Wilderness Travel in Old School Essentials

In the previous post I summarised the rules relevant for wilderness travel in Dungeons and Dragons 5e. Although there are plenty of rules for wilderness travel there are also rules missing. I thought it would be interesting to also have a look at what the earliest editions of Dungeons and Dragons did with the subject. Old School Essentials is what is called a retro-clone. It basically summarises and cleans up the Basic/Expert rules of D&D from 1981. Compared to the vast amounts of text in the 5e books, the compactness of Old School Essentials is refreshing. New players might find them a bit too compact, although I am pretty sure that many new players will also have problems with the D&D 5e books. The rules of Old School Essentials are also much simpler than D&D 5e (e.g. skills and feats are missing).

The Core Rules book contains a section on wilderness adventuring. This section is two pages long and describes very succinct all relevant rules. It also has a half-page summary at the front of the book. This clearly illustrates that wilderness travel is a core part of the game. As the rules themselves are already quite compact, I will not try to summarise them any further and will describe some of things I find notable.

The book contains a clear description of the steps involved in running a wilderness travel. Wilderness travel is ran per pay using the following steps:

1. The players decide on a route they want to follow.
2. The DM determines if the character loose direction. This is done with fixed probabilities given the type of landscape (e.g. 2 in 6 in woods). This is typical for older editions where character tend to not have skills.
3. The DM rolls for wandering monsters. This is typically done once per day. The probability for a random monster depends on the type of terrain (e.g. 3 in 6 for mountains). Monsters are encountered 4d6 x 60 metres/yards away or when one side is surprised 1d4 x 10 metres/yards.
4. The DM describes the travel and if necessary the encounters.
5. At the end of the day rations, spell durations etc. are updated. One day in every 7 days the party should rest for a full day or suffer a penalty. The party can forage while traveling. They have 1 in 6 chance of finding enough food and water for 1d6 members.

The system is quite complete although the rules are rather simple. The simplicity is mainly caused by the fact that the earliest editions don’t contain skills. In case of a system with skills, the probabilities getting lost, finding food, etc., would depend on skill scores. However, other than that the system seems quite useable by other systems such as 5e.