Perception & Travel

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.

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. 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 Speed

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/day, 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/day. Truly exceptional horses can achieve speeds of up to 100 miles/day, but such animals are rare.

Encounter Checks

Rolling two encounter checks/day is proper if players travel through dangerous or poorly patrolled areas. Highly hazardous areas may require 3–5 checks/day. An encounter table uses percentile die — lower sections of the percentile range indicate “no encounter”, while higher percentiles 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 supplies a party can carry, add up the total load capacity of all party members (their MIGHT scores) and establish a pool from which the party draws when traveling. A mount can carry substantially more load than a character, which is why most adventurers traveling long distances keep pack animals.

Safe Transport

Specific methods of travel are supposed to be safe and reliable — well-patrolled roads, armored stagecoaches, merchant caravans with plentiful mercenary guards, armed ships on well-established routes, etc. Characters using these methods 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 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.

Carrying load beyond a character's might causes 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.

It can be challenging for characters to carry cargo or treasure long distances, especially when laden with weapons, armor, rations, and tools. This is what vehicles and pack animals are for.