Rules for Travel , Resting, and Time

Mechanical Stuff

The map is made up of 12 miles hexes, there are about 125 square miles in the hexes. The below rules are meant to simplify travel and make

Resting

Short Rest

You can do a short rest any time you are in a relatively safe area. If people forgoe their rest and instead perform sentry duties, others can take a Short Rest in a more dangerous area. A short rest is a period of downtime, at least 1 hour long, during which a character does nothing more strenuous than eating, drinking, reading, and tending to wounds.

• Healing can be attempted by any healers in the party.
• Known spells can be prepared.
• If a spellbook you're attuned to has any unknown spells you can spend this time to translate 1.
• A character can attune to 1 magical item or unattune themselves from it. Magic # of magical items you can be attuned to is 3 + your Magic Skill.

Night's Rest

This is when you recharge. It takes 8 hours, 6 of which must be sleeping. You roll for camping.

• All the short rest options
• Natural healing and recovery can occur as per the WWN rules PDF page 52 (Book page 48)
• If in a stress-free zone (safe indoors in a town), you lose Stress at the same rate you gain HP

Skipping a Night's Rest gives you a 1 Stress and 1 System Strain. The second successive night skipped is D4 of both and need to pass Physical and Mental save or suffer the effects of exhaustion. Failing 1 means you roll disadvantage with those attributes, failing both means you'll collapse from exhaustion. The Stress and System Strain increase by 1 pip each night (D4+1, D6, D6+1, D8, etc)

Time progression

In towns or cities, time will progress to follow the fiction as needed.

4 hour Watches

• 6 Watch per day.
• Each Watch is 4 hours long
• You need 2 watches (8 hours) for a Night's Rest.

10 minute Turns

• In a dungeon (any dangerous site), time is measured in Turns.
• A turn is about 10 mins
• On a turn you could check a room for traps, examine an old book, search corpses, unlock a treasure chest.
• Your lightsource burn time is measured in turns.
• Each turn there's a chance for a random encounter or wandering monster. This means if you spend a long time in a room doing a bunch of things you could have multiple encounters without leaving a room.

Hex Map Traveling

Below are speeds/kinds of traveling you can do when moving over the hex map.

• Normal/Default: 2 Watches per hex
• Random encounter chance: 1 in 6
• Hustling: 1 Watch per hex
• Random encounter chance: 2 in 6
• Navigation checks to make sure you're still heading in the right direction after each Watch spent Hustling
• You're exhausted from moving quickly, doubles encounter chance and you can't roll to forage for supplies.
• If you Hustle for two+ Watches without a sleep cycle you take 1 Stress per hour of additional travel.
• Mounts typically hustle at twice the sapien speed, but the mount takes 1 lethal damager per hour when pushed.
• Cautiously/Exploring: 4 Watches per hex
• Random encounter chance: 1 in 6
• Can select 1 need that is taken care of at camp. No need to spend time looking for a camping spot.
• Random encounter chance is the same as normal, but you get additional information and spot the encounter from a distance.
• May roll Wisdom/Craft, or Wisdom/Notice, to create a route map while doing this.
• Can roll some sort of scouting or navigation to try to discovery something new in the hex (a site, a type of wildlife, a small village, etc) There are between 3-12 sites in an unmarked hex.
• Foraging: 3 Watches per hex
• Random encounter chance: 2 in 6 for wildlife, 1 in 6 for random encounter.
• Chance of wild-life encounter doubled
• Foraging Survival rolls double food and water found.
• All rolls for making camp are done at advantage.

Encounters

For simplicity assume any random encounter eats up about an hour of time, unless something about the encounter suggests it would be particularly brief or particularly lengthy.

Player Advice

We've never really played this type of game before. Stars Without Number comes close, but this is a proper sandbox. I feel some explanation is going to be helpful. So here are some things to keep in mind for this game:

• This is NOT Stars Without Number.
• You got no place to escape. You can't just spike jump a million miles away to escape consequences. If you murder someone, they aren't 1 in a billion people on a planet, they are likely 1 of maybe a few hundred or in a larger city maybe 10,000. It's a much smaller scale. You may not even make it out of town before the guards are after you. If you do there's gonna be wanted posters and bounties on your head. This is not to say you can't just murder your way through your problems. Just being clear that in this game it is harder to escape consequences in this game.
• Seriously though NOT Stars Without Number. I cannot stress this enough.
• Ain't no Lazarus patches or high tech armor to save you if you try to fight your way out of difficult situations. Going to prison and escaping from that prison is probably gonna be easier trying to kill your way through the city guard. You are going to have random encounters as you travel now, so it's entirely possible to be randomly attacked by bandits while you travel even if you just expended all your resources killing the evil sorcerer. If your character dies, the rest of the party has 1 week to attempt any sort of necromantic magic resurrection before they rise as a mindless zombie. If you die mid session there is a d30 temporary character table to roll on to finish the session.
• There is no read a sitch or move to try to force the GM to provide additional information.
• The idea is that in many of these situations will be testing the player rather than the character. If a room is described, that's what's there and you gotta use your clever player brain to decide what you're going to investigate and how. Your actions define what you find out. If you're faced with a hallway and you think there is a trap, maybe tap in front of you with a ten foot pole to see if it sets any off, dump a water ration on the ground and see if any pit traps are revealed, or trying blowing smoke from a pipe to try to detect unseen passages by where the smoke travels.
• Keeping in touch with contacts will help you long term.
• It may take weeks or even months for you to return to a location. Keeping in touch with your allies via the magic mail system will help improve your relationship with them and keep you informed of the situation. Then the next time you return it's a good friend finally returning, rather than some person they knew from a long time ago.
• Crucial plot shit will never be locked behind some impassable object or difficult puzzle...that's where all the treasure is hidden.
• The treasures and secrets will not always be obvious or be found at all for that matter. That's not to say you won't find loot. It is to say that being clever and exploring an entire location will be rewarded with additional loot. Plus if you ever want to convert it to a stronghold at a later level it will be necessary to clear it out totally.