Travel and the Two Scales¶
Blitz Eternal: Adventures Beyond the Mists — v0.1 Draft¶
This document is mostly direction and gaps. It records a confirmed structural decision about how campaign play is organized, and names precisely what still has to be built. Treat the gaps as the real content here.
The Problem This Answers¶
Classic room-by-room dungeon crawling does not suit this game. Four Characters each leading a Company means twenty or more combatants trying to fit through a doorway, and a mode of play built on checking every corridor for traps.
This is not a new discovery. Design Goals already states the game is not a dungeon crawl and is not optimized for room-by-room exploration. The concern restates an existing constraint rather than surfacing a new one. What was missing was the positive answer: if not corridors, then what.
Two Scales, Clearly Separated¶
The answer is two zoom levels with a clean boundary between them.
Hex scale. A Company travels as a single abstracted unit. Individual Retainers are not tracked, positioned, or moved. Terrain does not need combat statistics; it grants Advantage or Disadvantage on the relevant Extended Check and nothing more. A river crossing is a Difficulty, not a map.
Grid scale. The existing 5-foot-square combat system, unchanged. Entered only when the party zooms into an actual site and a fight or a detailed physical problem begins. How that 5-foot square is represented at the table, a battle grid, miniatures and a ruler, or theater of the mind, is set out in core-rules, Part Nineteen.
Nothing new is needed to resolve hex-scale activity. Extended Checks (core-rules, Part Seventeen) already provide the backbone for navigation, foraging, and tracking: a Difficulty chipped at across several attempts over time, with prior Successes surviving a later zero.
What the Setting Gives for Free¶
The Known World and Hynafol produce two distinct hex-crawl textures without additional design work. In the Known World, risk is mundane and death is final; travel is dangerous the way real travel is dangerous. In Hynafol, terrain is mist-unreliable, distances do not always hold still, and a road walked twice is not always the same road.
Enclosed Sites as a Set Piece¶
Corridor-heavy, enclosed sites become a deliberate and rare choice rather than the default mode. This produces good story logic on its own rather than needing a rule to enforce it: a full Company physically cannot fit into some spaces.
That gives the fiction a natural reason for a party to leave their Retainers at the mouth of a barrow and go in alone. It is also precisely the moment an Errant or a Squire, who have little or no Company to leave behind, gets to matter most. The two classes that give up the most at hex scale are the two that gain the most here.
What Must Be Built¶
Confirmed as missing. None of the following exists yet.
- A travel-pace rule. How far a Company moves per hex or per day, and whether Retainer Speed matters at this scale at all. This is the load-bearing gap; nothing else in this document works without it.
- Mounts. Already deferred once from the Tephra review. Now clearly more load-bearing than it looked then, since a mounted Company is the most obvious travel-pace variable.
- Terrain and cover translated to hex scale. Specifically as Advantage and Disadvantage on Extended Checks, which is a different job from the grid-scale cover tiers already flagged as deferred. Both are needed; neither substitutes for the other.
Guardrail¶
Resource tracking at this scale stays genuinely light. No ammunition counting, no ration bookkeeping. This is consistent with the explicit rejection of that level of granularity during the Tephra review, and with the standing "playable while camping" design constraint. If a travel rule requires a tracking sheet, it is the wrong rule.