Exploration

Play

Ref: Right, so it’s the dawn of a new day.

Ref points to the pawn on the player’s map showing their location.

Ref: To recap, you’re here. Other than the elevated camping spot you found it’s rather unpleasant bog as far as the eye can see. The air feels damp and mushroomy.

Both players look at the map and start to point at other Hexes.

Moss: We could make it to this Holding by nightfall. Get some hospitality and actually speak to some locals?

Tal: Yeah but we know these woods over here are where the Goblin was last seen. Wait, how far can we actually see? Can we see those woods?

Ref: Not from your camp, but they’re so far away that you’d only get a distant view even from a vantage point. You’d see there are woods, but couldn’t spot a person there.

Moss: Okay let’s go toward the Holding and do some information gathering. We’ll just Trek as we’re not in a rush.

Tal: While we’re travelling can I search for any other travellers we could speak to? I can see through my raven’s eyes remember.

Ref: Yeah that’ll help for sure. No real risk here so we’ll just make it a Luck Roll. With your raven you’ll certainly find somebody, but this is more about how far away they are.

Tal rolls a d6, scoring 5.

Ref: Sure, there’s somebody travelling not far from here, let me see who we’ve got.

Ref decides to roll a random prompt for a person, scoring 1 and 11. They’ll also use the State prompt from the same page. The result is “lost Knight” and “nurturing”.

Ref: Through your raven’s eyes you see an armoured figure riding on horseback, a smaller figure on a pony trailing behind them. Looks like a Knight and their Squire. You’ve got enough warning to skirt around them, or are you going to move closer?

Thoughts

In my experience as a Referee, you can’t recap too often. In this game it’s especially useful to recap the geography of the world, as there’s a lot of travelling into new areas. The Hex map is useful, but it’s up to the Referee to make the Realm feel like a real place.

Ref goes beyond just describing the sights of the area, indulging in other senses. Here the feel of the air and the stink of the bog.

It seems like the players both understand the basics of travel in this game, knowing how long it takes to reach a certain point, understanding the importance of speaking to locals. This is something best learned through play, rather than being frontloaded into a rules explanation.

When a player is unsure about an element of exploration (here Tal asking how far she can see), the Ref can explain it with the context of a situation she’s actually invested in.

When Tal decides to move she specifies that they are Trekking, using the actual game term. When new players are learning they might say something like “we’ll move to here” and it’s worth clarifying what they actually mean in game terms, ensuring that they’re happy with how their decision will be implemented mechanically.

Ref leans on a Luck Roll here for a situation that didn’t have any risk, but was still uncertain in outcome. Perfect use of that type of roll.

To get a prompt for what the raven finds, Ref rolls a Knight and uses the prompts on that page. They could also have simply flicked to a random page if they wanted inspiration quickly, but the dice are generally preferable to get a wider spread of results.

When Ref describes what they see their description ends with a choice that the players must make. I try to do this as often as I can. Remember, the most powerful words in any RPG are “what do you do?”.