The Environment - Surviving the Wilds
Exploration, in any RPG, is a great way to make your world feel alive and interesting. From strange vistas to unique dangers, and from strange creatures to mundane sights, the world has a lot going on. Many of these dangers just feel like they are meant to be invoked once by a DM before being forgotten just as soon as someone announces they can’t get lost or don’t need to search for food because they have a certain ability or any number of things. It’s great to have someone well-versed when it comes to survival, but for those who are playing D&D 5e, and many other games, it feels like the designers intended you to just handwave traveling.
Recently, I talked about the Wilds and exploring them. I didn’t go into the mechanics of actually traveling through them but rather talked about how you might use the Wilds. Today, we are looking at some of the unique dangers that outsiders might face when traveling and exploring, updating the existing rules in the 5th edition Dungeon Master’s Guide to give exploration even more to do.
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The Environment
Today we are focusing on the different environments and biomes that make up the Wilds from the sweeping plains to the towering mountains, each one has unique dangers that can make exploration hazardous. These biomes are divided into seven different environments: Aquatic, Arctic, Deserts, Forests, Hills & Mountains, Plains, and Swamps & Marshes.
These general biomes represent dozens of unique and strange worlds and provide general rules that go over the basics of surviving in each one. These rules are not meant to be exhaustive, unique situations like avalanches, desert sand storms, and other natural hazards are not covered here. Instead, the challenges and difficulties that everyone must endure to move across the environment are, like dealing with thin atmospheres, trudging through the snow, or even seeing through a dense jungle.
Aquatic
Traveling across the surface of the ocean is not too terrifying and rarely requires strange environments to survive. Once one begins diving deep, either to look for sunken treasure or flooded cities, the pressures of water begin to take their toll. The Dungeon Master’s Guide already provides information on how long you can travel for underwater, that once you swim below 200 feet, you treat each hour your travel as 4 hours of travel, but what if you swam deeper? This rule was made for those wanting to explore deep underwater without a diving bell or magic to protect from the pressures of the ocean.
Extreme pressure is an environmental concern that can cause anyone diving that far down without pressure intense pain and discomfort. The longer you swim around at depths greater than a 1,000 feet, the water begins pushing in all sides and it is harder to swim. You must make saving throws against the extreme pressure every 10 minutes, and the DC increases the more saving throws you make. Eventually, a creature will die from exhaustion, if they don’t run out of air first.
Otherwise, upon ascending, they have to worry about getting sick with decompression sickness if they don’t go slow enough. If they are being chased by sharks or a tentacled-horror, they might not get the chance to properly depressurize and run the risk of becoming poisoned by their own blood as decompression sickness sets in.
Arctic
Frozen landscapes and vast fields of snow and ice make up much of the artic region. One might see penguins or seals near the edges of these ice fields, while mistaking a sleeping polar bear as a small pile of snow. There are two new rules in this section, one towards moving through snow and ice, while the other is focused on tracking.
Moving across the ice and snow can be difficult, especially if the snow is quite deep. If the snow is at least over a foot deep, a creature begins finding it harder and harder to move through it without problem. For every foot of snow, a creature must expend a number of feet of movement in order to move 1 foot. This means that if snow is only 2 feet deep, it requires 2 feet of movement for every 1 foot moved, or if the snow is 4 feet deep, it requires 4 feet of movement for 1 foot moved. Trying to power massive snowdrifts is exhausting, making it a harder challenge as the snow gets deeper.
Ice doesn’t quite act like difficult terrain in that it doesn’t reduce your speed. Instead, creatures can move up to half their speed each turn but still have their full movement. A creature that moves faster than that must try to maintain their balance, toppling over on the ice if they move too quickly. This makes dashing and running almost impossible as the DC is based on how far you move each turn.
The final rule is based on tracking and how hard it is to track a creature across the snow. This is often a very easy DC, but as time and fresh snow accumulate, it begins getting harder and harder. For those tracking a hoard of beasts, its far easier than tracking a single person, but so long as there hasn’t been too much recent snow and it hasn’t been too long since they passed through, the unchanging snow can highlight tracks.
Deserts
There are more deserts than just one composed solely of sand. Tundras make up the cold deserts, hot deserts formed of sand and sand dunes, and barren deserts of just solid stone known as desert pavements, are all different varieties of deserts. These barren landscapes are known for their often extreme weather, their lack of precipitation, and the hardships of traveling across them.
Extreme weather is already covered in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, though I provide another rule for those traveling for long periods of time in extreme temperatures. This rule stops creatures from gaining the benefits of a long rest after resting for 8 hours, instead, they only gain the benefits of a short rest if they fail a Constitution saving throw. This can make long journeys across a desert a dangerous proposition as the extreme weather makes it difficult for a creature to properly recover from their travels.
Of course, wandering a desert is often much easier with magic and magically created food and water. Unfortunately, magical food, like that created from the spell create food and water, is bland and can be difficult to eat for long periods of time. Over time, a body gets intolerant towards magical food, refusing to accept it is actually nourishment and a creature gains no benefits of consuming it. This is a Wisdom saving throw as it takes willpower to continue to eat this magical food and to force your body from rejecting its nourishment. The DC increases for each day you eat magical food but also decreases for each day you eat solely non-magically produced food.
The last new rule for deserts is focused on those who begin starving or dying of thirst. A creature can survive a number of days equal to their Constitution modifier without water, and a number of weeks equal to their Constitution modifier without food. Once a creature surpasses that, they begin losing their hit dice as their vitality begins draining out of them in the form of losing access to their hit dice. This means that the hit dice don’t recharge on a long rest, and a creature first loses the expended hit dice they used to heal during a short rest.
Forests
Often known for their large trees, forests are anywhere where there is suitable vegetation for large flora to grow. This could be a massive mushroom forest, an alpine forest, or any other strange environment with lots of large plants growing in huge numbers. These places are teeming with life, from insects to frogs, and from owls to owlbears.
Depending on how dense a forest or jungle is, it can be difficult to see more than a few dozen feet ahead of you. Depending on how much light is available and how dense the vegetation is, creatures can often only see 30 to 200 feet away. This makes it so that encounters might begin a few hundred feet away, or right in front of you since you couldn’t see the tiger stalking you just a few feet away.
In addition to the forest making it difficult to see, it also restricts movement thanks to the underbrush. Often this underbrush grows thick, turning it into difficult terrain, but it also comes with a bonus, granting half cover to all creatures in it. There are plenty of bushes, fallen trees, scrubs, and other flora detritus to provide plenty of places to hide and avoid being attacked.
This underbrush also makes it easy for predators or prey to hide. Those who don’t move or make noise, while hiding in the underbrush, have advantage to hide and avoid being noticed. This can be quite useful for monsters smart enough to use the natural landscape around them in order to ambush food, also known as adventurers.
Hills & Mountains
This environment is focused on the rise of elevation from a few hundred feet, to thousands of feet above. Hills don’t present as many challenges as mountains, since they are typically easier to navigate and to climb over, but each have their challenges.
Chasms, crags, cliffs, and rock walls can dot the landscape. Sometimes they might not be very large, easy to skirt or navigate around, while other times they are imposing and can cause a significant delay. If a bridge spanning a chasm has rotted away, it might mean the trip is diverted by weeks as you must go a very long way around, or you must spend a day or two climbing down the chasm and climbing up the sheer rock wall on the other side.
If you do survive the climb, you have a thin atmosphere to worry about. Once you summit high enough, the air gets thin and creatures have more difficulty resting and recuperating while in it. Similar to the extreme weather, you may not gain the benefits of a long rest but only a short rest after spending enough time resting. Eventually, you can get acclimated to this environment but requires you to spend 30 days here.
Plains
Seas of grass and wildflowers are hallmarks of the plains. They often have few trees, but rather large fields of low, flat land. The biggest dangers on these plains are the wind, invisible forces that can blow a creature over and fling them into the air. The effects of strong wind is already covered by the Dungeon Master’s Guide, but I also provide information on tornadoes. Tornadoes are swirling forces of nature that can’t be put down by a simple spell but rather creatures should run around the tornado, skirting its powerful energy. Of course, sometimes creatures aren’t lucky and get caught in one when a monster uses this as the perfect time to attack.
Swamps & Marshes
Our last major biome are the bogs and muck-filled swamps. They are found in low lands where water has accumulated, turning the ground into muck, making it difficult to move. In certain areas of a swamp, there might be deep bogs where creatures can only try and sludge through, requiring 3 feet of movement for every 1 foot they move. This does grant the benefit of cover, and if you are really short, you might have total cover as you sink 1d4 feet into the bog.
In addition to dealing with difficult terrain, you also have to worry about diseases. Most diseases are not too hard to avoid, and in truth, diseases can be almost completely ignored as paladins can just touch you at 2nd level and instantly remove a disease. But not every adventuring group is lucky enough to have a divine caster, and diseases can create a greater challenge for them. When traveling through the marsh, after one day of travel, a creature has to make a Constitution saving throw against a random disease chosen by the DM or gain that disease. These could be weird and strange, or simple diseases that often plague small swamp-towns. If you need more diseases, make sure you check out my post on Virulent Diseases!
More to the Wilds
There is more to exploration and the Wilds than what is presented here, but these rules should be used to help expand what is already presented in Dungeons & Dragons. I hope these rules provide some inspiration for you, and next time we visit the Wilds, I’ll be looking at some of the natural hazards one might run across like quicksand, avalanches, and more.
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