It's been a while. The blog's looking a bit different as I experiment with the format going forward. I'd like to open it up to wider considerations and topics, and try to contribute more, but we'll see how that goes.
I recently read W. A. Kenyon's book on Martin Frobisher's voyages, Tokens of Possession, put together around the 400th anniversary of Frobisher's expedition to Canada's Arctic in 1576. It's a great read and contains plenty of interesting material for considering how adventures might work. I had a similar experience to watching The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
The book has four sections: the first three are logs from Frobisher's associate George Best, who wrote about the details of each of the three voyages Frobisher embarked upon to the Arctic, first to find the Northwest Passage and get to the Far East and become filthy rich, and subsequently to search for gold (!) on a peninsula on modern-day Baffin Island and become filthy rich. It didn't really pan out for Frobisher, sadly. Kenyon's fourth section recounts his expedition to the sites of Frobisher's expeditions to look for signs of their arrival, still present centuries later both in physical terms (evidence of mining, a boat trench, discarded objects) and in local legend (some of the First Nations of Frobisher Bay, now Iqaluit, had heard stories of Frobisher's arrival, transmitted through local oral literature).
As a dungeon master, I found the book interesting in its presentation of adventure. There's a great deal of detail describing the ships and their crews, Frobisher's orders, how the days went and how brutal the weather could be, along with how the crew interacted with the Inuit (who are not depicted in the kindest terms). That, combined with Kenyon's expedition, provided a few notes I thought might be worth considering next time I propose an adventure to my players where they set out on an expedition of their own. My goal is mainly to find ways to make adventures more stressful, and hence more rewarding through the overcoming of stress (with, as always, the looming chance of defeat).
Spend it all on supplies. By the third Frobisher voyage, a fleet of fifteen ships had been put together with all sorts of supplies, including materials to construct a permanent settlement on the island. Supplies are ridiculously expensive to amass, and it also costs a hefty sum to pay wages to the crews. The players will want to have barrels of food, lots of weather-appropriate wear (for rain or cold), rope, torches, tents, blankets, cooking supplies, tools like shovels and pickaxes, potentially masonry, and sundry other goods. If the expedition is to a mine or cave, shovels and pickaxes might be necessary to dig ahead. If they're going to a northern locale, they will want goods that can withstand rain, sleet and snow, along with gloves and hats against frostbite.
Getting them to take out loans is a good way to increase the stress of the expedition: what if they don't make it back with much and have to face angry creditors? It's a good way to get the high-charisma characters involved, too.
Get them lost. Different rulesets will cover this sort of thing differently, but what's meant by this point is that, despite how much the players feel prepared, something should not match their expectations. If this is their first time to this place, maybe they weren't expecting natives or monsters to also be living on the land. Maybe they weren't expecting such bad weather or such a strange landscape. A particular source of alarm for Frobisher's men was the icebergs that would sneak up on ships through the fog. Allow the expedition to develop once they arrive too: let an assumed norm change without explanation. Perhaps they are in a cave of glowing mushrooms, but one morning the mushrooms have stopped glowing for reasons presently unknown. Sensory descriptions can provoke this further: change how things smell or feel or sound.
Don't leave them alone. It's easier to have the party waltz in somewhere, kill a few ogres and then sit around in an empty ruin, but having them encounter others always makes things more interesting. And these others absolutely do not have to be aggressive! Frobisher's relationship with the Inuit is at times playful, at times friendly, at times violent. The two groups try to understand each other despite their differences and can communicate fairly clearly. Don't assume the monsters are monstrous: perhaps these goblins have never seen other races before and want to trade magic bones for glass objects rather than murder the party. On the other hand, allowing for misinterpretation can make the situation more tense: there could be something one party does, a gesture, activity or other behaviour that is wildly misunderstood by the others and leads to conflict. Perhaps the conflict can be resolved diplomatically, perhaps not.
Make it rain. Reading about Kenyon's expedition emphasized how much a part weather can play as an antagonist, and how frustrating it can be. Applying this tension with care is of course important, as the players shouldn't feel the DM is just trying to rain them out or deliberately make things miserable: a weather generator would help. In Kenyon's case, he has only three weeks to get in and out of the expedition site before the weather makes it too difficult, and during that time the group deals with several lost days due to terrible weather.
If it's not waterproof, make it wet and penalize it (sleeping on wet beds or in wet tents is less effective, and definitely make the firewood wet). If it can't handle wind, blow it away. Make the players waste days keeping dry or fixing damaged supplies. I'm considering a sort of "wilderness stress" system where players can develop wilderness skills (like Alexis Smolensk's sage abilities) to manage these effects better while also taking stress penalties when they lose a day in camp, someone catches ill, they get lost and other issues (perhaps flavoured a bit like Darkest Dungeon's stress system?).
And then, perhaps, dispense treasure. Once you've browbeaten the players silly, let them get something to show for it. Again, it can't be just a magic sword lying outside camp, left by a forgetful orc. Let the players find small tokens of possession, little objects of seemingly little worth that may prove useful at some future point. In between all the running around and stressing the players should still be edging steadily towards a goal. Perhaps they will have to make harder choices to keep going, risking their crew or their existing haul. Maybe the goal has to shrink or be recalculated if things go completely sideways, but it still helps for the players to feel like they chose to push on and try to achieve their reward. Eking by is still on the table of course: maybe the players give up and head back to town empty-handed and burdened by debt, or skip town altogether, fleeing creditors with money for assassins. But if you can make the players want to go back later and try again, then you don't even have as much work to do next time.
