Running Interactive/Cinematic Travel

How to run travel for RP-focused groups

Travel has always been one of the most complicated parts of GMing for me - there’s (usually) no mechanics to hold your hand, and player agency comes to a halt. It’s all on you. Everyone is watching and listening as you try your hardest to create a Middle-Earth-scale journey from points A to B.

Official 5e adventures rely heavily on random encounter (mostly combat) tables to pad out a travel segment, but it rarely feels like there’s any purpose to fighting a pack of gnolls giggling in the distance for a group that isn’t combat-oriented. LevelUp 5e takes those random encounters and elaborates on them, transforming them into RP opportunities through monster lore and signs. Finally there are travel mechanics that give players agency again, letting rangers track creatures to hunt or for druids to scout and look for a more secure way to avoid a deadly encounter. But it’s still combat focused at its heart.

Interactive travel is what I call the style that I run - a mostly non-combat, almost cutscene style of describing a prolonged journey. A mixture of random and scripted events that don’t just exist to fill time between the start and the end, but to flesh out the local area around the characters and remind them that they aren’t the only ones who live in this world. These scenes can be anything from a short situation that calls on a player such as “The bridge across the river is broken. Alanar, how did you help the group to cross to the other side?”, to a fully fleshed out hours-long roleplaying moment.

An example of the latter that I recently ran came from writing down the simple sentence ‘People camping nearby speaking elemental language’. The party were on track to finish their day’s travel near a large lake which was relatively unexplored by the local populace, so I glanced at my notes and decided that this hook would work well due to the elemental connection with the water. I described the scene as they were walking through the camp, explaining how large it was, how many people there were, and most importantly, giving them something to interact with by asking them what languages they each spoke. The agency was then in their court. They wanted to figure out what was going on, and whether or not this was a safe place to rest for the day, and they could use any of their spells, features, and items to get to the bottom of this mystery. 

It was a simple quest hook that didn’t need any maps or encounter design, was more fleshed out than a traveling NPC to talk to on the road, and could be easily cut short or expanded if the players decided that it was uninteresting or of major importance to their quest. Simple quest hooks/seeds are all that’s needed, but it’s important to have a way to call on the group, or specific players, to bring them into the scene and make it fully interactive. 

Instead of the usual dawn/noon/evening encounters each day that official adventures suggest, I chop up the journey into major chunks, whether that’s the trip between settlements, landmarks, or simply cutting a larger area in half. I then designate 1-3 events to each chunk that can be sprinkled in, and can be easily tailored to the local area. Breaking it up is also a great way to cut down on prep time even more (since you’re generally running less encounters), making it a very simple travel method to run, and less exhausting to play.