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Travel, Upkeep & Expenditure

Author	Jayke Paver
Type	Additive module · official
Built for	Frontiers 1.0, any Ruleset

Most games treat getting somewhere as a subtraction problem. You have so far to go, you cover so much a day, and somewhere in the arithmetic the question of what it took out of anybody stops being asked.

This module is for the systems where getting there is the game.

It covers three things, and they're one subject rather than three: how a crossing is played, what it burns while it runs, and what it spends and gets back. Answer the first on its own and you have a map with a timer on it.

It offers three answers to the first and expects you to take one. None of them adds a resolution layer or changes a core rule, so you can adopt a model as written, take the parts you want, or replace the lot.

The rules here work on any of the three Rulesets unchanged. The numbers are starter values on a four-character party, and they say so where they sit.

A Distance Is an Endeavor

Travel isn't a separate mode. It's an Endeavor with a destination on the end of it.

The engine already has the scope: a long stretch of time committed to one pursuit, played as a compressed span instead of moment to moment. A Distance is that, broken into pieces. Each piece runs as Exploration, and turns into an Encounter on the occasions it has to.

What this module supplies is the shape of the breaking up, and a reason for the party to care how it went.

What an Event Is

An Event is one thing that happens on the way. Not a distance, and not a fixed span of time.

An Event can be four days of open going where the only thing that happens is an argument about the route, or a single afternoon at a river crossing. Both are one Event. What makes it one is that something was in front of the party and the party dealt with it, or did not.

This is the whole abstraction, and it's worth being stubborn about. The moment an Event starts meaning a day or twenty miles, the table is back to arithmetic and the cost to the people crossing stops being worth asking. Events are counted, not measured.

All three models below deal in Events. They disagree about what a Distance does with them: counts them, races them against a clock, or lets the party choose which ones they meet.

Naming it

Distance and Event are deliberately flat words, chosen so the module doesn't decide what kind of travel your game is about. Neither is meant to reach the table. Name them for the thing your setting does, and the structure underneath doesn't change:

	A Distance is	An Event is
Overland	A journey	A leg
At sea	A crossing	A watch
In space	A transit	A jump
Underground	A descent	A level
Over years	A campaign season	A turn

The same is true of the six kinds below, of the upkeep, and of what a Waypoint is. Everything named in this module is a slot to be filled. A game that calls them Distances and Events has not finished naming things yet.

Four Things to Settle First

Before you build any of this, answer four things about your game. The answers decide everything below, and a system that has not answered them will produce travel rules that don't agree with themselves.

What does distance cost?	Something comes off every Event. Supplies, money, daylight, standing, a vehicle's condition. If nothing comes off, there is no pressure and the party will take the long way every time
Where does it come back?	A cost that only goes down is a countdown. Name at least one way to resupply, and no more than two
What does the crossing take out of a character?	The per-Event mark on a person. ⊖ Fatigue is the engine's default answer and the one this module uses
What does arriving pay?	A Distance has to be worth finishing. If arriving pays nothing, the party will treat travel as a tax and play around it

A system that answers all four has a travel system. A system that answers only the first has a supply tracker.

Three Ways to Cross

Those questions have more than one good set of answers, so what follows is three models rather than one. They aren't variants of each other. Each decides a different thing about what the crossing is, and a system picks one.

	The crossing is	The play is	Suits
Model A: Counted Events	A run of events, counted	Dealing with what is in front of you	Survival, hauling, a destination that matters
Model B: A Clock	One long span with something closing	Spending time you do not have	Pursuit, deadlines, a Distance that is not the point
Model C: Routes and Choices	A map of places and the ways between	Choosing which route to take	Trade, exploration, a world worth knowing

Model A is the longest of the three because it has the most moving parts, not because it is the default. B is the cheapest to run and C is the one that makes a setting worth drawing.

The machinery after the models, upkeep and pace and what arriving pays, is shared. All three use it.

Model A: Counted Events

The crossing is a number of Events, and the question is how many of them the party handles. This is the fullest of the three, and the one with the most to set up before play.

How an Event Runs

Three steps, in this order, every Event.

1	Upkeep comes off. Whatever your game spends per character, per Event, is spent now, before anybody knows what the Event holds
2	Play the Event. One situation, everyone in it, everyone rolling at least once across it
3	Take the mark. Each character gains or sheds ⊖ Fatigue according to how the Event went for them

Step 1 happening first is deliberate. The party pays for the crossing before they see it, which is the position anybody setting out is in, and it stops supply from being a thing you spend only once you know it was needed.

Step 3 is per character, not per party. An Event the party passed can still be the Event that broke one of them, and the opposite happens just as often.

A character may refuse the mark by spending 1 ϟ Energy. This is the engine's usual bargain in a new place: the reserve exists to let a character reach past where they're, and holding yourself together on a bad night is exactly that. It costs them the point for whatever comes next.

Passed, Failed, and Nothing

At the end of an Event the GM says which of three things happened. This is a judgement, not a tally.

	When
Passed	They dealt with what was in front of them, whatever the dice said along the way
Failed	They did not, or it cost more than it gave
Nothing	They kept their heads down and it went past them

An Event can be passed on one good idea and no successful rolls at all, and failed with three successes and a bad decision. If that feels loose, it's meant to. The alternative is a party optimizing for a hit count instead of for getting there.

Nothing is a real outcome, and it isn't a soft fail. It is the right call when a party deliberately avoids engaging: passing the smoke, not answering the shout, staying down until the riders have gone. They lose no ground and gain none, and the upkeep still came off. Say it plainly and don't editorialize. A party that learns avoidance is safe will use it, which is the behavior the rest of this is asking for.

Only Passed counts toward the Count. Failed and Nothing both leave it where it was, and the difference between them is what the Event cost on the way through.

Kinds of Event

Six shapes, offered as a menu rather than a table to roll on, and meant to be added to. A Distance built entirely out of one of them is a Distance about one thing.

Kind	What the Event is	Watch for
Stretch	Open going with nothing in the way. The crossing itself: conditions, terrain, the state of the vehicle, the argument about which way	The easiest to make forgettable. Give it one decision
Obstacle	One thing that has to be gotten past. A river, a ridge, a checkpoint, a door nobody has opened in years	The most dice-forward kind, and the easiest to overuse
Meeting	Other people, wanting something. Toll, trade, warning, company	The kind most likely to pay off later. The people met on the way back are the people met on the way out
Site	Something worth stopping for. A wreck, a cache, a place that was somebody else's destination once	Where upkeep comes back. Two in a Distance makes range stop mattering
Waypoint	Somewhere the party is safe for a night. Still an Event, still costs the upkeep	The only place pace can change. A Distance with none in it is a Distance about exhaustion
Trouble	Something is following, hunting, or closing	The only kind with a clock in it, and the only one that gets worse if ignored

The Count and What It Pays

The Count

Before the Distance starts, the GM decides how many Events must be passed for the party to have arrived well. That number is the Count, and it's the most direct difficulty control in the module.

Say the number out loud. A hidden Count turns a Distance into a guessing game about the GM's mood, and the whole point of counting Events is that the party can see where they stand and decide whether this one is worth the detour.

A Distance of eight Events with a Count of five is the starter shape: room to lose two and still arrive, with the third loss mattering. Lowering the Count by one is a large change, and raising it by one is a larger one. Move it between Distances, never during one.

What Arriving Pays

Count the passed Events against the Count.

	What everyone takes
Met the Count	A Mark, and clear all ⊖ Fatigue carried in
One short	One of the two, and the party chooses which
Two or more short	Neither, and the ⊖ Fatigue stays on

The Mark is the important half. Marks are capped at three per Level with no bank, so three crossings is a Level if a system pays them this way and nothing else does. That's a deliberate rate, and it's the number to check first if you change anything here: a system that also pays Marks for Individual Pursuits is paying twice and will outrun its own ceiling.

The Mark is for arriving, not for succeeding at the destination. What the party was carrying may still turn out to be the wrong thing, and the person waiting may still be gone. Paying on arrival keeps the crossing worth playing even when the errand fails, which is the only way a group stays willing to spend four sessions on one.

Model B: A Clock

The crossing is one long span, and something is closing while the party makes it. There is no count to meet. There's a distance to cover and a clock filling against it, and the only question is which fills first.

This is the cheapest model to run, and the right one when the Distance isn't what the session is about. A party riding to reach a siege before it falls does not need six kinds of Event. It needs to know how far they have come and how close the thing behind them is.

The two tracks

Progress	How far there is to go. Six to ten segments is the useful range
The clock	What is closing: pursuit, a deadline, a storm, a wound going bad

Every stretch advances Progress by one. Then the GM advances the clock by one if the party spent time on something, took the safe option, stopped to help, or failed at whatever the crossing put in front of them.

Arriving before the clock fills is arriving. Arriving after it is arriving to find the thing already happened, which is a result rather than a failure, and usually a better scene.

What makes it cheap

Nobody tracks events. The GM narrates the span, stops where something is worth playing, and moves the two tracks. This is the Endeavor rules used exactly as written, with a clock bolted on.

If that sounds familiar it is because it is the Pressure clock from Undertaking Projects, pointed at a crossing. A system running both can use one set of rules for both, and should.

What it costs

The crossing stops having texture. A party on a clock isn't deciding how to deal with a river; they're deciding whether the river is worth the hour. That's a real decision, and it's the only one this model makes often. Run a Distance on a clock when the destination is the story, and reach for Model A when the going is.

Model C: Routes and Choices

There is no Distance as such. There's a map of places, routes between them, and a party deciding which route to take.

Each route carries three things, written once and reused forever:

What it costs	Upkeep, time, or both. The short route is dearer in something else
What is on it	One or two things the party may meet, known or rumored
What it opens	Where it lets out, and what that place is good for

The party picks a route, the route is played in a stretch or two, and they arrive somewhere that offers its own set of routes out. A Distance is however many of those the party strings together.

What the choosing buys

In Models A and B the route happens to the party. Here they choose it, which means the information is the resource. A party that knows the river route floods in spring is a party that paid someone for that, and it's why a rumor is worth real money in a game built this way.

The corollary is the work: every route needs its three things written before play, and a map with twelve routes on it is twelve small pieces of prep. That is the cost of this model and there is no way around it. It buys a setting people remember the shape of.

Keeping it honest

No route is strictly better than another. The moment one is, the map has a right answer and the choosing stops. If the short route is also the safe route, put something on it that the party wants to avoid for a reason that isn't danger: a person they owe, a toll they can't pay twice, somewhere they're not welcome any more.

Let them learn it. A route run twice should be cheaper the second time, because they know where the ford is. That's the reward for playing a map instead of a line, and it's what makes a party argue about routes a year in.

Upkeep

Something comes off every stretch, whichever model you took: every Event in A, every advance of Progress in B, every route taken in C. What it is belongs to your setting, and the module doesn't name it, because a game about a caravan and a game about a starship are spending different things in the same slot.

What the module does supply is the shape: a per-character spend, decided fresh each time, with three rungs.

Spent	Per character, per Event
0	Each character gains 1 ⊖ Fatigue on top of whatever the Event produced
1	Enough, and nothing more
2	Each character removes 1 ⊖ Fatigue

The top rung is expensive on purpose. On a Fast pace it is often the only thing holding a party together, because ⊖ Fatigue arrives every Event and little else takes it off while the party is moving.

The ⊖ Fatigue from going without can't be refused with ϟ Energy. The mark the Event produced can be. Going hungry isn't the kind of thing a reserve of will gets a character out of.

Rest doesn't solve this, and should not

The engine's recovery rules remove ⊖ Fatigue over three uninterrupted hours of rest, which over a long crossing would undo the whole module between sessions. Events aren't uninterrupted rest. A party on the move isn't resting in the sense the Recovery rules mean, and only a Waypoint, or the top rung above, puts ⊖ Fatigue back. Say this at the table once, before the first Distance, because a player who knows the core rules will reasonably assume otherwise.

How much they can carry

The ceiling on upkeep is a property of the transport, which is why a vehicle is usually the most valuable thing a party owns. Starter numbers for a party of four, spending 1 each:

What is carrying it	Maximum upkeep	Events of range
Only what they can carry	10	2
A small conveyance	18	4
A proper one	30	7
A powered one	45	11

Fill those four rungs with whatever your setting has. Backs, a handcart, a wagon and a truck. Or packs, a skiff, a hauler and a ship.

The range of a Distance belongs to the vehicle, and losing it partway across is a catastrophe rather than an inconvenience. That's the intended weight. A game about short hops between close places wants these lower; one about long empty crossings wants them considerably higher.

The Whole Ledger

Upkeep is the part that comes off every stretch. It isn't the only thing a crossing spends, and a system that tracks it alone will produce parties who arrive solvent and wrecked.

Five things are spent getting somewhere. Name which of them your game counts, and leave the rest to the fiction.

Spent	Comes off when	Comes back when
Upkeep	Every stretch, without exception	Resupply, salvage, somewhere glad to see you
Condition	A failed Event, hard going, no maintenance	Time and parts, in that order
Standing	You took from somebody, or were seen taking	Slowly, and only where it was spent
Time	Always, and faster at a careful Pace	Never
People	Rarely, and it should be rare	Never

Time and people don't come back, and that asymmetry is the point. A party can always buy more upkeep. They can't buy back the week, and a system that lets them will find its Distances stop mattering.

Expenditure is a decision

The reason to track any of this is that it makes the party choose. If the answer to every shortage is spend more, nothing above is doing any work. Each row wants a moment where it is the thing standing in the way:

• Upkeep bites when range is short and the stop is three stretches off.
• Condition bites when the vehicle is the range, and fixing it costs the time they were saving.
• Standing bites when the cheap resupply is somewhere they aren't welcome.
• Time bites when the reason for going has a date on it.

A Distance that never puts one of those in front of the party was not a Distance. It was a transition.

Resupply

Upkeep that only goes down produces one game, played once. Where it comes back is a setting decision, and the module offers four shapes.

Trade	The reliable one. Costs money, standing, or whatever your economy runs on
Salvage	A Site worth stripping, a good forage, anything a Meeting can be talked out of
Welcome	Somewhere glad to see the party costs nothing to stop at. This is most of what standing is for
Cache	Something left on purpose, by them or by somebody else. The only one that rewards planning a route twice

Two sources in a Distance is the ceiling. Past that, range stops being a constraint and the whole upkeep layer goes slack. One source plus the hope of a second is the shape that keeps a party arguing about the route.

Where this meets the economy

Trade is the point where this module touches Currency & Exchange. Nothing here prices anything: upkeep is an abstraction measuring how long a party can keep going, and a Cost Rating measures what a thing is worth. A system running both should decide once whether upkeep is bought with money or is a currency of its own, and say so. Both work. Running them half-merged does not.

Pace

Pace is chosen when the Distance begins, and it doesn't change the target. It changes how many attempts the party gets at it. In Model A that is Events against the Count; in Model B, stretches before the clock fills; in Model C, how far a given amount of upkeep reaches.

Pace	Events	Upkeep spent	Every Event
Fast	Fewer	Less	Each character takes 1 ⊖ Fatigue
Average	As set	As set	—
Careful	More	More	Each character removes 1 ⊖ Fatigue

Fast is the same target with fewer attempts, and it gets harder as it goes. ⊖ Fatigue is a penalty on every roll a character makes, and at a fast Pace it accumulates quicker than anyone can shed it. A party four Events into a fast Distance is measurably worse at everything than the party that set out.

Careful buys attempts and recovery, and pays for both in upkeep. It's the pace for a party that is already worn, and it's the reason a Distance that looked affordable stops being affordable.

The recommended default is one Event either way: Fast takes one off, Careful adds one. Longer Distances can move by more.

Pace changes only at a Waypoint. Reaching somewhere safe is the one place on a crossing where everybody stops, eats, argues, and looks at what is left, and it's the natural place to decide the back half is going to be run differently from the front half.

What You Can Turn

Six, in the order they matter. The last three work under any of the models; the first three are Model A's, and the note after the table says what stands in for them elsewhere.

Dial	Does	Starter
The Count	The difficulty of the whole crossing. One either way is a large move	5 of 8
Events offered	Room to fail. Count plus three is generous, plus two is tight	8
The mix of Events	What the Distance tests, without touching a number	Varied
Upkeep per character	How fast range runs out	1 a stretch
Pace	Attempts traded against wear	Average
What arriving pays	How much a Distance is worth finishing	A Mark

Under Model B the first three become one dial: how many segments of Progress against how fast the clock fills. Under Model C they become the map, where difficulty is which routes you drew and what you wrote on them.

The mix is the subtle one. A party with strong bodies and thin nerves will cross a Distance of Obstacles without trouble and come apart over three Meetings. Choosing which kinds of Event it is made of is how a Distance is made hard for these characters without a single number changing.

Two things to leave alone. Don't raise Difficulty Targets to compensate. A DT describes a task, and a harder Distance means harder tasks on it. Scoring the same tasks meaner is a different thing, and a worse one. Don't add a fight. An Encounter already costs an Event, the upkeep, and the wear, which makes it among the most expensive things that can be put in front of a party. Adding one doesn't tune difficulty; it changes what game is being played that evening.

Reading the Rulesets

The module leans on ⊖ Fatigue, and ⊖ Fatigue is the rare engine value that reads almost identically on all three Rulesets. The track is the same everywhere: 3, plus 1 per 2 points of ◬ Resolve Rank, to a maximum of 5.

Ruleset	Penalty per point	As probability
d18	−1 on the roll	≈5.6 points
d20	−1 on the roll	5 points
d100	−5 on the Target	5 points

A party carrying 3 ⊖ Fatigue is about fifteen percentage points worse at everything, on every Ruleset. Pace and upkeep tune the same way on all three, and numbers written for one transfer to the others unchanged. That is unusual, and it is the reason travel was a good candidate for a module.

The difference worth knowing is granularity. On the d100 an Event's Target can be set anywhere, so a Distance can be tuned in single points and a GM can make one Crossing fractionally harder than the last. On the d18 and d20 the smallest honest move is a full point, which is that same five percent, so Distances there are tuned by changing the Count or the mix, not by nudging Targets.

The Core Rules It Builds On

Everything here comes from the Rulesets, unchanged.

• Modes: An Endeavor is the fast-forward, committing hours or days to a single pursuit. Exploration is the default mode between crises. An Event sits in Exploration and becomes an Encounter only when it has to.
• ⊖ Fatigue: A short track, five points at its longest, sized off ◬ Resolve. Each point costs −1 on every roll on the d18 and d20, and −5 on the Target on the d100. It applies to passive values as well, so a worn character can't dodge it by declining to roll.
• Collapse: The point of ⊖ Fatigue past maximum drops a character unconscious. It doesn't kill them, which is what makes it safe to spend a whole Distance filling.
• Rest: 1 ϟ Energy per uninterrupted hour. Each 3 uninterrupted hours restores half of maximum ✚ HP and removes one ⊗ Wound or one ⊖ Fatigue. An Event isn't uninterrupted rest.
• ϟ Energy: The reserve spent to reach past normal limits, which is what refusing an Event's mark is.
• Marks: Small personal growth, earned often, with a hard ceiling of three a Level and nothing carried over.
• Skills: Grant Favor and never decide whether something can be tried, so no Event is gated behind owning the right Skill.

Building a Distance

Start with why they are going

A Distance is built on a reason. The reason is almost always the Party Pursuit, and that is the whole relationship between this module and the rest of a campaign.

Ask the table one question together: what is worth crossing for, and who is waiting on it? The answer is the first Distance. When it is finished, ask again.

A good one has
Somewhere to be	The Distance needs an end, even if they never reach it
Somebody who cares	A delivery nobody is waiting on is an errand
Something that stops being possible	Not a punishment. A door that closes if they are slow

If the table can't answer, hand them one: somewhere is running out of something, and the people who used to bring it have stopped coming. That will carry three Distances on its own.

Then build it

Pick the Count, lay out that many Events plus two or three, choose the mix, and put one character's personal business on one of the Events. Shuffling the kinds and dealing them out produces Distances a GM wouldn't have written, and the only thing that has to survive the shuffle is the personal Event, which wants to land where there is enough left to argue about it.

Putting a Pursuit on the route

Individual Pursuits are where the sessions actually are, and they're the piece most likely to go unused.

Once a Distance, take one character's Pursuit and put it on an Event. Not as a side quest to be approved, but as a version of the decision the party was already making, where the cheap answer and the right answer disagree.

The cheap way	Shorter, safer, or already paid for
The other way	Costs Events, upkeep, or standing, and touches somebody's Pursuit
The argument	Happens at the table, with the people who will pay for it

Rotate it. If the same player's Pursuit comes up three crossings running, the others have stopped having characters.

Running an Event

This is the skill the module runs on, and it takes about a minute to set up.

Say where they are and what is in front of them. One or two sentences. A situation, not scene-setting.

Let them talk. The party decides what they are doing about it. This is most of the Event, most of the fun, and it needs no rules at all.

Ask each of them what they are doing. Everybody. The person who is not engaging is the person you ask directly.

Roll where it is uncertain. Not every declaration needs a roll. Every character needs at least one across the Event.

Close it. Say how it came out, and take the marks.

Twenty minutes to an hour. If an Event runs past that and nobody has rolled anything, you're running an Exploration scene, which is fine, so long as everyone knows that is what happened and that it still cost an Event.

Giving everybody a beat

An Event is one situation with four or five people inside it, and the failure mode is two players solving it while the others watch.

The fix isn't to invent four separate problems. It's to ask the quiet ones what they're doing while the loud ones do the obvious thing. Somebody is holding the animal. Somebody is watching the ridge. Somebody is deciding whether to say what they saw. Those are real contributions with real rolls behind them.

A Worked Distance

Model A, because it has the most to show. Four characters with a cart, eight Events offered, a Count of five, Average pace, and 30 upkeep in the back.

0

Setting outChoosing a pace

Two of them were carrying ⊖ Fatigue out of the last Distance, so Careful was tempting. It would have added a ninth Event and four more upkeep, and they did not have four more upkeep.

Average pace

1

StretchFour days of flat nothing

Four days of open road with nothing on it. They walked it, argued twice about the route, and nobody got hurt.

Passed

2

ObstacleThe ford has moved

The ford was not where the map said it was. Finding the new one took most of a day, and a crate went into the water on the way across.

Failed

3

MeetingA chain across the road

Three people had put a chain across the road and were calling it a toll. One of them turned out to be somebody the party's driver owed money to, which made the conversation shorter than it might have been.

Passed

◆

WaypointSomewhere with walls

They stayed two nights, ate properly, and shed a point of ⊖ Fatigue each. The pace could have changed here and did not.

A stop, and still an Event

5

SiteA hauler that did not make it

A hauler that had not made it, still loaded and still where it stopped. They took what they could carry and were gone before dark, eight upkeep better off.

Passed

6

StretchRain, and no shelter

Rain, and nowhere to get out of it. They put their heads down and walked, and the road did not ask them for anything.

Nothing happened

7

TroubleSomething followed them

Whatever had been at the wreck came after them. It took two nights to lose, and it took the animal with it.

Failed

8

StretchThe last stretch

The last stretch, walked hungry, because the upkeep had run out somewhere in the second night of being followed. Everyone took a point of ⊖ Fatigue for it, and nobody could refuse that one.

Passed

E

ArrivedFive of eight

They got there with an empty cart and one fewer animal than they set out with. Five passed against a Count of five, so everybody took a Mark and cleared the ⊖ Fatigue they were carrying.

Arrived well

Gold passedRust failedFaded nothing happened◆ a stop, and still an EventE what it came to

Five passed, two failed, and one went by without asking anything. They needed five, so they arrived.

Worth noticing what the Distance is made of. One of the eight Events was anything close to a fight. The rest were a crossing, a conversation, a stop, a salvage, and two stretches of road, one of which was only weather. It still cost them the cart's whole range and an animal.

Tone Is Yours

This module sets structure. How a crossing feels, and how much it takes, come from choices it doesn't make for you:

• Which model it runs on, which is the largest of these by some way.
• What the upkeep is, and how much of it a vehicle holds.
• Whether ⊖ Fatigue is the only thing a crossing leaves on a person.
• Whether a failed Event can cost the vehicle, the cargo, or somebody's standing.
• Whether a party that arrives short has failed, or has just arrived badly.

A forgiving game lets a party reach anywhere given enough upkeep. A hard one makes every Distance a decision about what they can afford to come back without. Neither needs different rules, only different settings.

Add-Ons

None of the following is part of the module, and none of it is required to run a Distance. Each entry is a lever that changes how travel feels, not how it works. Take them one at a time and play between each.

Each is listed with what it costs, not only what it buys.

Tracks instead of a single mark

Replace the one ⊖ Fatigue mark with two or three named tracks, and have each character step on whichever one their contribution drew on: the body for hauling and fighting, the mind for reading ground and fixing things, the nerve for talking and deciding.

Wear starts landing in different places, and a party discovers it has a weak flank it did not know about. The cost is a second system to track and a judgement call every Event about which track moved.

Standing as upkeep

Somewhere the party is welcome costs nothing to stop at. Somewhere they aren't costs double.

Makes the social map of a setting into a travel map, and gives a reason to spend an extra day to stop somewhere friendly. It needs a standing system to lean on, and a GM willing to say no.

Hidden Count

Model A only. The GM keeps the Count to themselves, and the party finds out on arrival.

Suits one-shots and horror, where not knowing whether there is enough left is the point. It costs the thing the Count was for: the party can no longer decide whether a detour is affordable, so detours stop being decisions.

Vehicle condition

Give the vehicle a ⊗ Wound track of its own and let failed Events mark it. The engine's Field Repair already removes one.

Range becomes something that degrades rather than something that runs out, and repairs become a reason to stop. It adds a second resource to watch on a crossing that already has one.

Events that cost two

An Event the GM declares hard costs double upkeep whether it is passed or not.

A direct way to make one stretch frightening without touching a Target. It is sharp, so used more than once a Distance it stops reading as an exception.

Arriving late

Keep the Count, but attach the reason to a clock. Meeting the Count arrives; doing it within a stated number of Events arrives in time.

Turns pace into a real decision instead of a wear trade, and gives Fast a reason to exist beyond saving upkeep. It also makes a bad Distance unsalvageable halfway through, which some tables want and others will resent.

Using This Module

1. Answer the three questions. Especially the first. A travel system without a cost is a map.
2. Pick one model. Counted Events if the going is the story, a clock if the destination is, a map if the world is. Don't run two.
3. Name your upkeep and set what a vehicle holds. The range table is a starting point on a party of four.
4. Decide what arriving pays, and check it against the three-Marks-a-Level cap before anything else.
5. Lay out the first one. For A, a Count said out loud and a mix of Events; for B, two tracks; for C, three routes out of one place.
6. Put somebody's Pursuit on it, whichever model you took.
7. Run it once at Average pace before offering Fast or Careful. The wear rate is the thing to feel first.

 

Attribution for systems using this module. Travel is an official module, so it doesn't need a credit line of its own. Name it alongside the engine:

Powered by the Frontiers Engine 1.0 with the Travel module. © 2026 Jayke Paver · frontiersengine.dev · Open RPG Creative (ORC) License

The full requirements are in the License.