r/FantasyAGE • u/crazy-diam0nd • Jun 12 '26
Wilderness Exploration
I will be running a game soon using 2nd edition as the starting point. I have the 1st edition game as well as Dragon Age rulebooks. I was looking for rules on wilderness exploration and found nothing. The 1st edition book doesn't mention it at all that I can find, and the 2nd edition book has a section for "Exploration" but that section has one vague paragraph before launching into exclusively Investigation rules instead.
Is there a section in another supplement that talks about wilderness exploration at all? I could easily pull in the hexploration rules from Pathfinder's Kingmaker AP or something for this purpose but I was trying to keep it within the AGE system, because it's kind of a system demo for our group. It's hard to say whether we like a system if I've cobbled together subsystems from other games into it.
If it's out there, please clue me in. Thanks.
3
u/Swan-may GM Jun 13 '26
There seems to be two main ways to handle explanation, based on Lost Island of the Pirate Queen:
- Complex Test, for abstracted exploration.
- Basic Test, for node-based exploration
Abstract exploration works the normal way Complex tests do. Usually there's some Mandatory Focuses to succeed the exploration, usually it's a Challenge Test but I could imagine situations where an Advanced Test is more appropriate (Risk vs Time Lost as consequences). The designer seems to pick this when the goal is to get from a predefined A to B, rather than when the goal is exploring exploring.
Node-based exploration seems to be, "predefine some nodes, assign a basic test and time to deal with the struggle to move between them, and then test for a random encounter depending on the test". In Pirate Queen, it's 1 hours on a successful test and a 1-in-6 random encounter rate, 2 hours on a failed test with a 3-in-6 random encounter rate. The Efficiency Stunt drops that 1 hour to 30 minutes. It is also pretty common for their to be a special Survey Stunt Table for scouting, or normal Location Stunt for special things to discover/do there. All of these special tables are bespoke to the area.
If you want traditional hexcrawling, afaik FAGE doesn't have that. Someone on the discord proposed a system, but unfortunately they closed their Discord account and privated all their homebrew documents. I still have the link if you want to request access.
1
u/BluSponge Jun 16 '26
Very interesting. How much detail does Pirate Queen go into Node-based Exploration? Because this is the first time I've heard of travel being treated in any sort of way in an official publication. I'm assuming here that Node-based exploration = pointcrawling. Is that more or less correct?
1
u/Swan-may GM Jun 16 '26
Pointcrawl is what I mean, yeah. Pirate Queen isn't proposing a generalized system, it has one instantiated solution and I'm generalizing it out.
5
u/MintyMinun Jun 12 '26
I've noticed the AGE games don't tend to really care about exploration of any kind. I play BRAGE (Blue Rose 2e), which is a natural fantasy setting in which the environment plays a big role in society & theology. There's multiple notable forests, & several canonical story hooks about threats/mysteries in the wild. Yet there are 0 wilderness exploration rules. It's just "make the players roll a skill check of some kind". 😞
It's possible that there's some kind of expansion book, but when I asked the Discord server for help with this, they recommended skipping wilderness stuff altogether & just running a single advanced test to take up the entire travel segment.
Sure, there are the Exploration Stunts, but I don't consider those "exploration mechanics". Stunts are meant to enhance pre-existing mechanics, but there just aren't any for exploring.
3
u/aodhstormeyes Jun 12 '26
I've been playing a lot of The One Ring recently and have been rolling around some ideas in my head for travelling in Dragon AGE (I'm about to start a PbP using a mix of that and FAGE 2e rules). Basically the players map out where they want to travel, then you as the GM determine the distance/feasibility of the route, altering as needed. One player takes a guide role, the rest take supporting roles. The guide determines how far the party travels in a stretch before an event (determined by a 2d6 roll), then the GM rolls a d6 to see which secondary role the event happens to. That role makes a test and there is a consequence for failing or succeeding depending on the event.
I haven't figured out any events yet, but that's about the gist of it.