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Sculpted in Blender, printed in resin, and painted by me. I used chrome nail powders for the foil. This was a mimic chosen by my Patreon members, just in time for Easter!

You can find my other mimics on my social medias:

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@too.many.mimics

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/toomanymimics

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@toomanymimics

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/TooManyMimics

Website: https://toomanymimics.com/

Hello everyone! I’m excited to share a recent commission I had the pleasure of working on ✨ This piece features Thistle, a Tiefling Druid, brought to life for a client. I had so much fun interpreting her design, personality, and unique traits, focusing on warm tones, layered textures, and a nature-inspired feel. I really enjoyed bringing her to life, and I hope you enjoy how she turned out 🍂

"A creature from Elysium and a Patron.

A Celestial Warlock in need of acquiring the Holy power that he would've had as a Paladin, he bound himself to her as a pact. And since then, he found a way to make her materialize into his world, and although she prefers to present herself as a pixie, she can also transform into a celestial imp, a quasit, and a pseudodragon"

I made this design some years ago, but it's still one of my favorites by far, she encapsulates everything I love drawing: cute fantasy creatures, medieval armor,weapons and magic. I also had the luck of drawing her "other" versions, but I can only post one image, so I chose this one :>

Hope you like her! If you liked this drawing, consider looking through my other pieces in my socials! or DM me if you'd like a commission or design for yourself :D

Me and my friends have started a group, and it will be all of outlets first time playing, except for one of us, and multiple people are just using ai to make characters, and I don’t know how I can convince them to make their own characters.

The game itself is a homebrewed story/setting, where players are monsters and the villains and BBEGs are the typical "heroes"! The players (a team consisting of a fairy, a kobold, a pegasus, and a tiger) must defend their magical wilderness from encroaching human kingdoms. Each main boss will be a dnd class, as well as my attempt to embody a typical archetype of that class. The Saint is the cleric. Her design was based on old renaissance era angel paintings, as well as Joan of Arc.

Hey all! Dean from Roll20 here. With all the Ravenloft excitement in the air, we decided to remaster Curse of Strahd with a ton of new Roll20 features and improvements. This update is free if you already own it with us!

The big one for me is Map Pins. The castle has sooooo many rooms, and hunting through adventure text for descriptions is as big a nightmare as Strahd himself. Now you click the marker and the room description is right there. We also added automated traps, foreground layer elements, the new D&D Fifth Edition sheet, and the ability to read the complete book in our Digital Reader. I cover all the changes in my blog post.

A lot of what we've done here is being applied directly to the new Ravenloft book launching this summer, so consider this a sneak peek of how we're approaching D&D content. If there's ways of approaching these products that you'd like to see done differently, please let me know!

And finally, here's a video of my top 10 favorite Curse of Strahd features.. some new, some you might have missed! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9ZG7s7nVWI

Hello, folks!

I've seen a few posts lately across D&D Reddit lamenting the lack of fun and challenging overland exploration and wilderness survival in D&D 5e, so wanted to share some thoughts on the matter.

The goal here is primarily to share examples within the system of how exploration and survival can be framed, and evangelize the style of play supported and reinforced within the rules of the system.

First, to define our terms. Going forward, when "exploration" and "survival" are brought up, they specifically refer to:

• Exploration. The process of navigating environments, factors and decisions that influence where to go, how long it will take, and the experience of "going" to a place.
• Survival. The act of interfacing with conditions to stay safe or alive, or circumstances that threaten staying safe or alive.

Largely, the concerned comments and posts I've seen around exploration and survival boil down to these three points:

1. There are insufficient rules and support for exploration and survival, so it is largely hand waved, and thus either nonexistent or boiled down to a couple undramatic random encounter rolls.
2. Many character features strictly invalidate the tension that supposedly comes from exploration and survival - see every post about Goodberry, Create Food/Water spells, and the Ranger existing.
3. Even if a challenge exists, the party can just rest for the night and get everything back to full, so there's no tension even across individual threats.

These are all very reasonable concerns drawing from real life experiences at tables, so this post isn't meant to ignore or invalidate those concerns. This post is solely focusing on the existence of rules and support, and evangelizing a style of play that tables can consider if they want the process of exploring and surviving the wilderness to feel fun and engaging.

Exploration and survival in 5e become engaging when treated as a resource-pressure system driven by time, weight, and environment, rather than isolated skill checks.

They are not under-supported, they are under-integrated. When encumbrance, time, terrain, weather, and recovery function as a unified system, wilderness travel becomes meaningful and dramatic.

Setting the Stage

Ok, enough preamble. If the below narrative expresses the kind of experience you're looking to capture at your table, read on! If not, then I submit exploration and wilderness survival may just be better suited to your table as a couple scenes of "things that happened" and everything else largely covered through exposition and description of their travels. Just start in front of the Dungeon!

After spending a few days deciphering the map the party found in the Goblin Warren, they conclude that their Keep, and the stolen treasure they ransacked, lies 2 weeks West. 2 weeks, through harsh forested terrain where reports of a wild Manticore have reached the town, and unless they spend even more time navigating around it, the swampy bog of Uriel the Witch.

Ulrich the Fighter, Bertrand the Ranger, Azorath the Wizard, and Joseph the Cleric consider their supplies and equipment. Between them all they can only have enough supplies for one-and-a-half weeks of provisions if they carry all of their gear and equipment with them.

Azorath notes that based on what they know there may be a Goblin Outpost in the forest, a place for potential recovery, but also where the Goblin Shaman Hazigan may have stored the magical relics used from her last ritual. If they can procure those they could greatly benefit Azorath's magical studies, but it would mean ensuring they have ample space in their packs, and strength of their backs, to bear it home.

Bertrand notes that he knows the forests well, and poisonous flora is notorious in the woods, but he supposes that he should be able to help provide some support for their provisions to ease the burden. Bertrand asks Joseph if his ability to Create Water can help, who clarifies that unless the party can bear a 10-gallon barrel with them his magic would be ill suited to satisfy their needs.

With that, the party sets out on their journey. They travel for about two days, following signs of smoke in the distance that must mean some kind of civilization. After failing to come up with reliable sources of water the day before, the party consumes their limited supply of Rations, Joseph expending a portion of his magical energy to help stave off the worst of the effects of dehydration - knowing it will be some time before he can replenish.

As dusk nears, Bertrand sets about scouting for clean water sources as the rest of the party sets up camp. After searching for an hour he comes across a bend in the river, the chill of night pulling at his clothes. Withdrawing the waterskins of the group he kneels to fill them. A snapping of branches behind him alerts him to the presence of another creature. Before he can turn to react, a long, serpentine tail grasps him by the neck and hauls him into the air - unconsciousness comes quickly after.

What's Happening Mechanically Here:

• Encumbrance → Limits provisions → creates scarcity
• Time → Forces ration consumption and spell usage
• Navigation/Foraging → Creates risk separation
• Encounter → Punishes isolation and resource pressure

This exposition isn't dramatic because of a single mechanic, a single die roll. It is the interaction of multiple systems together reinforcing a shared pressure that makes exploration and survival a meaningfully interactive experience. What makes Exploration and Survival such an exciting prospect is both the wonder that comes from discovery and the risk and reward that come from overcoming challenges. If Exploration and Survival boils down to only a few skill checks, casting a few spells, and rolling on a few random tables, however, it starts to lose all of that drama.

The memories that stick with tables about tense and harrowing exploration and survival are those where the party made a decision, and the outcomes forced even more desperate decisions, with nail biting tension up to the moment of respite.

The Proposal

In the exposition and set up above I set out to define the kind of experience the following Rules Dissection and Mechanics Analysis seeks to reinforce. I'll be breaking out the mechanics and rules analyses into 6 key categories, and within each category explain both how it reinforces Exploration and Survival, where the rules and mechanics can be found, and examples for how to implement them. At the end of the Proposal I'll recapitulate the top 3 concerns I mentioned at the start and how this Proposal can address them, what considerations still exist, and recommend expectations to set if seeking to leverage this style of play.

1. Encumbrance

Basically, how much can you carry. In the typical 5e game Encumbrance is calculated as 15 times your Strength Score. For even the weakest of characters this means that for all intents and purposes how much you can carry is not a meaningful challenge. To that end I'll proceed with the recommendation that all Encumbrance considerations leverage the Variant Encumbrance rule (2014 PHB, Chapter 7: Using Each Ability).

Variant Encumbrance dictates that your free carrying capacity is instead 5 times your Strength Score, and your maximum capacity to avoid seriously debilitating limitations is 10 times your Strength Score. Application of this Variant rule means that, for example, the 20 pound weight of 1 week of Rations has a significant, character-defining cost. A Human Fighter with 16 Strength will have a capacity of 75 pounds before they become Encumbered, and a single week of Rations accounts for over a quarter of their free Encumbrance - so if you've been paying attention, this means Ulrich would have needed to carry 40 pounds of provisions for his 2 week journey with the party.

Encumbrance is a vitally useful tool in our Exploration and Survival toolbox, because it means that before the journey even begins we're challenging the party with meaningful decisions. Decisions on where to go, how long it takes to get there, what equipment we might need to bring with us, what we might want to bring back - all come down to literally how much the party can physically carry.

Editor's Note: Bags of Holding are a magic item that can trivialize this element of Encumbrance as well. My recommendation is to simply not introduce these items as treasure until the party reaches a level where Exploration and Survival is no longer part of the experience.

A few examples of how we can leverage Encumbrance to reinforce exploration and survival:

• Rations weigh 20 pounds per week. If the destination is only a couple days away the volume of provisions drops significantly - but consider a wilderness wherein civilization is separated by week+ lengths of time, which can be accomplished quite simply with Terrain (see below).
• Water. Characters need 1 gallon of water per day. Create or Destroy Water requires a single 10-gallon open container to create the water within. Most portable items like Jugs have a capacity of 1 gallon, meaning Create Water can only fill that single container. A single 10-gallon basin could conceivably weigh 40 lbs. Alternatively, a single day's worth of Waterskins for the party weighs 40 pounds - unless you are reliably able to succeed on Foraging checks to forage 4 gallons of water per day.
• Loot takes up weight. A single party of lightly equipped Goblin Raiders accounts for at least 48 pounds of equipment.
• Count the weight of coinage. 50 coins weigh 1 pound, meaning 50 gold - but all in copper pieces - weighs 100 pounds.
• Heavily Encumbered characters (carrying 10x their Strength Score or more) have disadvantage on ability checks, meaning physical effort is that much harder when you're already overburdened.
• Determining routes is a question of resource management. Whether it takes 2 weeks over the road, 12 days through the woods, or 10 days through the swamp matters in terms of how much you need to carry.
• Helping people. If the party comes across four hungry villagers rescued from Goblin Raiders - do they share their food? Do they have enough for everyone to get home? Do they spend time foraging for more?

If this management of Encumbrance, carrying capacity, and storage seems like a tax on fun or unnecessary bookkeeping, it's worth reframing: these constraints are what create meaningful decisions during exploration. Whether you have enough food and water to survive, whether you can carry all of your loot back to town, whether you can afford to be heroes to other people - that is exploring and surviving.

Why Encumbrance Matters: Encumbrance forces players to make tradeoffs before the journey begins. Those tradeoffs - food vs loot, speed vs safety - create the decisions that make exploration meaningful.

2. Weather

If you treat weather as little more than a narrative part of exposition ("it was wet as you trudged through the forest") let me tell you, you're missing out on some amazing exploration and survival moments.

Weather is one of the most impactful, organic tools in our toolbox. It can literally change how your players see the world they are traveling through, influence their decisions, and give any scene more weight.

Key rules references for this section:

• 2014 DMG, Chapter 5: Adventure Environments
• Tomb of Annihilation, Introduction: Welcome to Chult

The types of weather your party can face are as varied as you wish them to be, but the core dials are these: Temperature, Wind, and Precipitation. Any one of these, taken to their extremes, represents a significant threat to the unprepared - and sometimes even prepared - parties. Combined with each other, and with other elements of exploration and survival, they can represent deadly threats.

What we're looking to do with Weather is make the environment itself a threat, one that cannot be easily avoided or challenged in ways that Creatures or Physical Obstacles can. Weather represents something to endure, and forces decisions the party might not otherwise make.

High level examples from DMG Chapter 5:

• Extreme Temperatures force Saving Throws against Exhaustion, impose additional water requirements, challenge Foraging, and require specialized equipment to survive.
• Precipitation (snow, rain, fog - or ash from volcanoes, if you like) can influence visibility, which covers Foraging, Perception checks, and very importantly, chances of getting lost.
• Wind influences smell-based Perception, ranged weapon attacks, and can accelerate the effects of Precipitation or cause entire new challenges like Sandstorms.

The Tomb of Annihilation further describes how Heavy Rain limits visibility to 150 feet, cuts ranged weapon attack ranges in half, and how heavy precipitation makes the simple process of traveling overland force Saving Throws against Exhaustion. This is an absolutely immense toolbox of threats. No amount of food and water can prevent the effects of Severe Cold, Lightning Strikes, or Sandstorms.

A simple example of Weather as a primary challenge:

• Travel overland through a dense tropical jungle.

With no weather consideration, there's little real embedded threat. But apply Weather as a pervasive force:

• Travel overland (on foot, exposed to the elements), through a dense jungle (difficult terrain, half overland speed), in over 100 degree heat (double water needs), with a 25% daily chance of a tropical storm bringing tree-uprooting heavy winds (disadvantage on ranged attacks, damaging flying debris), flash floods (impassable routes and rivers), and torrential downpour (disadvantage on vision-based checks, increased chances of getting lost, Saving Throws against Exhaustion).

With no other threats from monsters, hazards, or encumbrance, just enduring this environment should already seem a significant impediment. The decision of whether to proceed on foot or seek shelter and wait out the storm is a real one - one that costs rations, and time.

Two sections down, and we should already be seeing a nested toolset of exploration and survival challenges that make the process of moving around the world have real impact and weight.

Why Weather Matters: When treated as an active threat rather than background scenery, Weather forces the party to grapple with decisions on what to do, where to go, and how to do it - in ways that confrontations with creatures with hit points cannot.

3. Hazards and Terrain

The environment itself, as distinct from its climate and weather, is a meaningful feature of exploration. Forests, jungles, swamps, mountains, hills, valleys, plains - all represent individual environments that house unique challenges to surviving while traveling through them.

The primary feature that different terrain impacts is travel time. Over flat lands with little in the way of obstacles, parties can typically travel 24 miles a day. DMG Chapter 8: Adventuring describes how environments like jungles, swamps, and mountains take twice as long to navigate - 12 miles per day. You can push this further: a particularly treacherous Swamp might cut speed to one quarter, meaning only 6 miles per day. The amount of time traveling, of course, compounds elements noted earlier - encumbrance, necessary supplies, risks of inclement weather, and encounter pacing.

Beyond terrain, the hazards that reside in different environments add their own color to the experience. DMG Chapter 5: Adventure Environments and Ghosts of Saltmarsh describe a variety of Hazards that can reside in the wilds:

• Desecrated Ground - areas imbued with evil, empowering undead creatures.
• Frigid Water - practically speaking, imbuing the water with the effects of Extreme Cold.
• Quicksand - a progressively restraining and drowning hazard, at first hidden from the party.
• Infestation - rats, parasites, or bacteria infest supplies, potentially poisoning rations or spreading disease.
• Diseases (DMG Chapter 8: Running the Game) - features incubation periods, symptoms, and progression that worsen over time, and notably, are not simply healed at the end of a Long Rest.

These examples are illustrative, not exhaustive.

You can think of Terrain and Hazards as a pairing of elements that should be present to parties both as they prepare for their journey and within the journey itself. The knowledge of quicksand pits, spiky brambles, and poisonous mushrooms in the forest should play as much a part in the party's decision to risk traveling through the forest as does the weather, travel speed, and known or rumored monsters or factions.

A core feature that Hazards should typically entail is some kind of cost for avoidance, to create a risk vs. reward decision point. Randomly walking into a Quicksand pit, then getting out after a few seconds and moving on, adds little to the experience. Each failure on attempts to escape costing a Ration - with particular failures potentially costing equipped gear - turns a single Quicksand pit into a journey-defining obstacle the party must consciously work to avoid.

Why Hazards and Terrain Matter: Distinctive environments and hazards create a living space that players can recognize and must reconcile with on its own terms. This shift in perspective both encourages and rewards character features and spells that allow them to engage with the environment and overcome their obstacles.

4. Time

Compounding the question of encumbrance, weather, hazards, and navigation itself, is Time. How long it should take to get through the Forest vs. how long it actually takes plays an important part in the stakes of exploration and survival.

If it should take 2 weeks to travel through the woods, and the party confronts no challenges or obstacles that influence that, and they make it through otherwise unscathed — you may as well have just skipped it entirely for all the drama you lost. If the party needs to hunker down for a day to avoid inclement weather, spend two days tending to disease after Ulrich ate a bad flower, or spend a day skirting around the territory of a predatory beast - then we have unique stories that have a fundamental impact on the outcome of the journey.

This framework assumes the use of Gritty Realism. Without it, many of the pressures described here - especially around spellcasting and recovery - will not meaningfully impact play. In short, this rule makes those daily resources the party depends on: spell slots, hit dice, and other character-defining features, significantly more costly and impactful. With Gritty Realism, a Short Rest takes 8 hours, and a Long Rest takes 7 days. This reinforces a key theme across all of this Proposal: slowing the party down and encouraging real decision making.

Application of this rule will dramatically influence your style of play, so be aware. When Bertrand casts Goodberry, that's one of his spell slots he won't see again until the party spends a week to recover. When Joseph casts Create Water to compensate for failure to find clean water, that will likewise take a week to come back.

Why Time Matters: Time turns every delay, detour, and mistake into a cost. Without time pressure, exploration has no stakes.

5. Encounters and Threats

Up to now I've not made any mention of random tables, little mention of checks, and how we can ensure threats are a pervasive obstacle across the length of exploration. This is that section.

With Variant Encumbrance and Gritty Realism in place, a single challenging obstacle that consumes party resources will immediately have a big impact, since those resources will likely not come back during the journey. As a result, challenging encounters and conditions represent those "things that happened" referenced earlier - but in a way that actually matters.

The 2024 DMG (Chapter 3: DM Toolbox) provides guidance on CR-relevant threat levels for Hazards incorporated into encounters, including example Hazards and difficulty ranges. For example:

• Brown Mold: A Deadly Hazard for levels 5–10 (Nuisance for 11–16), which creates areas of frigid cold, deals cold damage, and expands when exposed to fire.
• Fireball Fungus: A Deadly Hazard for levels 5–10, which are small mushrooms that give off light and can explode as Fireballs when destroyed.

Hazards like these typically represent additional complications to other encounters rather than standalone encounters - cold-immune creatures in an underground full of Brown Mold, or Fireball Fungi on the ground while elevated archers fire down at the PCs.

An important consideration for exploration and survival is that between resource management, weather, terrain, hazards, and time, the party is already managing a great deal. Encounters should be one more tool, not the primary tool.

This should be a freeing experience. You don't need to prepare 12 combat encounters across 12 days of travel. Instead, plan for a broader spectrum of challenges - some blended together, some ambushing the party, some the party ambushes, some the party can prepare for, some they come across the aftermath of. Each should include some kind of "hook": why it exists, why the party might choose to engage, how they might avoid it, and what reward comes from overcoming it. Variety is the spice here. The 12 days in the Forest should be a meaningfully distinct experience from the 6 days in the Swamp.

Building Encounter Tables

Chapter 3 of the DMG provides several pages of guidance around encounter tables, pacing, and environmental considerations. Rather than recapping all of it, here's the practical condensation.

Guidance. Random encounters need to create a sense of urgency - whether it is an ambush by Goblins, signs of fire and cries for help in the distance, a traveling merchant who has just what the party needs to evade the hunting Dragon, or thunderclouds portending a need to find shelter. 1d4 Wolves, bereft of any other context, will not make for a particularly dramatic encounter, even if the party expends resources fighting them.

Building Tables. Consider the environment the party will be traveling through, their level, what kinds of encounters would make sense, what moments could be fun or interesting, what could reinforce themes of your campaign, add new lore, or provide aid or support to the party. These need not all be combat encounters - they represent "scenes" that the party can either interact with on their terms or must react to with a sense of urgency.

Adding Context. Ensuring you factor in more than one of the above tools at a time will help provide variety, opportunity for creative thinking on the party's part, and inject different layers of urgency into the scene - such that when encounters occur, it is an organic transition from the overland travel sequence into "the thing that happened."

Practical Example

Below is an example table system that can generate a wide variety of encounters from a small set of inputs. This represents a prep-forward approach using a blend of pre-rolled and random encounters: seed some "Keyed" encounters on specific days, and leave the rest to random chance.

Environment: A Forest, approximately 10 days travel to any edge from the center.

The Who - The primary actors in the scene. Note the intentional lack of specificity - the goal is topical inclusion so GMs can determine what makes sense with the rest of the context.

d20	Encounter Result
1–5	Hobgoblins: War party (approx. 50), aggressive and antagonistic.
6–10	Manticore: A lone, hungry apex predator.
11–14	Griffons: A pair of territorial hunters.
15–16	Displacer Beasts: A pack of 4, stalking from the shadows.
17–18	Orc Tribe: Neutral group (approx. 20), wary of outsiders.
19	Civilization: A small village (30 souls) OR Alchemical Merchants (2).
20	Local Wildlife: Various minor beasts (CR <3).

The Where - The environment and context shaping the encounter. On a 10, roll again for Terrain and consult the Weather sub-table.

d10	Terrain / Weather Result
1–4	Deep Forest: Dense canopy and thick trunks.
5–6	The Clearing: An unusual break in the trees; high visibility.
7–8	The Landmark: A cave system OR a vital water source.
9	The Lair: You are standing near a monster or faction stronghold.
10	Extreme Weather: Roll 1d10 on the Weather sub-table below, and re-roll this d10 for Terrain.

Weather Sub-Table (if d10 is 10): 1–4: Fog | 5–7: Heavy Rain | 8–9: Monsoon (Thunder/Wind) | 10: Flash Flood

The What - The context around which an encounter occurs, and any additional complications.

d6	Activity / Hazard Result
1	Scouting/Hunting: The Actor is alert and likely to spot the party.
2	Resting/Eating: The Actor is distracted; potential for a surprise round.
3	Chasing/Fleeing: The Actor is moving fast, pursued by (or pursuing) a threat.
4	Biological Hazard: Poisonbomb Fungi OR Razorbushes.
5	Physical Hazard: Quicksand OR Tangled Undergrowth.
6	Pure Flavor: No hazard; the encounter is straightforward.

The Why - Without a sense of urgency or reward, many encounters will fail to push the party to engage.

d4	Reward
1	None: The encounter is purely a survival or social challenge.
2	Utility/Info: Scraps of a map, a single potion, or knowledge of the area.
3	Supplies/Trade: Bulk goods (fur, meat, alchemicals) or 1d10 worth of "pocket change."
4	The Find: A significant cache, a lost heirloom, or a piece of masterwork gear.

How to Resolve

Roll 1d20, 1d10, 1d6, and 1d4 together.

1. Read the Who (d20)
2. Read the Where (d10)
3. Read the What (d6)
4. Read the Why (d4)
5. Build a single sentence that brings the elements together.

Example: You roll a 12 (Griffons), a 7 (Cave System), a 2 (Eating), and a 4 (the Find).

"You crest a ridge near a yawning cave mouth to find a pair of Griffons busy eating a fresh kill, their backs currently turned to the path, a glint of polished armor and swords nearby."

Much of the context here is left intentionally vague to allow GMs to inject the context that inspires them. Note that the Actor table doesn't specify something precise like "1d4 Wolves" - the goal is not to do all of the work of encounter design for you, but to provide tools that help inspire you to make it your own. Additional resources like the Treasure Tables in DMG Chapter 7 can layer on top of this system as needed.

Why Encounters Matter: Encounters serve multiple purposes: they introduce threats to survival, create opportunities to reward exploration, and force important decisions on where to go and how to get there.

6. Navigation

With all of the above context, we've outlined what kinds of challenges parties might face, and under what context, during their journey. What remains is how to actually manage the process of moving through it.

Ironically, navigation is quite simple in practice - it is often the other sections conflated with the process of navigation that result in the experience falling flat. Navigation is the thread that ties all of the above together, the moment-to-moment framework through which all of those systems get expressed.

Simply put, Navigation is a factor of speed, perception, and risk management. When detailing that traveling to the other side of the Forest will take 10 days, the implicit comment in that statement is that this is based on a normal travel pace, finding navigable paths, and avoiding risks.

Chapter 5 of the DMG describes a simple system for managing Navigation through the wilderness. Typically the party will nominate a "Navigator" - someone skilled in Survival - who will, based on the pace of the party, the environment, and other factors, make a Survival check on a regular interval. The result determines how accurately the party moves through the wilderness, avoiding risks, keeping to trails, and so on.

Moving faster or slower imposes penalties or provides bonuses, as does knowledge of the environment through maps or rumors, and the DC is based on the environment.

As alluded to in the Weather and Hazards sections, there are factors that can further complicate this: higher DCs from uprooted trees, Hazards spreading into areas, or Weather features making accurate navigation more difficult. Whether through impassable routes or difficult terrain, the Navigation check can result in the party getting lost.

The primary result of getting lost is losing time - time that must then be spent getting back on course, consuming rations, potentially triggering encounters. Chapter 3 also describes that getting lost, drawing attention to themselves, stopping for a rest, or an extended period of uneventfulness are all appropriate opportunities to roll for random encounters: roll a d20, and on an 18 or greater, an encounter occurs. Enter the Encounters and Threats resolution above.

Exactly how frequent you want encounters is down to taste - once per hour, 2–3 times per day, once per day, or once per rest. Consider that some areas might be particularly dense with potential threats, making that d20 threshold a 15 or greater.

Imagining the environment as a living place, considering the territories of factions and predators, can help inform this pacing decision.

Why Navigation Matters: The ever present need to stay on track, to not get lost, to focus on the next step, is a crucial factor in the experience of the journey. It does not require granularity for granularity's sake - but the right touch of risk and reward can continually reinforce and encourage smart decision making.

Each of these systems reinforces the others. Encumbrance limits what you can bring. Time determines how long it must last. Terrain and weather increase that time. Hazards and encounters tax your resources. Recovery is slow. Together, they create a continuous loop of pressure and decision-making that makes every day of travel feel like a meaningful part of the journey.

The Reframe

If you've made it this far, thanks! I hope this has been valuable. This write-up has been an attempt to address common concerns about the lack of rules or support for making exploration and survival meaningful and interesting.

Exploration and survival become compelling, engaging, and fun gameplay when:

• The party cannot carry everything they want.
• Time forces consequences.
• The environment creates problems that don't have hit points.
• Every decision trades one risk for another.

So, to redress the core concerns raised at the start:

• "There are insufficient rules and support for exploration and survival."
  • The rules and support do exist, but are admittedly spread across multiple chapters and even multiple books, and are less prescriptive than they are illustrative of what you can do. The core message, however, is consistent.
• "Many character features strictly invalidate the tension - Goodberry, Create Food/Water, the Ranger existing."
  • In the absence of reliable resource recovery, lingering threats, and the ever-present cost of simply carrying your supplies, spells and resource-based features become much more precious. The number of scenarios a single feature can simply resolve reduces significantly.
• "The party can just rest for the night and get everything back."
  • Gritty Realism is the real star here - turning Time into an incredibly valuable resource, and every encounter into a potentially significant cost to the party's survivability.

To synthesize all of this into a simple reference point:

• Exploration and Survival are a style of play wherein getting somewhere safely is the point of the game. Reconciling that as a core experience is crucial. If you are primarily interested in what lies at the end of the road, in the center of the swamp, or at the top of the mountain, an exploration and survival game may not be suited to your goals.
• The immersive experience of exploring, finding, and surviving requires important decisions to be made - which requires there to be real stakes and risks being balanced by the party.
• Ultimately all of this guidance is to serve a single point: Exploration and survival can be some of the most engaging and memorable gameplay a table can experience.

Thanks for your time, and if you have any thoughts on your own exploration and survival games or considerations for discussion I'd love to hear them!

Just wanted to show off my new mimic collection i made for our DnD campaign.

Printed these myself on a resin printer and I’m kinda worried my players will start attacking everything now.

I didn't paint them yet but once i do so im going to put them to good use.

I tried to make each one a little bit different so they don’t expect what’s coming.

My personal favorite is the chest in the middle.

Which one do you like the most?

From : Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel

Bae Si-Hyeon is the second member of our D&D Party.
She is from Yeonido (a sort of Korean inspired fantastic region). She's related to my own character) in being her adopted sister.

She has draconic features as a drakeid born and like gems, stones and wealth. She can throw fire and is skilled with her double-scimitar. Her psionic talents reveals to help control ennemies and allies on the battlefield.

I will try to draw all OC from our Party one by one ! ♥

Feel free to exchange !