Perception
Illumination. There are four levels of lighting: darkness, dim, bright, and blinding. Creatures with special visual abilities, such as dark sight or infravision, treat darkness and dim lighting as “bright” to a specific range.
Darkness. Stealth advantage. Possible blindness.
Dim. Perception disadvantage. Missile attack disadvantage.
Bright. No bonuses or penalties.
Blinding. Stealth disadvantage. Perception advantage. Missile attack disadvantage.
Darksight. Creatures with dark sight can see a certain distance (usually 60’) in environments without light. Darksight has no color; everything perceived is in black and white. Details are otherwise normal.
Infravision. Creatures with infravision see the world in heat gradients to a specific range (usually 60’). Infravision reveals creatures and objects as general shapes ranging in color from blue and black (cold) to red and orange (hot). Details are minimal. The main advantage of Infravision is its ability to spot warm-blooded creatures in dark environments easily. The residual heat left by warm-blooded creatures moving across cold surfaces can also be noticed within a few rounds of passing.
Ultravision. Creatures with ultravision can project a strange sort of illumination from their eyes, well beyond the visible range of most humanoids. While ultravision can reveal certain types of organisms, it is not ordinarily helpful in navigating the dark. Instead, it exposes traces of fluids that fluoresce, such as blood, even once they are no longer perceptible to normal vision. Creatures with the power to see in the ultraviolet spectrum are rare.
Scent. Creatures with this powerful ability have olfactory acuity on par with a wolf. This provides them access to a great deal of additional information; they can authenticate a being's identity by scent, track others with great efficiency, detect smoke or toxic gas before anyone else, sense changes in a creature's body chemistry (such as sickness or pregnancy), know if a person whose scent they are familiar with was recently in an area, and so forth. Virtually all creatures with a highly developed sense of smell are susceptible to blood, and they can detect spilled blood nearby with no rolls required. All living things also leave a cloud of scent particles in their wake, which linger for a variable time.
Travel
Travel Speed. First, the Storyteller must establish how many miles the party can travel daily. Physically fit characters traveling on foot in a group will move 20-30 miles daily, depending on the terrain. This is not meaningfully affected by individual party members’ foot speed because the vagaries of overland group travel even out over a day. Characters on horseback move at double this speed, averaging 40-60 miles daily. Truly exceptional horses can achieve speeds of up to 100 miles a day, but such animals are rare.
Encounter Checks. Rolling two encounter checks a day is proper if players travel through dangerous or poorly patrolled areas. The odds of an encounter will depend on the table used. Highly hazardous areas may require 3-5 encounter checks a day. An encounter table uses percentile die. Lower sections of the percentile range will indicate “no encounter”, while higher percentiles will indicate an encounter. Rarer encounters have fewer percentile points assigned to them.
Rations. A traveling party consumes 1 point of rations per person per day of travel. A single point of rations has a load value of 1. When calculating the supplies a party can carry, add up the total load capacity of all party members (add up their MIGHT scores) and establish a pool from which the party draws when traveling. Remember that a mount can carry substantially more load than a character. This is why most adventurers traveling long distances keep pack animals.
Safe Transport. Specific methods of travel are supposed to be safe and reliable. These include well-patrolled roads, armored stagecoaches, merchant caravans with plentiful mercenary guards, armed ships traveling well-established routes, etc. Characters using these methods of travel must often pay for the privilege, but bypass the need for encounter checks and food is typically provided. While high-level adventurers often develop extraordinary methods of travel, these services are still necessary.
Encumbrance
Encumbrance is calculated in terms of load. Every point of load represents approximately 5 lbs, but because encumbrance is partly based on how weight is distributed over the body this is not a rigid unit of measurement. Weapons, armor, and significant items all have a load score. Items without a load score are too lightweight or unobtrusive to impact mobility. A character's maximum load is equal to their might score. A large humanoid's maximum load equals 2x their might score. Larger creatures can haul exponentially more weight depending on their size, physiology, number of legs, etc. The narrator determines the exact encumbrance threshold of such creatures.
Carrying load beyond a character’s might cause encumbrance, cutting foot speed in half and imposing disadvantage on might and agility-based checks (including initiative, attack rolls, and reflex saves). This is very bad.
Mounts & Vehicles
It can be challenging for characters to carry cargo or treasure long distances, especially when they are laden with weapons, armor, rations, and tools. This is what vehicles and pack animals are for.
A typical mule or draft horse can comfortably haul 70 points of load. Mules are even-tempered and surefooted beasts with good stamina. They have a reputation for stubbornness because they have common sense, but most adventurers can easily manage a mule without special skills.
A two-wheeled cart drawn by a strong horse can carry 450 points of load. Carts are fast, highly maneuverable, fit into small spaces, and can safely haul two or three sleeping or injured adventurers if necessary. They are also pullable by a single mount, such as the one summoned by the steed spell. This makes them popular with adventurers.
A four-wheeled wagon pulled by two strong horses can haul close to 1200 points of load. Wagons are slow and cumbersome, so merchants and teamsters typically use them to haul goods long distances along roads and well-worn routes.
Traps
Traps (Mundane). The fantasy genre is filled with elaborate traps requiring precision clockwork and colossal feats of engineering to create. In certain situations, these may be appropriate, but most traps created by humanoids can be made with a hatchet, a shovel, a knife, wood, stone, rope, and time. The following traps should be made available to all humanoids (including characters) with trapmaking tool proficiency or survival skill;
Alarm. The trap makes noise when triggered, alerting nearby creatures.
Deadfall. The trap drops a heavy load onto a given spot, such as a tree, a basket of rocks, a boulder, etc.
Foothold. The trap snares a target’s foot and restricts their movement, holding and possibly harming them.
Incendiary. The trap bursts a container of flammable liquid on the target while igniting it.
Pitfall. The trap is a covered pit, potentially with spikes or other hazards on the bottom.
Spikes. The trap is one or more concealed spikes, possibly in a slight depression in the ground.
Springbolt. The trap is a crossbow rigged up to fire at a given spot when a trigger is activated.
Tripwire. The trap is a thin wire at the foot or throat level to provoke an uncontrolled fall.
Other traps may be included in this list at the Storyteller's discretion. Spotting a trap is a secret perception check rolled by the storyteller against the trap’s stealth score. A trap's stealth score is 10 + the creator's proficiency modifier + the creator's intellect modifier. If a trap is particularly ingenious or the surroundings make it particularly hard to spot, the difficulty may be more severe at the Storyteller’s discretion. A trap's damage is largely circumstantial; dropping a basket of rocks onto an orc is far less lethal than dropping an oak tree onto one. Thus, a trap's damage is always subject to the Storyteller's approval.
Traps (Magical). Magical traps are different from mundane traps. They require an arcana roll to disarm and can be detected with a successful perception check or using spells like aura sight, truesight, or similar. Disarming a magical ward requires a basic understanding of how they work; wards create an intangible field centered on an anchoring glyph. This field is similar to a magnetic aura or a soap bubble. If an intruder gets too close the ward brushes their aura and attraction occurs or the bubble pops, triggering the effect. There are various arcane methods of tricking, misdirecting, or countering this hanging influence to “confuse” the programming of the glyph, causing it to short out without discharging.
The exact flavor text of this process should be worked out between the Storyteller and the players ahead of time. Perhaps the character positions multiple creatures with differing auras at the very edges of the ward in various spots, causing the power to bleed off without actually triggering. Perhaps they have stones or figurines in their toolkit with simple petty enchantments that create arcane resonance or confuse the ward into registering a computer-like error and shutting down. Whatever the rationale, this process is always an arcana check because it relies on knowledge of the mechanics of magical theory. For this reason, rogues who specialize in traps are encouraged to take the arcana skill. Remember that the arcana skill does not impart spellcasting ability; it is simply knowledge of spells and how magic works. Actual spellcasting is a special process accessible only to those rare individuals who are born with magical souls, receive divine or mystic investiture from outer planar entities, or endure the long and slow process of attenuating to cosmic energies that shape reality (enduring arcane rigor in the process).