Heading out into The Frontier is a dangerous endeavor. The following page will walk through and explain the mechanics as well as the process for traveling, exploring, and surviving beyond the safe light of civilization on the continent of Berastus.
Travel and explorations is done in “legs”, this not a specific amount of in-game time, but a cycle with the generation and expenditure of a number of travel related resources from skill checks and the facing of dangers and challenges, at the end of the leg the party can take a day to perform a “wilderness rest” a type of enhanced short rest.
The first thing to do is decide how quickly the party is going to be moving on this leg of the journey, there are three options, each with their own consequences:
Next each member of the party must make a skill check to generate “travel resources” for this leg of the journey.
The available skills are:
Going around the table each character chooses one of the skills and makes an ability skill check with the chosen skill against a DC determined by the “region” of the world that they are in.
Background, tools, information, = more rolls
Degrees of Success: to calculate the degree of success or failure of a roll do the following: calculate the difference between the DC of the check and the roll, then divide that number by 5 rounding down.
For example: if a task had a DC of 10 and the player rolled a total of 16 their roll would indicate one degree of success, ( 16 - 10 ⇒ 6; 6 / 5 = 1.2 ⇒ 1 ); if instead they rolled a 16 that rolls would have one degree of success.
A Further Note: a check is still considered a success if there are no degrees of success associated with the roll, there are just no additional bonuses received.
For every successful roll, as well as every degree of success indicated by the roll, a player can choose to generate a point from the table below.
| Movement Points | Exploration Points | Scouting Points | |--- |--- |--- | | generated by: |generated by: | generated by: | | Acrobatics | Nature | Athletics | | Animal handling | Perception | Perception | | Athletics | Survival | Survival | | Nature | | Stealth | | Survival | | |
| Activity | Pace | Cost |
|--- |:---: |:---: |
| Move into a hex, spending movement points | Slow
Normal
Swift | 3 points
2 points
1 point |
| Explore a hex, spending exploration points | Slow
Normal
Swift | 1 point
2 points
3 points |
One might notice that the generated scouting points do not have a way to spend them in the table above. In addition to overcoming challenges, which will be described later, scouting resources can be spent as “wild” in a two-to-one ratio to accomplish a move or explore action, however you cannot spend only scout dice to perform those actions, just to “top-up”.
The frontier is a dangerous place and the party will face a number of challenges on their journey that do not rise to a cinematic level, these occurrences are represented by danger dice.
For each leg of a journey the GM will generate a pool of danger dice in the following way. Take the number of players in the party and multiply it by the Danger Level of the region that they start the Leg in.
Each danger dice is a d8, with the following options:
| Die Roll | Result | Description | | :---: | --- | --- | | 1 - 3 | No danger | - | | 4 - 5 | An Environmental Challenge | the party must spend 1 movement point to overcome the challange -or- spend 1 ration per party member and succeed on a group athletics check; on a failure take a “setback” amount of damage | | 6 - 7 | Hunger | Spend 1 Ration per Character -or- 2 scout resources -or- 3 explore resources; if unable to do so... | | 8 | Random Encounter | Scout Resource to avoid -or- group stealth check |
When the party moves into a new hex the GM may roll up to 3 danger dice for that hex representing potential hazards. One by one roll the d