Scholarly Adventures | The Bazaar #40: Geography & Distance

[desrocfc]

So, after some needs to redesign the Scholarly Adventures blog, I got back to actual content creation. This week I start adding more to my GM Field Guide section, with something targeted more specifically to newer GMs and Players, but applicable to those less "green behind the ears."

Scholarly Adventures | The Bazaar #40: Geography & Distance. For new GMs, the Rifts world effect on both geography and travelling great distances can be a daunting element of campaign design. The first of two posts, I discuss some macro-level factors to consider for travel in the post-apocalyptic world of Rifts, as well as those that can be manipulated and leveraged in order to make adventures planning a little easier to handle, including integrating travel as part of the plot.

https://www.scholarlyadventures.com/pos ... -distances

How does geography and distance affect your campaign design?
What tips or tricks have you seen/used in order to handle travel in designing adventures?
How true are you to the geography as presented in the World Books?

[Grazzik]

I use the desktop version of Google Earth Pro as there is a plug in out there that shows what happens at various sea levels. At 50m/150ft, it doesn't always match the drawings in the Rifts books, but close enough. It also helps to plan out routes and measure distances / frequency of encounters.

Shout out to Mobuttu for some great work plotting locations!

Though very clunky to use, I add polygons to reflect buildings or even cities so I can get a sense of what landmarks I can see from ground level in places I've never been.

I've also created a layer for the Palladium world and figured out that that planet is much smaller than Earth, to the point that I have to divide distances on the Earth distance ruler by half when using the Palladium map. Must have more density under the soil if the gravity is the same as Earth.

The 3D building feature and street view is useful for games like BTS, Chaos Earth or Dead Reign.

[slade2501]

I actually pulled up a US map, and using most places of interests real world name and location, made a short matrix table of distances from notable settlements and or towns mentioned in most books or supplements. Surprisingly most places are pretty close to one another (98 miles from Whykin to Kingsdale) to a fair distance (961 miles from Mantistique to Golden Age Weaponsmiths in Huntsville, AL.).

This can have some pretty interesting effects on travel, depending on the modes and methods available to the players (a standard old style SAMAS could make most of these trips in 5 hours or less without even pushing the engines).

[desrocfc]

I actually pulled up a US map, and using most places of interests real world name and location, made a short matrix table of distances from notable settlements and or towns mentioned in most books or supplements. Surprisingly most places are pretty close to one another (98 miles from Whykin to Kingsdale) to a fair distance (961 miles from Mantistique to Golden Age Weaponsmiths in Huntsville, AL.).

This can have some pretty interesting effects on travel, depending on the modes and methods available to the players (a standard old style SAMAS could make most of these trips in 5 hours or less without even pushing the engines).

This actually points to part of the problem with the current state of Rifts, which leads into yet another article I'm drafting. The number of books makes the world seem a lot smaller than it probably should. We live in an age of integrated technology and satellite communications/GPS that takes a bit of a mental pivot when contemplating Rifts Earth. Sure, an old-style SAMAS could make that trip in 5 hours, but with what likelhood of not having/surviving an encounter? I mean, you *are* traversing/skirting the Magic Zone. But Rifts Earth does not have GPS travel guidance. The military might have more detailed maps and pre-programed relay points for regions of interest outside their borders. John Q Public not so much. Adventurers? Sure, maybe.... hence the Wilderness Scout.

Most folks in the CS/FQ/NGR/Sovietski/Japan live in something akin to what we rely upon today; interstate highways and other manicured lines of communication. Out in the boonies, it's a much different scenario. As an example, try driving that suggested route (or something akin) without a GPS or connectivity to the internet, without a map, heck without the road signs - oh, and you can only drive on the shoulder or the median. Consider any construction or accident an overgrowth of the forest that has now cut off that road and you now need to make a detour. Any repairs to the vehicle are your responsibility and yours alone (no AAA or local dealership/shop). Google says that would take roughly 12 hours to drive - on current infrastructure. Throw in Magic Zone gribblies/CS patrols/random nastiness/repairs/detours and you've got something much different than a Sunday drive. That would be the likely reality of travel. <shrug> LOL.

The level of difficulty and influence this has on the player group is more to the point of what I was trying to get at. Some GMs will be more forgiving, others more crunchy in their approach.

[Grazzik]

All good points.

Travel has played a factor in a number of campaigns. If the players have a hi-tech vehicle, typically travel is skipped unless there is an encounter or something relative to the plot. However, when travel is considered, it generally falls along three types or themes: Foot, Surface and Air. Each has their place and brings a different flavor in time required, conditions of travel, and likelihood of encounters. The following are high level notes that have guided those campaigns and that obviously could be expanded in much greater detail.

John Q. Public is not going to leave the safety of their walled settlement without good reason. In that case, they will likely stick to areas that are regularly patrolled with good infrastructure. Their mode of transport is likely by gas or battery truck or horse (with or without a cart) - what I'd consider a "Surface" mode of transport. Pleasure drives are likely not going to happen for most people, as they would possibly have to weigh the benefit against personal safety, though there will always be individuals that accept the risk. That said, they'd likely stay within an hour from home to minimize the risk of an encounter, unless they were going to another settlement.

Traders and shippers are the most likely to be the traffic that uses established roads, bringing resources from outlying regions into the settlement or bringing goods between settlements. If the value of the goods are low, the transport is likely to be cheap and able to haul volume - again trucks or carts (Surface). Using established roads that are well known to the drivers has travel times comparable to today. Most would likely not range further than the next market town with whom they maintain good relations, which means the roads are likely well patrolled and maintained. Shippers or traders that go more than 4 hrs away from a given settlement are likely a rarity or are very sure of the route and destination. The risk of being caught out in the open beyond the reach of a rescue would have to justified by valuable cargo and mitigating security. If the value of the cargo is sufficiently high and the risk is also high, it is probable that non-desperate shippers and traders would use another means of transport - namely hover vehicles or VTOL craft (collectively considered "Air"). This provides the advantage of speed, the ability to bypass most obstacles (at least for hovercraft that can gain altitude), and to possibly take a more direct route where roads are not provided or maintained. However, hover vehicles may be prone to breaking down with a reduced likelihood of on the spot repairs, so it is a trade off.

WB31 (Triax 2) is helpful to model Surface travel in patrolled/maintained areas, in that it provides a random encounter/conditions table along the Autobahn. However, it suggests rolling for every 10-20 miles. Since folks are likely traveling 100+ mph, that might mean an encounter every 6 minutes which is tiresome. It might be more reasonable to roll every 80-100 miles travelled.

Speed is important, as the risk of being stopped by a patrol or attacked is reduced if you are miles past the threat before they react. Could such travelers still be chased? Sure, but likely not for any significant distance, unless the pursuer disabled the vehicle and/or thought the traveler had something worth the effort. Also, there are few threats that are sufficiently coordinated to relay instructions to secondary party of ambushers several miles away. Unless in a warzone, most CS regional forces and militia are likely to do very little as long as it is not clearly identifiable as a Enemy of the State, they themselves won't get caught for dereliction, or it's going so fast it will be someone else's problem soon.

The other advantage of hovercraft and VTOL aircraft is that they are sophisticated machines most likely to have instrumentation by which they could be flown. While not all pilots IRL are rated or maintain their rating for Instrument Flight Rules (IFR), it is likely that any Rifts pilot that has the Pilot Related: Sensory Equipment and Pilot Related: Navigation skills is likely rated. This is because of the very fact there is no satellite GPS and maps are supposedly so poor. The pilot could use existing information to plot a course and stay on course based on inertial tracking/dead reckoning.

Side Note: After a hundred years of the Coalition States and longer for other major players like NG and Lazlo, I find this idea re poor maps implausible for NA since high altitude craft could have easily mapped most of the US and Canada in that time. Maps are an essential aspect of trade, civil infrastructure, industry, and national defense, so to ignore maps for over a hundred years or to suppress them from commercial use, but build civilian hovercraft with ranges in the hundreds of miles, is just plain silly, particularly when you have Pre-Rifts maps to start with.

Adventurers may have access to hover vehicles, but unlike traders/shippers, their destinations may not always be accessible by those vehicles and require hoofing it through the bush ("Foot"). This is slow and the rules in PFRPG Book 2 (Old Ones), the Rifts Vampire Sourcebook and WB20 (Rifts Canada) have proved very useful in determining the factors impacting foot travel. It might only take 4 hours to travel by hovercycle the 400 miles to a suspected abandoned dragon hoard, but it might take 3 days to get the last 15 miles through thick forest on foot. A good week's travel there and back. The likelihood of an encounter on foot is high - whether it is other people, monsters or simply a terrain-based obstacle. In most instances, it is likely a terrain-based obstacle that needs to be over come. Encounters with other people or monsters might or might not happen depending on the nature of the travelling party, but it's up to the GM if the encounters are one-shots or perhaps a single monster or other group that reappear along the path to the destination.

There are obviously other factors to consider, such as water travel, whether stretches of Pre-Rifts highways had already been converted to MDC, and access to fuel. However, I hope this has been helpful to folks in order to better visualize travel in Rifts.

[Hotrod]

I feel like I need to make more maps now…

[glitterboy2098]

it is also worth noting that travel cross country offroad (or at best on dirt paths) is going to be a lot slower than people assume. if not flying, a good rule of thumb is for each day of travel (assuming about 12 hours of travelling, with time to eat, rest, set up camp, and sleep filling the rest), a person on foot can cover about 10 miles, a person in a cart about 20 miles, a person on horseback (no spares) about 25 miles, a person on horseback (with spare horses) about 35 miles. if doing a forced march/minimal rest, you can get about 50% more than that, maybe double that if you are traveling with minimal luggage/gear. but you usually can't keep up a forced march for more than 2-3 days on foot, or about a day for horses. (this was why having spare horses at way stations was such a big deal for armies and messenger services. also one of the reasons the mongols were so militarily effective, since they brought whole herds of horses along and could easily swap between tired out ones and fresh ones often)
i don't have solid data on cross country car travel, but it probably would be better than the multiple horse option. and obviously flying can cover a lot more ground per day. but i doubt that a car is going to be able to travel more than 50-60 miles day, since you won;t be able to drive full speed, given uneven ground, the lack of ability to see the kind of terrain ahead of you clearly, etc. most of the time if you are driving offroad with no or only limited dirt paths to follow, you'll be limited to maybe 20-30mph, and will end up slowing down and/or stopping often to figure out how to progress. that said, if there is track to follow and the ground is fairly flat and clear, you could certainly cross a lot of ground. but even the open praries of the great plains would have enough bad ground, sudden streambeds, and other hazards that you aren't going to get full speed. (hover cars, especially the rifts ones that are basically ground effect aircraft flying a dozen feet off the ground, are going to able to move a lot faster. which is probably why they're popular),

generally if you have decent roads to follow you can get about 50% or more per day than these. one of the reasons why building well maintained road networks let Rome dominate so much of the mediterranian.

now obviously there are going to be environmental factors to consider.. rain and snow will slow all of these down, as will heat and dry conditions. mountainous terrain will reduce how fast you can move, as will swampy ground, etc. but as a rule of thumb these numbers are pretty good.

[Grazzik]

I feel like I need to make more maps now…

Hotrod, your stuff is AAA Top Shelf! Your maps AND npc generators are a boon to the community! Thank you.

it is also worth noting ...

On road conditions, much of the elevated infrastructure is likely demolished due to the Earth-shattering events of the Cataclysm. Nothing left but the occasional berm of forest covered rubble running for miles. Sections might still exist here and there similar to how MDC buildings are occasionally found. Though, as they are found, these sections might be seized upon and their materials recycled.

However, it's been an old house rule for the games I've been in that in the Golden Years, despite the proliferation of expensive hover vehicles, much of the MAJOR highway system still accommodated high volumes of low cost and freight traffic, and had been replaced with MDC materials in a cost cutting effort, much like new roads today that contain plastic and other materials to reduce wear and tear. One would hope that sometime between now IRL and 2098, someone would come up with a modernization plan for critical infrastructure.

In that case, ground level roads might still be very usable (or at least patchable) once 300 years of accumulated dirt, ash, rust, assorted debris, and brush has been cleared off. Only about 10mm of soil is created every 200-400 years depending on climate. Accounting for ash from Yellowstone based on RL estimates, CS territory would have anywhere from 1-30mm ash deposits depending on how far east you go. So, a road near Des Moines on the CS western border would have about 4cm / 1.6 inches of dirt/ash. Round up to 3 inches for accretion of wind blown dirt from carbonized trees and structures due to additional volcanoes and nuclear explosions to the west, and add an inch for well and truly decomposed cars, well that means you only have to dig about 4 inches to find serviceable road.

In fact, that pay dirt would be high in valuable and rare minerals from the decomposed cars - copper, gold, nickel, cobalt, manganese, zinc, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if, in over 100 years of post apocalypse recovery, most major roads had already been mined for hundreds of miles just for the metals. This would leave at least level ground upon which local communities could reclaim MDC roads, lay cobbles, or properly pave. At least lay a corduroy road for local use using timber. Actually, there may be other mineral deposits of iron, aluminum and steel UNDER the roads, as construction costs can be cut if compacted garbage is used as underfill for new road. IRL, a community locally had an issue with medical waste and batteries being used as underfill for a road.

Of course, damage due to conflict during the Chaos Earth years probably tears up infrastructure like tissue paper. Rifts and LL Storms can d-shift huge stretches of road. Indeed, strange critters from the rifts may also EAT part of the road making it unrecoverable. But for those larger communities located near former major cities, it would probably not be too difficult to create a network of reclaimed road for an extended distance. However, smaller secondary roads and even some highways would probably disappear into the muck and revert to little more than a strangely straight dirt path of thin brush through a forest on either side.

If sections of major roads were recovered, this would bolster the idea that maps would be frequently used to chart usable tracts of highway, even if they are just copies of Pre-Rifts road maps that show the major routes.

Would love to hear thoughts on this house rule, how others have treated ancient roads, how roads have impacted Rifts communities and the PCs' ability to travel on foot or wheeled vehicles in their sessions.

[glitterboy2098]

the canonical ashfall for the chitown area though is about 4 feet. which i've generally assumed to be due to all the other volcanos erupting as well (like many on the ring of fire), not just Yellowstone, and their ash being carried by the jet stream and other high altitude currents to drop across the continent. not to mention that odds are a fair few more volcanos probably popped up in the rockies, given how they're basically all new post-rifts.. either you had a lot of tectonic weirdness going on, or dimensional weirdness. either way, that could be a source of additional ash.

and yeah, i didn't want to address roads, new or old, since we have such little solid info on them. i was focusing on cross country across either typical wilderness terrain, or at minimum along unimproved dirt tracks (aka game trails, wagon trails, and other places where movement of stuff from place to place has created a passable area through any foliage and obstacles, but which haven't been cleared, leveled, graded, or paved in any way.)

personally i'm not convinced that the pre-rifts road networks were rebuilt with MDC materials.. but i can buy that bridges and similar transportation infrastructure would be. given the fact that hover vehicles seem to have been increasingly popular and thus reduce wear, i suspect that most roads didn't need MDC level materials, just improved SDC ones and the normal systems of maintenance. though i also tend to assume that weathering and wear can effect MDC materials over time, just a lot slower than the straight MDC to SDC values would suggest.

but places where those roads once existed likely do end up as the routes of the dirt tracks, because of the flatter ground and existence of stuff like cuts through hills and along mountainsides making for natural access points.

[Grazzik]

Glitterboy, any quick search of the Forum will show you know what you're talking about on this topic Not going to rehash past forum discussions. Was just pointing out our house rule that tied in with improved ease of travel and use of maps.

[Shorty Lickens]

My solution was: Never be too specific with ANYTHING, cuz all it will do is limit your options later on. Be as vague as you can get away with. No details on exact angles and distances. Just general references to time travelled. You can improvise more, later on. ( and you will, trust me)