Trails, tracks, and roads

Let's talk about different types of paths you might use during a hexcrawl in your TTRPG campaign!

Transcript

A while back on the channel, we looked at some Mystara docs. I'll try to link the video up, if you wanna check out that stream.

These docs had some really interesting, but really crunchy rules for traveling along different types of paths and what the effects of these types of paths were. And had some really interesting information, but I felt that overall, it was just more than I wanted, more crunch, just more rules keeping than I thought that at least for my kind of game, I needed. But I really liked the concept of looking at different kinds of paths.

Well, fairly soon after that, I posted up Patreon, just a little beta document where I tried to break things down into maybe three main types of paths. Though it's been a long time since then, I think I put that up in April, I thought I'd make a short video about it because it came on my mind again.

I don't know, maybe I'm the only one that's thinking about these sorts of things in regards to hex crawls, but it came into my mind. So I thought, you know what? Let's do it.

How do you imagine a hexcrawl?

So first off, when you're traveling in a hex crawl, what do you picture in your brain? I think what most of the rules present is that image you might have from Hollywood film of some explorer with a machete just chomping down grasses or brush or tree leaves and blazing their own trail through the wilderness.

I think this is what the rules imply. They don't ever outright state that you are making your own trail. A lot of us in our experience probably are not experiencing wilderness in that way. We are not blazing our own trails w'ere, at least in my case, hiking, multi-hour hikes, maybe if you're someone who does day hikes or even overnight hikes, walking over established trails-- something like the Appalachian Trail or some other trail in a national park.

You're generally not just taking off across the land. I don't know what folks did back in the day in the medieval landscape. I think they mostly traveled by paths. I don't think yield, peasant, certainly not any organized troop, are just rampaging across the countryside, literally. They may be pillaging and doing all kinds of awful stuff, but they're probably using roads, trails, and tracks, and other paths like that to get there, not to say that someone never did have to do that thing.

In a fantasy world, usually there are these large swaths of wilderness that don't have have nice, clean, and neat trails. But, in the absence of, say, human-made trails or trails, maybe I would say paths made by organized cultures, you still find all kinds of animal trails, inhuman creatures, or whatever might also be making roads, trails, and whatnot. So they might be out there.

I think if you're an adventuring party and you're trying to go somewhere and you're not taking the established roads, maybe there are no roads where you're going, maybe the roads aren't fast enough, maybe you just want to avoid going one way or another, maybe if you take the road, you have to go past some folks you don't wanna seize, you're trying to get around them, whatever it is, you could just trailblaze, which in that case, I think you could probably use whatever hex crawling rules you have written, but if your folks decide, hey, you know what, can we find some kind of path going there? Can we survey wherever we are? We're leaving the road. Are there any paths that lead off in some way that we can utilize? And I think the answer to that is, well, I'll give you a roll, if you have a skill that might the forgo roll or whatever, or invest time, let's do it.

What kind of paths are there?

Now, I mentioned that in that Mistara document, there was a whole bunch, of different-- they had all kinds of different classifications in there that were really interesting. I think I ended with three, and I think three, for me, is a good number that I think will cover the bases as I'll go through, and I'll go through them from sort of or the, I guess, least, no, least good worst, not really worst, because worst would be nothing, to the best, or whatever, the most efficient, let's say least efficient, most efficient. So the least efficient would be what I'm calling a trail.

Trails

This would be kind of your game trail. I would imagine that, unless you really zoomed in on a map, you're not gonna map all the game trails, right? It would be silly, but you should find them, I think, just about anywhere. Maybe you could argue in a desert, or some kind of rocky plateau, there's just no trails to find, or at least they're very hard to find. That could be part of the roll, right. But assuming you make whatever roll, you could make it however you like. If you want to use a set difficulty, if I'm using this in my game, Troupe, I'll be doing a dice pool, and I can count how many successes you roll versus the difficulty of the terrain, whatever. But if you make that role, however you do that role, then you found something, whatever it is.

Now with a trail, it is the least versatile path. You have to go single file, can't bring vehicles if you've got them.There's certainly no amenities, right, because this isn't something traveled by people. So it's probably hard to find good water necessarily nearby unless it ends at a water spot. Or, you know, maybe you can find a kind of a fording spot, but certainly no bridges, right? So it's very much the budget one, but you're gonna find it probably in the absence of anything else. If you're in real wilderness where there's nobody there, you'll probably still be able to find a trail.

You can create mechanics, if you want, to in terms of how inefficient the trail is, how far it's meandering, does it keep going? I think I have some tables somewhere. I'll probably try to get them in order. Maybe I'll publish them and then I'll link to them. But you can come up with some numbers you like to say, like, hey, where does it end? Does it keep going? All that kind of stuff.

But really the thing is, okay, you found this trail. And the idea of where you wanna find a trail in the first place is it just makes travel easier. You can stay on the trail, which means that while the trail may not be going exactly where you want, in terms of the trail itself, you're not gonna get lost. As long as you stay on the trail, you're not lost in terms of the trail. Now you may not know where you are in terms of the entire landscape, but you could kind of stay on the trail, which is a positive because if you do find out that, oh, maybe it's not going where we want to, we need to backtrack. As long as you can stay on the trail, you can move up and down the trail. You get that kind of point crawl effect between wherever the trail hit is or where you pick it up to, wherever you end up, you can kind of navigate back and forth. And if you wanna add mechanics or roles or whatever on the end of it, you're welcome to, but that's basically the singular advantage.

In my case, the other thing I do is I allow you to travel a little bit faster because you're not hacking slashing anymore. You are not forcing your way through a landscape that doesn't necessarily want you to be there. You're using the contours of land, so to speak, because that's generally where the trails are gonna go. They're gonna follow these kind of natural paths of least resistance around. So you get to take advantage of that, at least as far as the trail lasts.

Tracks

So now the next one up would be a track. A track is essentially a wider trail. It may be natural. It might be, I think more often, I would think of it as something that is attached to minor settlements. So things like you may have a King's Row that's traveling from major locations to major locations, say towns, and then you've got little estates kind of dotted all around this. And then there are tracks that lead from these little estates to the King's Row. So these little villages around there, they take their track down, hit the main road and go to say the market town or to the capital or to wherever they're headed.

So I tend to think that depending on the scope of your hex map, most tracks, or many of them I would say, you would have listed. And if the party's passing through a hex that has one of those tracks in it and they're rolling to find a trail, maybe they find that track. But of course there can be ones that, like I said, they can be natural, maybe they're abandoned. You could come up with reasons if they're in a place that has no villages and they roll up a track, you can think about, okay, well, what is it? Is it a old, made by a culture, track, has wagon ruts where you can see where the things were moved along it, or is it just really a wide trail?

But the point is where it differentiates from a trail is that this one you can, as I mentioned, wagons, you can, it is wide enough, it is generally, to allow vehicles to pass. But it's still single file, so at a time going one direction, it's wide enough just for that to go. You'll probably find forwarding points, especially if it's one that is made by cultures as a real network of roadways, that it is going to have. If it's going to pass over water, there's probably going to be a fording point where you can pass, potentially a bridge, depending, that could be up to you. It's not paved, so it's not a road.

I mentioned the thing about single file and whatnot, because that's a source of encounters. I mean, think of path encounters. Oftentimes, I've read about in medieval times and whatnot that you could really find trouble where roads or different tracks or trails would get washed out. I guess more tracks, right? I don't think they were concerned about trails so much, but a track or road could get washed out, become really muddy, wagons get stuck, and it could be really hard to get them out. And it doesn't just, it's not like what you might see now when you're looking at, oh, there's an accident on the road, and so things slow. If there's just a single room for a single person, and there's stuff on either side, and that wagon's got a broken wheel or axle, or it's stuck in the mud or some kind of a rasp there, it halts everything until that can get fixed up.

There might be other things you could think about, different creatures, different effects, different crazy weather, whatever, that really hits one of these tracks, along traffic along there is gonna be literally stopped until folks can figure out how to get basically camped out next to these tracks, waiting for things to get cleared or trying to help because it was just impassable for a amount of time. So you think about these things, we're talking about how much you can get across and whatever, these are not just difficulties to hit your players with, but it's also if you wanna put an encounter table of things that are happening different paths, if you're on a track, maybe in the spring and the fall when it's likely, I guess in sort of temperate environments anyway to be very rainy and very muddy, that these are things that can be almost adventure hooks.

Well, this wagon here is stuck and okay, we gotta help them or why is it stuck? Or maybe somebody has set up a toll, commerce and travel, it is a real choke point. It may not seem like it because you might have grass on either side, but you can't really get wagons down that. It's not like you can just go off-road with your cart and get it around there. You need that track. So if something damages it, blocks it, that's a serious concern. And it'll be serious-- the towns that rely on things moving along that track, for the villages that are trying to get their supply in that track-- it becomes something that might not seem like a big deal to us, might seem really small and piddly and yeah, but for local, certainly for local folk and maybe even regional, depending on what's traveling on there, it might be really important.

Lords will be tasked with keeping their tracks free and clear. So that becomes another element of a potential adventure is, hey, this thing's blocked. I need you to go sort it out for me because maybe it's not a mundane cause just like mud, but there's a mud golem or there's a water elemental that's sitting there and it won't leave until X, Y, or Z, right? Figure out how to fantasticize it up for your campaign, but are real concerns. So that's a track.

Roads

And then finally you have roads. Now, in my opinion, I look at roads as being, they should be kind of rare, right? These are ones that are paved or very much leveled and prepped and the best maintained. These are if you're on the road, the local lords are definitely, if they're, if tracks, keeping tracks open is kind of important to them, you know, on a, say for a locality, say for a particular estate, right? For their track, because so much of their commerce comes on that track. Roads are where the higher level lords, estates that cover multiple smaller states, right? They're higher up the, I guess the feudal food chain. They're gonna make sure that those roads are clear. The ruler is gonna make sure those roads clear as much as they can, right? But of course things happen. And so calls to adventure, but roads will allow two-way traffic. So now you at least have two wagons that can get stuck before things totally bog down. They're gonna be paved, most likely maybe fords or even maybe a barge if it's a wide river and it can't be forded and you can't afford a bridge, you might have a barge taking you across. You have two lanes, essentially one going each direction and therefore obviously vehicles can be passed.

I didn't mention under tracks, but tracks and trails improve the distance you can travel and per however your turns are by maybe one step, I would say roads are two steps. But they should also be the rarest and these are the ones you probably won't find by rolling dice. I mean, I imagine that roads, since there aren't at least in my conception, there aren't super many of them and they are kind of major that those would be definitely marked on your maps. These are the ones that traveling from city to city, from capital to capital, from town to town where the big trade is happening, where they need it, it's the other highways. They're not gonna be pinned straight like the interstate. They're still gonna be curving around, following the contours. They're not gonna be super efficient in modern terms, but these are the ones going to the major centers, carrying the big loads with lots of traffic and then off of those, these little arterial ways would be those tracks and then trails or whatever you find in the woods.

How do you utilize trails, tracks, and roads?

So you're making your hex map, you're probably putting roads on there already. I don't think it's a stretch to put at least some of the major tracks on there. Just when you see villages, instead of just connecting villages by roads, think about taking those smaller, what maybe you have as roads and just convert them to tracks. Maybe use a dotted line or dash line to show that yeah, they are connecting the roads, but they're a little bit different. They're not as well kept, not as well made, they're a little bit rougher, but they'll still get you where they need to go. And if you have a party traveling with wagons or if they're on some kind of caravan mission or whatnot, you could still get up and down there. And of course, that's what's happening, right? The villages, the farms coming in, taking their stuff in the carts, taking those tracks down the road, taking the road where they're going. Now they don't need to, you could have centers, little local centers that say a town or a major kind of a state, but I'll say a town and you have maybe surrounded by some villages and the may just all be tracks to the town, right? That's fine over short distances, but probably over longer distances and again for those more major ones, you'll wanna road. So you probably wanna put those on your map. Again, depending on scale, but I feel like roads and tracks for the most part, you probably wanna end up on your map.

When the party's in a hex that has a track, you can just have them find it, which is totally fine. Oh, you stumble upon this track. Okay, great. Or it could be that, well, you wanna play around with the fact that maybe they're not going on. Maybe there's things like hills or other kind of barriers that you have a track that you think is running on one side of a hill and they're on the other side of a hill. So there's no guarantee they will find it, but they wanna search for it. Well, then maybe they will find it, and then you also kind of know where they're going. And then for trails, probably anywhere, you can use the terrain type.

I have my whole system with giving terrain basically hit dice. I call them hazard dice and I have attributes that I give them. So I can look at the turbidity, which would tell you basically how hard it is to observe things. So I have all these different stats. I'll link to that in the show notes somewhere, if you're interested in that, that we can use to basically differentiate even more between different woods or different grasslands if you want to. If not, you could probably just look at the, maybe use the getting lost roll or use the wandering creature roll and just use the same kind of role for, hey, do you find a trail if you just wanna have that. Or like I said, use whatever, use some like Shadowdark, that uses DCs or some other system, you can use whichever system you like to see, hey, do you come across a trail? And then you can decide, roll some dice, whatever to see if where that trail goes.

Now, what I would say is if you're having the party spend time, some amount of hours, cause usually when you're in the wilderness, it turns or hours, I'd probably have them find a trail that's going at the general direction where they're going, at least for a hex, say at least to the edge of whatever hex they're in, it's basically going where they wanna go. Cause I assume that if you're spending three or four hours looking, probably gonna find a number of different trails and you're sort of going down a little bit, coming back, you know, you're doing all this little testing, saying, okay, I think this one's going more or less where we're going. So I would say at least for that hex, and again, you can roll dice and say, maybe it's multiple hexes that's going in that direction or whatever, but that hex, you know, given the benefit of, okay, you're investing hours of time, so you're gonna do that. You could also have a system where you say, hey, you know what, if they're in a hurry and they wanna do it while they're moving, they can maybe just do a really quick roll and then they don't get that benefit. And it's like, well, you found this trail and you're not exactly sure, but okay, we're taking it, go, kind of thing.

You can kind of play around with mechanically different ways of searching. But I think if they're investing time, you should probably have the trail going in the general direction they want to, at least in the short term. Now, when you're doing tracks and roads, those should probably be more set. So you should probably already know in advance kind of where that track or road is going. But if you really are just coming up with your hexes on the fly, you could probably roll some dice. The nice thing about a hex, right, is you have those six sides. So you can roll to see which one of the six sides it's exiting the different parts of the hex from, or you could even cut it in half. You could do some kind of north, south, east, whatever. Well, there are many ways to cut that with six-sided dice, but it's nice that the six-sided die will cover the six, what do you call, planes, faces, I guess, of the hex. So pretty easy to modulate that to get some different directions for where those things are headed. And then you can use more dice or use a mechanic or roll to see how many hexes this thing goes before it fades out, if you don't have a location in mind.

I think actually, I might've written a blog post for RPG Day 2025 about coming up with where, yeah, I'm pretty sure I did. I will post a link to that, because I think I did this work, at least some of it for… I think there's actually two of them now that I'm thinking about. One was where does the path end? And I think another one might've been determining the length of the paths. I think I will look them up. That's funny, I hadn't even really thought about that. If I can find them, I will post links to them. Hopefully this gives you some ideas with some different things for your party to do. I just been thinking about it, the sort of picture we have in our mind of what we're doing on hex crawl, probably what real folks were doing.

I think hexcrawl thing is also sort of difficult. I think a lot of us in our mind, we picture a hike. But classically, the way hex crawls work is you're not on a pre-made trail. You really are just kind of heading off in a direction, looking at the sun and like, all right, are the stars and like, boom, you're off trying to weave your way as fast as much as possible. So when you see a hike and you're, oh great, it's a nice little trail, and you get to follow those little, and the markers tell you where you're going, and it's really mostly clear though, I've done some hikes where sometimes your path seems to just fade out, and then those markers can really important because you really just can't see anything, and then you look and oh, 20 yards off there, I think I see the painted marker so I can go that way. It's definitely possible to get lost a little bit in those. And again, you can play mechanics. I don't know if that's more in depth that we need given everything else that's going on, but you can play with that.

In any case, this concept of what does it look like or what are we doing when we're there? And so I thought about that and I thought, well, I think that I at least want to have the option or at least let folks know the option to, hey, look for a trail. all kinds of adventure that can happen. I already mentioned the kind of things you can run into when you're on the tracks and the roads, but of course trails, you could have a whole set of encounters on trails. Maybe some creatures avoid trails, maybe some creatures sit in trails, right? Ambush predators, other folks, just other folks going about their business on these trails, maybe people who don't want to be seen in other areas. Who else is following this game trail? It could be a hunter, it could be a fugitive. Let's find out. So it's not just transportation or a network of ways to get different places, but also look at it as other places where things can happen, adventures can happen. And of course, we always want to embrace adventures wherever they are and wherever we can make them and wherever they just happen our minds, the dice, players actions, all the above.

Let me know what you think. That's all I got folks. Game on, talk to you later. Bye now.