RPG a Day #11 Wilderness

 

I’m going to try and take part in the #RPGaDay writing prompts for 2021. The idea is there’s a prompt every day that asks you to write about something in RPG’s you really like. There are a couple of alternate prompts offered but I’m going to try and do the main one every day. If you want to try it yourself, you can head here for the calendar for this year.

I honestly wasn’t sure I was going to do Wilderness. I tend to do campaigns centered on a city or town and occasionally send my players out into the wild. I prefer urban setting and situations as I’m more familiar with them.

I personally don’t enjoy nature. Or to be more specific being in nature. I think flowers are pretty and I enjoy having a good old cook out. Heck, I’ll even admit that walking outdoors for exercise is preferable to a track in a gym, though where I walk is a central square with benches and a lovely fountain I can look at. Camping on the other hand isn’t a thing I’m excited to do.

This is reflected in most of my games. Go out, find a thing, maybe have an encounter, then head home. Recently, I’ve been writing a new campaign setting for D&D. It’s a modern day setting and due to some story events people are securing themselves in large cities. The first adventure I’m planning is the characters are going to leave to the city to find a friend who needs their help.

It wasn’t until I was reading some of the other response to today’s prompt that I realized that this is my wilderness. It’s an easy trap to fall into; thinking that wilderness means woods, dessert, or tundra. For my campaign wilderness is also going to mean highways, suburbs, and rural areas. Traveling through farm country is going to be dangerous for my players. This was a really interesting revelation. It’s going to change how the campaign setting works in a lot of ways.

Beyond that it made me realize that the definition of wilderness in a campaign is really just the area past where it’s safe. Once your players leave the area that offers relative safety and headed into the unknown, regardless of where that area is geographically, they’ve entered the wilderness.

 If you’re playing Shadowrun and head into the slums, you’ve entered the Wilderness once you get outside of the corporate sectors. In Malifaux you don’t have to go into the dessert to be in the Wilderness; you can enter the quarantine zone for that. In Dungeons and Dragons the sewers of any large town can easily be defined as wilderness.

I may be entirely off base here, and may even be saying something that most of you have figured out before, but for me this was a fun revelation. While I may not ever refer to I-75 as the wilderness to my players, I’ll know that they’ve started traveling down a dangerous trail with all sorts of hazards, monsters, and random encounters. It will be just as dangerous as if they wandered into the dark woods of Ravenloft. Well, maybe not that dangerous, but you get my point. (Of course now I’m wonder where the modern day equivalent of Ravenloft is. Probably New England. Beware Cambridge, Strahd live there)

Anyway, I’ll see you all tomorrow for Think

Until next time. Stay safe and be well.