Wildered Wildlings Wilding the Wildness

Very well, this argues that we should do something other than dungeons and town-talk, but let's answer the harder question.  How do we run the wilderness?

I touched on this five years ago, but specifically in relation to the adventure, not as it applies to exploring or moving through the wilderness as one might through a dungeon.  I confess that this is a hard nut to crack; but crack it we must, or else nothing I've said thus far have the remotest value.  Your players, as Lance put it, go into the wilderness "in a random direction with no plans or foresight."  What to we, as the DM, do?

Verticle axis increased 2:1

I live on the edge of a wilderness, a happy place called The Rocky Mountains.  This is the country about 65 miles east of me.  People come from all over the world to see these mountains; and naturally, when I have friends drop 'round, a trip to the mountains is always on the iternerary.  Yearly, in every season, like clockwork, people go out into these mountains and die, mostly from failing to take along sufficient equipment, underestimating the distances and the difficulty of terrain and ... occasionally ... because they try to use their cell phone as a flashlight so they can walk out at night, running out their battery and making it impossible to triangulate their position.

If I should take you out here, and you feel hardy, we could walk a trail or two.  And you'll be sure to ask me if there are bears and the answer will be, yes, there are definitely bears.  Big grizzly bears the size of a Volkswagon Beetle, able to run faster than us.  "But it's not the bears you have to worry about," I'll say.  "It's the pumas.  'Cause you'll never see them or hear them before it's too late."

This kind of thing is fun to say, but the truth is, I've spent many hundreds of hours in these mountains on back trails, fire trails and sometimes straight through the bush, up and down over deadfall ... and the nearest I've been to a grizzly bear that I could see was a quarter of a mile, standing in a gas station with binoculars watching the bear go up scree across the highway and way, way above us.  I've never seen a puma, but that's as I said.  I've certainly never been attacked by one.

In actual fact, the chance of stumbling across a normal animal in the bush is about 1 in 3.  And that will almost certainly be a goat or a deer.  Hollywood likes that scene where the protagonist finds himself face-to-face with a deer that's just 20 feet away ... and plays it up like this is some mystic moment in time.  In fact, it's ridiculously common.  I've had 30 or 40 such sightings, a few right inside Calgary, since the deer can enter through several routes along streams and rivers into the city parks with impunity.  A truly dangerous animal, however, is quite rare.  It's only that, if we were to run into one of the dangerous ones, there's a very good chance only one of us would survive.  No, not the faster runner.  Rather, the one unlucky enough to be closer when it starts.

Let's set aside animals for the time being, then.  Of course, for D&D, we can populate the wilderness with whole armies of owlbears, but this is low-hanging fruit and ultimately not exactly valuable for a sustained wilderness journey.  If we want them to fight monsters, we can run a dungeon.

We want our wilderness to create function and behaviour.  Not everyone knows what these are, so in a couple of sentences, function is how a thing operates.  Your phone is structured out of various materials but it functions, or operates, through electrical and computative processes that spits out responses for queries ... and translates voice and image into electronic signals that are sent to other phones.  Behaviour is how you act when you, your body and your mind, interacts with the phone, along with how you respond to the content and frustration you receive from the device.

The wilderness has a game function, and it has a game behaviour that the players elicit.  We want to define what those things are.

Let's go back to front.  What sort of behaviour do we want?  Obviously, the players aren't bored, the players are keen to remain in the wilderness and excitedly talk to one another about what's going on.  You know, like they act when they're in a dungeon.

The wilderness is usually made to function by pouring monsters over the players, getting the response of fighting monsters, but as I said, we're shelving that.  I'm sorry that this is starting to sound like a youtube video, where I purposefully keep the answer out of your reach to waste your time, but I just want to establish the dynamic clearly.

The function of the wilderness is that it contains whatever valuable details we wish to give it.  The players are walking along, assuming there's going to be a wandering monster any second, and instead they come across something else.  A dilapidated hovel that's been abandoned for ten years.  A dead skeleton laying face down by a creek holding a leather bag with items or a weathered book.  An unnaturally beautiful glade, with fresh water and sustenance ... that, no, is not magical and is not protected by a magical being, but would make an excellent base camp.  Rock carvings that suggest a greater purpose, followed by more rock carvings, or a cairn.  A recent kill, but no beast in sight.  Another party, friendly, who can share information with the party and direct them to places of good hunting, forage, the shelter of a hermit, knowledge of a druid that watches over the landscape, even knowledge of which fork to take.  And, as I promoted in the last post, this other party doesn't lie, or have ulterior motives.  They're just glad to see other intelligent beings in this dangerous wild place.

No, no, no, no, no.

Most of all, we want to create a series of connecting pieces, that encourages the party to believe they're onto something.  Here I don't mean a set of story-set clues, though Kipling and Stevenson made good use of that idea.  Rather, recognise that the wilderness is not a haphazard sploosh of homogenous features splashed over a hex map.  Even the tiniest of streams create pathways, legged creatures choose the easiest course through a landscape and leave behind a trail, ravines lead upwards to vistas where the players can get their bearings or over divides from one valley to the next.  Like vegetation forms territories for herbivores and predators alike — and both rangers and druids should be able to recognise predators from the animals that are present, the sort of path, markings and tracks and other signs.  A good ranger should be able to tell when the party has left the range of one predator and moved into the range of another.  As players follow along patch after patch of berries growing along a pathway, saving their carried food supply, they'll notice if they're steadily climbing or descending, even if this is a huge open steppe with nary a tree in sight.  Steppes have gulleys and coolees, that lead to streams and lake shores, which must be patiently circled, forming another sort of path.

As the players follow these paths, so do others, because these are the natural courses to take for anyone moving through the wilderness.  This is an important point.  Think of this wilderness as a set of odd, criss-crossing tiny highways that enable predictable travel ... and thus, the meeting up with things along the trail that are sensibly there to be found.  It's not at all random to find this odd, unexplained object along the way.  Whoever dropped it was probably going the same way the party is now, though a week, a day or an hour before.

Consider as well that there are macro-effects going on around the party that affects the landscape as a whole.  Rain, wind and lightning can force the characters into places they wouldn't normally go in search of shelter.  At some times of the year, animals are in the time of their biological rut, making them violent as they compete for mates, so that what might normally be a peaceful beastie along the trail is a definitely threat.  In late spring, many forest and prairie rivers are in flood, drowning the countryside or roaring through gaps that are now impassable.  In deserts, dunes move; sandstorms arise for days at a time, greatly changing the landscape and causing neophytes to lose their bearings — which, in the desert, can only be truly found in the stars.

Other strange things might be seen as well.  Suddenly, the forest is a flurry of animals, fleeing, bounding, scrambling all around the party in the same direction ... and just a suddenly, the mass flight ends.  The forest grows quiet ... but in fact, even though the party searches, they never find exactly what caused the frenzy.  Was it a great beast?  Or do our noses sniff a forest fire?  And as regards those, they can be detected for sixty miles when they occur, even five miles against the wind, since the wind is never steady in the mountains and smoke gathers in the atmosphere in a wide circle.  A flash grassfire is much more dangerous, for they do appear out of nowhere and burn themselves out rapidly.  But it's better when the party stumbles across the after effect rather than the effect itself.  After all, a forest fire is a chance thing ... but a forest that's burnt out remains so for years and years ... and it's eerie to walk through ten miles of charred flooring and trees torched into dead poles, not knowing how much further it will be until we reach the end of the burn.  A section of blackened prairie is just as unpleasant, especially as every item is blackened with soot and the player's shoes are gummy with pine tar.

Taking the creatures down off the shelf, now, allow me to stress against constantly using them to ambush or otherwise jump-scare the party.  Five days into the wilderness, the party stumbles across a group of three ogres building a house, cheerfully working and assuming they're alone out here in the great nowhere.  Now, yes, the party could rush out and kill them all ... but the braver, thinking sort might realise these ogres seem a good bunch of fellows, and step forward to parley.  After all, these ogres know this country, better than the party does.  And the party's done nothing to them; they have no grudge to bear ... at least they don't if we allow for all sorts of intelligent monsters to possess ordinary, common emotions.  Sure, they'll trade; they'll give information.  Heck, one of them was going up through that country in a few days to cut some big oak trees for a ridgepole.  He could go today, as a guide, if that helps the party.  "Sure," says the ogre, "I know just where that thing is.  I can point it out for you easy."

The trick, of course, is to think of things to find.  Consider, first, that the world is very, very, very old ... and that there's stuff out there that might pre-date, well, anything.  Second, the world is connected to a lot of other worlds, and stuff drifts through from place to place.  You know how we can feel sure that if a satellite crashes to Earth, it's almost certain to land nowhere because there's a lot more nowhere than somewhere?  Well, if stuff appears randomly from another plane of existence, it's sure to appear where somewhere isn't.

Third, the sort of people and things that abandon the civilised world for the wilderness have their own, shall we say, "way of thinking."   What they do, what they build, what they think is important, makes for a wide variety of weird things just laying about for a party to find.  Fourth, if the party is headed out there, chances are other parties are as well, and most likely looking for the same sort of non-specific things.  These other parties are allies, not enemies; there's lots and lots to find, and therefore lots to share; and there's death out here in a hundred ways, so yeah, let's cooperate.  Try to point these things out clearly to parties who think they have the ability to conquer the whole wilderness.

Last, and most important, the wilderness is sort of like civilisation's dumping ground.  All that's happened, all that is happening, if there's a good place for something we don't want, it's definitely the wilderness.  Which means anything might be out there, just lying around.  Why it is, and what it's for, and who's lost it and is diligently searching, are all good questions for a party to ask when this thing is inexplicably just laying here on the side of the trail.  Especially if it's something valuable.