Porting the Land of Eem Travel Rules to Shadowdark

When running the Shadowdark overland travel rules for the first time, it felt like I was rolling tons of dice without anything happening. Which was very unsatisfying for me and my players. So I started looking for alternative rules. Most of them were too complex or unwieldy for my liking. But then I stumbled upon a damaged copy of the Land of Eem core rulebook on sale in my FLGS. There was a lot of positive chatter online about the system, so I gave it a try. And it was exactly what I was looking for!

There is just a single role for the PCs during a journey, the single roll (except for random encounter tables) is player faced and the mechanics are similar enough to the core Shadowdark D20 roll-over principles to be easily portable.

Travel Turns

Instead of tracking individual hours during Hex travel, in Land of Eem each day is divided into 4 Travel Turns. 2 turns during daytime and 2 turns at night. PCs can move up to 2 6-mile Hexes every turn.

PCs can move up to 2 Travel Turns each day. If PCs push ahead and travel a 3rd Turn in a day, they become Tired without a successful DC 12 CON check. If they travel a 4th turn, they automatically become Tired. In addition, travel at night is way more difficult (see below).

Tired Condition

A Tired character has disadvantage on all checks until they take a Long Sleep.

Travel Checks

I scaled the d12 realms check from Land of Eem to a WIS roll and keeping the rules for rolling:

For every Travel Turn spent moving across the map, a different PC must make a Travel Check for the whole group. To make a Travel Check, roll 1d20+WIS at the beginning of the Turn to determine if there is an encounter, a minor setback, an uneventful journey or a discovery. Travel Checks and Hex movement are modified according to the Travel Modifiers table.

The travel modifiers table can be kept as is:

Perilous and Dangerous Encounters

First of all, the Perilous Encounter and Dangerous Encounter results can be handled as a single Encounter result. But I think it can be interesting to bias the normal Shadowdark rolls for Distance, Activity and Reaction towards a more dangerous result for the Perilous Encounter result by rolling with Disadvantage, for example. You can, of course, also prepare two separate encounter tables for this, but I am not sure, if the additional work you have to put into this is worth it. Alternatively, you can roll on the Something Happens! table in addition to the normal encounter table.

Bump in the Road

I kept the rules for the Bump in the Road result from Land of Eem, only modifying the descriptions to match the Shadowdark rules:

Lost

The PCs take a wrong turn and get lost, moving just 1 Hex and rolling 1d6 to determine which Hex the party travels to (1. North, 2. North-East, 3. South-East, 4. South, 5. South-West, 6. North-West). In difficult terrain, they make no progress.

Lost Supplies

A random PC accidentally loses d6 Rations (or, absent that, a random item from their inventory).

Exhaustion

The PCs take a difficult path, wearing everyone out. Everyone become Tired until taking a Long Sleep.

Bad Weather

The PCs run afoul of bad weather: rain, wind, cold or heat. Only move 1 Hex and suffer -2 to the next Travel Check.

Unwanted Attention

The PCs travel quite conspicuously, drawing attention to themselves. The next time they camp, the Wandering Intruder Chance (see below) increases by +2.

Interparty Conflict

The road is hard, putting people on edge. Two random PCs start bickering about something important (a potential roleplaying opportunity).

Making Camp

When not travelling on the Hex Map, the PCs can spend the 2 Travel Turns making camp at night.

• Find Food (1 Turn). PC goes off into the wilderness to find food. Since there are no rules for this in the Shadowdark rulebook, we use the rules from the Western Reaches Preview: A PC can forage for 1 ration a day with an INT check.
• Sleep (1 Turn). PC gets a sufficient amount of sleep. Without food and sleep, PCs don’t heal HP. Use the normal rules for Resting from the Shadowdark rulebook for this.
• Long Sleep (2 Turns). PC conks out for an extended slumber, usually to heal the Tired Condition. This counts as 2 rests when using the Grinder Mode
• Keep Watch (1 Turn). Instead of sleeping, PC keeps watch while others rest, which reduces the Wandering Intruder chance by 1. Two PCs can take shifts during the Turn: they won’t be Tired, but they don’t heal HP that night.

Note how I did not include the Story Time action, because there are no mechanical benefits fitting for Shadowdark in my opinion. This does not mean, that the PCs are not allowed to have some roleplaying during there time in the camp 😁.

Wandering Intruders

Roll 1d6 each Turn while the PCs are making camp at night. On a 1, roll for a random encounter. This chance can be adjusted in different ways.

• Risky Environment +1
• Deadly Environment +2
• Keeping Watch -1

This means, that there is no need to check for Wandering Intruders in Unsafe Environment, when at least one PC is keeping watch, which reduces the number of dice rolls for “normal” travel.