Recently I’ve heard a discussion brewing on city travel and how to handle it. It is an aspect us Game Masters can very easily overcomplicate. How to get from one point of interest to another, what lies in between, are the streets rough, and who will they run into on their way, on and on the rabbit hole goes. But in the end, do all these details matter? I don’t think so. We leave out so much of the tedium of reality in our games for the sake of fun. Traveling around a settlement shouldn’t be an exception. So let’s make it a bit more simple, for everyone's sake.
To start, we should acknowledge knowing where everything exactly is within a settlement isn’t usually necessary. Most locations players will visit have a few points of interest they will be going to and then moving on. We can and should give flavor to our settlements. Like the sandy hive of scum and villainy that is Mos Eisley, or the sleeping simple village of Honeywood at the borders of the kingdom. But when our adventure takes place in a single city/town, or at least a decent chunk in one, it can be useful to map things out. But we’ll find a simple point crawl map is all we require.
Let’s start with the village of Honeywood. It is a small place but has a couple of distinct features. We will add little circles on our map for each location, vaguely arranged to show how each location is oriented to the other. We can see from this map that the general store is on the north side of town, the farmer’s house is on the south side, and the tavern is kind of in the center of it all. We want to make sure we leave some space in case we want to add any
more points of interest later. Now all we need is to make a set amount of time it takes to travel between locations, for this village let’s say 5 mins. We might not use it all the time, but it adds a scale to keep things consistent should we ever need to. Because of how this point map is laid out, we will always travel from closest point to closest point. Unless we have paths and “inevitable locations”.
An inevitable location is a place you have to travel by/through if you want to reach a different location, regardless of how close points are on the map. Like right now our map says they can just travel between the Honeywood General Store & Adam’s Orchard.
Well, we know that the orchard is on the other side of a river and Gregor’s Watermill is the only crossing. So we’ll add a connecting line to show we need to travel there first if we want to go from the general store to the orchard. Be aware this will add additional time to get to certain locations, since we are traveling to 2 points of interest instead of 1 now, so be aware of that.
Now what if our settlement is a large town or city? We can use the same point map but we might want to add a bit more detail. Larger settlements usually have distinct neighborhoods or districts and, if it does, keeping track of which players are in will be very helpful. Let’s make a new map to show how we do this. Here at Mos Eisley, we have four pretty distinct areas which we will call the Spaceport, the Slums, Cantina Row, and Junker Alley.
Now just like before we will include a travel time for moving between these neighborhoods, let’s say 20 min. Unlike points of interest, a location with districts should have those large areas fill up your map. We aren’t going to add new ones and we will need the room for our points of interest.
Speaking of which, let’s add those now and how long travel takes WITHIN a district. This way we can decide if any district is more or less quick to travel through, like the Spaceport for instance. And we are done! With districts/neighborhoods, we should keep in mind a few things regarding travel.
Traveling stacks. To get to the Desert Survey Office to the Mod Parlor it would be 30 mins. 20 min to travel between neighborhoods and 10 min to get to the Mod Parlor.
Travel between closest points. Getting from Shmi’s to Watto’s would be a 50 min trip, Shmi’s, to Meat Harvesters, travel between districts, to Arms Emporium, to finally Watto’s.
Districts can have inevitable locations. A path is connecting Spacer’s Row to Cantina Row itself. This means any travel to or from this district needs to happen from Spacers Row. This is especially useful to depict things like guard/police checkpoints or city gates.
There we have it, a simple way to track traveling through any type of settlement and an easy way to depict it for our players. They may find ways to break it, like choosing to travel outside Honeywood to get to the Beggar Camp. Or flying a ship to land near Shmi’s instead of traveling by foot. But players are always going to do that. What is important is to have flexible tools that can flex with them. And when dealing with city travel, this method gets straight to the point.