Product: Wondrous Expeditions
Author: Alex Clippinger, JVC Parry, Elf Vesala, Jeff Lee
Publisher: Loresmyth
System: System Neutral (though has some D&D 5e-specific items)
Summary: Roleplaying wilderness travels can be challenging for us GMs. The Wondrous Expeditions Forest book makes roleplaying wilderness travel exciting, engaging, and challenging. Descriptive, system-neutral content helps bring the environment to life in great detail and atmosphere. Tap into a wealth of world-building tools, new forest types, travel and survival gameplay, unique flora, fauna, new monsters, and more to launch your players on their next wondrous expedition.
Snap Judgement for Busy Wyverns: A good book full of really interesting ideas, along with some high quality fantastical forest biomes and a couple of fun instant adventures. However, some assembly required, and the instructions are missing. We felt this book could have used just a little more to help the user tie everything together, a bit more scaffolding to hang all the pieces. A very good addition to your forest-travel toolbox, but not enough to become the first book out of that toolbox.
What is it?
This 150-page book has lots of advice and tables for running forest expeditions and building scenes within those environs. The advice is solid, if a bit wordy at times, and the tables are inspirational and fit well within the themes. After going through all the forest expedition concepts and the descriptions of different types of forests (with their associated tables), the real mechanical innovation is presented – an expedition and travel system. Although this book is focused on forests, this expedition system is generalized to any biome or terrain. Then, the authors provide 4 pre-made fantasy forests with histories, creatures, hazards, special qualities and some plot hooks for jump-starting your adventure creations. Included are 2 short adventures that are pretty straightforward and attempt to show off the travel system within one of the pre-made fantasy forests (The Marrowgrove). Finally, an appendix holds D&D 5e stat-blocks for some of the unique monsters that were presented earlier (then with system-neutral characteristics).
What makes it good?
If you’re running a fantasy RPG, there’s a good chance that, at some point, your character party will have to travel through some untamed, possibly magical forest. It’s a staple of the genre, probably for good reason! Wondrous Expeditions ruminates on the importance of forests in the Introduction, along with a short discussion of Travel in Role Playing Games and why they’ve created a stand-alone Expedition System. We certainly read along with the introduction while nodding our head – readers of this site will know we have a real admiration for the Exploration pillar in Role Playing Games, and that it truly is hard to get right. Furthermore, there’s general agreement out there that the most popular system out there (5e) doesn’t really do a good job supporting or executing that pillar.
The Loresmyth team divides most RPG travel, as it happens at the table, into two camps – the Montage and the Realistic. Travel by montage doesn’t serve us well, as it denies players what should be an epic journey, the likes of which we’ve all read in classic fantasy novels. The realist approach attempts to detail out everything that “matters” during travel, in the hopes that some sort of drama will emerge from the spreadsheet of fluctuating numbers. More often than not, however, it’s just bookkeeping with no payoff.
So we are extremely sympathetic to Loresmyth’s argument here, and were eager to learn about this Expedition System, just as we were to learn about the travel system in Weird Wastelands. While that book spent over 30 pages discussing everything normally tracked in an exploration process, then distilling, abstracting and boiling it down to something manageable and then presenting a step by step process for resolving travel – Wondrous Expeditions spends about 10 pages. Now, the length of the system is not an indicator either way of quality – but we mention it as a comparison for what kind of complexity is in use in these books.
The main reason for the page count difference is the scope of the system. Whereas Weird Wastelands was concerned with survival during travel, Wondrous Expeditions is merely concerned with the travel itself. It doesn’t try to manage encumbrance or rations directly, it really tries to boil everything down to a few checks by members of the party performing different roles during travel (including planning before embarking) – most everything that could affect the party is then distilled to a modifier on that check. Finally, based on the success or failure of that journey – there is a morale check. Everything is broken up by the period of travel between waypoints. The morale check then feeds into the next travel stretch, and so on. While this book does seem to refer to hexcrawl methods (mentioning that the GM should know whether they have a map based on 6-mile or 12-mile or 24-mile hexes), this system seems to us to be begging for use on a point crawl map. Many articles on point crawls seem to dance around a system like the one presented in Wondrous Expeditions but do not outright articulate it. We appreciate the effort in this book and absolutely plan to use it for some future travel adventures.
Aside from that, there’s still more to like in this book. You get excellent layout and production value, quality art and some good “in character” interstitials. The art on the 2-page spreads at the beginning of each section is particularly gorgeous. There’s lots of good tables in here, and we love a good set of random tables. Drop-in forests and an instant adventure is always a winner in our eyes – we’ve been called in as a backup GM on short notice enough times to truly appreciate quick, clear and concise adventures, even when they are tightly bound to a track. We also just really agreed with the founding philosophy of this book – going into it we really wanted to love this book.
How do I use it? / Downsides
We’re combining these two, normally separate, sections because the answer to this question is also the biggest downside of the book. Even though (we feel) the Expedition System should have been the centerpiece of the book – as the attempt to solve wilderness travel is the central thesis of the Introduction – we don’t get to read the System until the first “appendix” – though we absolutely consider it to be a chapter of the book. Consider the order of this tome:
Had we been in charge, the Expedition System would have been Chapter 1 – because everything builds upon it. Presenting advice for running forest expeditions right after the Introduction was a bit jarring, as I didn’t even know how any of those pieces were going to fit into the travel system. And furthermore, while this book assumes you have a forest map in mind – as none are presented – it gives no advice on how to place any of the forest scenes you may create. Some of this just seemed backward to us. We would have chosen a different order, to be sure.
So this is the crux of the issue – there’s a lot of good ideas, inspiration and advice in this book – but what do we do with it? If we imagine a forest as just a big green blob on a map, how do we place all these waypoints, landmarks and topography that are essential to the encounters and navigation challenges of the Expedition System? On this, the book is silent. If an actual, cartographical map is not required for this system, how best can we organize the information about a forest so that we can effectively run travel using the Expedition System? We believe the answer is “a point crawl” – but the book is silent on this as well. It’s an exercise left to the reader – who may or may not be acquainted with point crawls and their design.
Final Thoughts
We wanted to love this book. We do really like it, the tables are great! There’s excellent advice in here, worthy of being in a stand-alone essay compilation like a Kobold’s Design Guide. It’s a pleasure to look at and a pleasure to read, and the expedition system shows promise. We don’t think its perfect, but it’s definitely a good attempt to bridge the gap between montage and realism. We think everyone who worked on this book should be proud of what’s in this book – it’s a high quality, independent system-neutral guide to forest travel in fantasy role playing games.
Recommend or not?
Conditional Recommend. Be careful with this one – as it just feels a little incomplete. You’ll have to do some homework and some thinking on how to fit in the system and pieces into your map – whether it’s a mile-based map, or hexes, or something else. This book stops short of giving you that information, how best to organize everything so it all works together. If you’re just needing forest inspiration – go for it, this is a great book. If you need step-by-step advice on creating a map – start elsewhere.
However, we hope soon to post the step-by-step creation of a forest point crawl using this, and other, resources.
Busy Wyvern 