length of a furrow an ox team could plough without resting. While the actually distance would vary on the quality of a plow, the land be ploughed, and the strength of the oxen used it has come to be standardized at 220 yards (660 feet, just over 201 meters). while it's not a measure we may all use now in our regular lives it's an easy one to envision with practice and splits up into other measures fairly well. The furlong being 220 yards in length works out to there being 8 furlongs in a mile. 

The furlong and the 3 mile league come together in a handy synchronicity. Since there are 8 furlongs to a mile there are as such 24 furlongs in the league used here. This is a very handy measurement in oldschool fantasy gaming wherein the original rules had a man moving at movement rate of 12" (later refined to 120 feet or just 12).  So in an hour an unburdened character could travel a league or 24 furlongs. Deciding 12 would be the base movement rate for conformity to classical rules and ease of math this lead to settling on 1/2 hour for the time-frame of the woodland pathcrawl.

 

The half hour long Woodland Pathcrawling turn works out nicely in my estimation. A furlong is about a bow shot in distance it's possible to relate to this in play as "oh it's about a bow shot away from you" isn't difficult to hold in your head. If one has their wilderness hex maps scaled to 2 leagues that also let's us have sub-scaled maps that would be 48 units across, not too many to deal with but certainly granular enough to have the Woodland Pathcrawl play out more like traditional dungeon crawling than zooming about the map at miles eating pace. It's also possible becasue we are using a relative term to describe distance (the furlong) one could stretch or shrink it to fit their larger scale maps without needles worry and math; the world will not break if your originally 5 mile scale hexes are now 2 leagues across or if your 8 mile hexes are 2 leagues or 3 leagues across as the smaller scale distance and times are still relative and not unreasonable.

Going fourth on Woodland Pathcrawl posts distances will be given in furlongs and the procedures will be based on that.  Unencumbered parties of man-like adventurers could travel two league in but 4 Pathcrawl turns, if the road were straight and no impediments were present but where would the adventure be in that?

On The Woodland Pathcrawl

 There's an allure in wandering into the woods and distancing oneself from "civilization" and getting back to nature. Of course the woodland most of us experience has been shaped by hundreds maybe thousands of years of contact with humanity. The woods I camped in and explored as a child in New England are full of forgotten trails, forgotten foundations, and seemingly misplaced rock walls (the forest they cut through was once cleared out farmland); the woods near a favorite country resort my family enjoys has century old middens and disused roads that once connected points no longer important enough to reach by foot or wagon. These are the sort of woodlands I want to play RPG adventures within not primordial otherlands but he land next door where civilization intrudes but gives way as often as it advances, where secrets are hidden by a row of trees for years because nobody has wandered off the trail in that direction for a long time.

The pace and nature of woodland pathcrawling is different from the mile eating pace often assumed by wilderness adventuring and by slowing down the pace to poke at smaller features and secret places the woodland starts feeling more like the dungeon a mysterious labyrinth that is a host to unknown horrors, hidden wealth, and unseen challenges just ahead. Of course this is a dungeon without (frequent) walls as instead of being restricted by abrupt barriers of stone the difficulties of pressing ahead through bracken, brambles, bogs, and hillocks lead to be guided by tracks, trails, paths, and even roads. While the woods may overgrow farms and overtake and eat into structures over decades and centuries there are still clearings that create little tiny islands of normality or foreboding otherness; these clearings serve much the same functions as the room does in a dungeon and the paths serve as a combination of terrain and corridor.

 

The most obvious feature (beside the ever-present woodland) for the Woodland Pathcrawl is the paths themselves from the freshly laid track to the ancient cobblestone road. These forest paths will set and restrict the pace for adventure. Each type of path should express limits and benefits of taking that route. A freshly laid track will mostly aid navigation and perhaps quickly lead to someone or something else traveling about the woods. The wider and straighter the route the easier it is to see and be seen in addition to how quick a pace one may set on foot, astride amount, or with a cart full of goods. Paths are not all straight and direct channels to places you may want to go now however as they may have initially been laid by wandering game animals and broadened by hunters and lumber men, a work camp at on end may have connected to a hamlet but a coupe miles away that was long since abandoned and reclaimed by the forest; the span of cart path you are walking along may indeed lengthen your journey but it keeps you from stumbling through a bothersome bramble.

 

So in future posts I shall outline procedures for blazing trails and wandering about woodlands, along with the mapping and stocking them out for play. A dungeon with few to no walls can be as deep a labyrinth as any other. There chart I posted last time was a teaser and a point of reference for these forthcoming posts and I hope to provide some useful tools and interesting tidbits to for your old-school and new fantasy RPG campaigns.

Pathcrawl Teaser Chart

 A chart for Pathrcrawling in The Fantasy Wood presented here as a teaser and reference for future posts.

Pathcrawling Master Path Chart. (Teaser/Draft)

	course of path
Path	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12
2 Fresh Track	Crossing	Widens to Foot Trail	Straight	Zig-Zag	Bend	Fades Away	Loop	Wander	Fork	Clearing	Straight
3 Old Track	Turn	Crossing	Widens to Foot Trail	Loop	Fades Away	Bend	Turn	Fork	Degrades to Fresh Track	Clearing	Straight
4 Marked Track	Turn	Widens to Foot Trail	Crossing	Fades Away	Loop	Bend	Degrades into 1-3: Old Track 4-6: Fresh Track	Fork	Clearing	Straight	Wander
5 Game Trail	Turn	Crossing	Widens to foot Trail	Fades Away	Fork	Loop	Bend	Degrades into 1-3: Old Track 4-6: Fresh Track	Clearing	Straight	Zig-Zag
6 Foot Trail	Turn	Fades Away	Crossing	Widens 1-4: F,Path 5-6: H. Trail	Bend	Fork	Loop	Clearing	Straight	Degrades to Marked Track	Fork
7 Horse Trail	Zig-zag	Crossing	Fades Away	Widens 1-3: H.Path 4-6:  Cart Path	Turn	Bend	Wanders	Clearing	Straight	Loop	Tunnel
8 Foot Path	Zig-zag	Fades Away	Crossing	Loop	Widens 1-2: H.Path 3-5: C.Path 6: Road	Bend	Clearing	Straight	Degrades to Foot Trail	Wanders	Tunnel
9 Horse Path	Wanders	Fades Away	Crossing	Loop	Widens 1-3: C.Path 4-6  Road	Bend	Clearing	Straight	Degrades to Horse Trail	Turn	Tunnel
10 Cart Path	Wanders	Fades Away	Fork	Crossing	Widens to Road	Loop	Clearing	Straight	Degrades to Horse Path	Turn	Tunnel
11 Road	Loop	Fades Away	Turn	Fork	Crossing	Clearing	Straight	Degrades to  Cart Path	Improves to Paved Road	Wanders	Tunnel
12 Paved Road	Fades	Wanders	Fork	Degrades to Road	Crossing	Clearing	Straight	Bend	Loop	Turn	Tunnel

The table above is squeezed in and not too amazing to look at yet, I'll get to explaining entries and prettying things up in future posts.