What Interesting Terrain Looks Like, or, More Mud, Please!

What Interesting Terrain Looks Like, or, More Mud Please!

 Those of us who get access to good roads are pretty spoiled, right? All other transportational advantages of modern technology quite aside, a decent street is really quite easy to walk along (assuming you've got a pavement and/or it's quiet - sorry, USAmerican readers).

Go out in the wilderness, and you quite quickly find things are different. The mud sucks at your shoes. Rocks trip you up. My family walks a lot, a relative still managed to break their arm this season about half an hour up a small hill, slipping on moss. The kind of fall you have a hundred times and are fine, but the one, you're waiting five hours for mountain rescue as the air gets cold and the sun dips and you start to shiver...

For whatever reason, a lot of games don't seem to care. Even games that reaaaaallly should, the 'mud, blood, and shit' end of things, the OSRs and WFRPs of the space. I'm going to break this down into two critiques: one targeted at battle-scale maps, one at navigation-scale maps. Then (during and after the critiques) I'm going to offer some solutions that I like.

This is not a manifesto for a particular way of doing terrain, more a polemic against the ubiquitously existing one, so my solutions will be imperfect invitations for you to do better. In all things, a process.

Issues, Small and Much Too Large

The Titanic Floating Corpse of the Crystallized Burning Dinosaur Regent (lv. 1 encounter area)

A lot of TTRPG battle maps, particularly dramatic ones for big setpieces, tend to look like the more extreme end of what gets made for Warhammer (insert favoured brand here, but especially Age of Sigmar) dioramas and art. Floating island here, dead god here, big river of lava inbetween! This is awesome, tbc. I love the heightened aesthetic of these settings, and sometimes you need to have a battle in a gothic palace that's slowly turning into ever-growing daemonic flesh...

Kevin Chin, Daemonic Invasion

Or a lava field, skies choked with ash...

Warhammer Fantasy Battles 6th Edition, General's Handbook by Eric Sarlin and Jeremy Vetock. Battlefield presumably designed by somebody in the 'Hobby Team' of Jason Buyaki, Chad Mierzwa, Jake Landis and Chris McPherson

(I'm using wargaming comparisons here, but this is also the dramatic terrain of many battles on film or  in video games).

BUT!

This is terrain that only a select team of superhumans like a Wizards-era D&D party or Space Marine squad could plausibly fight across. I was always confused by that lava field in a game of Warhammer Fantasy Battles... even if you assume that one miniature equals one warrior (which produces some really tiny army sizes, but this is probably another post), and even bearing in mind that proximity to lava is more survivable than one might think, the idea that two entire armies are going to bet on hopping across flows which are at least a couple of metres across is wild. Armies through much of history have spent weeks approaching and running away from each other as they each refused to engage an opponent who had occupied the terrifying ground of a hill behind a small stream.

In the real world, most of the more brutal and terrifying terrain soldiers have had to fight across (as opposed to move through whilst on campaign) has been some combination of: A) hilly (but not sheer enough to prevent battle entirely), A)i) flat but overlooked by a hilly bit, B) cold, C) hot, D) wet, E) forested, F) windy, or G) built-up (fortified or urban). 

9th Battle of the Isonzo, A+Ai+B from www.esercito.difesa.it, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50801793

Battle of the Trebia, B+D from  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Trebia#/media/File:Battle_of_the_Trebia,_opening_manoeuvres.png

Iwo Jima, A+Ai+G+sometimes F

Again, I'm not saying the 'superheroes duelling on giant cogs rotating over acid lake' style is wrong or bad. But I think it sometimes underestimates the difficulty created by perfectly mundane dangers. Part of this is probably because people are scared of bogging the game down with 200 'traverse the bog' rolls? But things like difficult terrain and cover tend to exist in TTRPGs for a reason. They're pretty simple rules, and nasty to be on the wrong end of.

How we fail the Local Area

'Put something [assumedly 'gameable'] in every hex' is a common mantra, (mirrored in the pointcrawl, where the 'something' replaces the hex) but assumes hexes of a certain size. Any given six miles might have a lot of stuff in. Any given one? Less so. But a lot of interesting stuff can fit within 1 mile, just not if it's magical treasure/highly threatening monsters.

For example - Silverdale, Lancashire, a place I've been walking all my life and yet where I never fail to find new nooks and crannies and little paths that feel like they should lead straight to a fairy court.

 

And here's a one-mile scale hex map:

Could we get years of exploration-based adventure from this???? 

How about a more conventional six-mile hexmap?

I've focussed on the hexcrawl here because A) it fascinates me as a format and B) it's the most patently absurd in this specific case. But as noted in the intro to this section, do not think pathcrawls, pointcrawls etc. are immune! Rigorously applied, they might well do better at recreating this space, but their focus on definable points and the major routes between them is inevitably going to reduce the complexity of the ways those places fit together, and potentially leave smaller ones out entirely. 

(That deserves highlighting: any map where the environment is abstracted to 'places the PCs can buy seriously important gear/kill threatening things' surrounded by a vague soup of 'probably some small farms or something, you can maybe buy some bread there' is not just less interesting, though tbc it does take lots of options off the table,[1] it's politically harmful: an elision of the rural, or worse, the 'wilderness' population, and the value of the lives and relationships of ordinary people who inhabit these spaces. Players are well within their rights to ignore these things, to have their characters behave towards them like many, many real people do/have; but to have the camera pan around them as disinteresting [or uncomfortable?] is to reify the colonial/internal-colonial myth of unclaimed wilderness.)

A low-granularity pathcrawl, with handwave-y wilderness between a few routes that connect the most significant spots, might as well be a freeform hexcrawl. A high-granularity pathcrawl, such as a rigorous application of Sachagoat's system, with detailed "Paths ... Points of Interest ... Borders [with the option for] Trailblazing [across them,] Regions [and] Landmarks", is better, but better insofar as it is beginning to approach a naturalistic map. 

But we in TTRPGs seem averse to more granular spaces. Perhaps we (those of us who want to play exploration-y games, let's leave the emotionally-complex storytellers and high-fantasy world-spanning questers out of this, even if I am also both of those things betimes) want to be theoretically able to explore everywhere, at least in theory, which rather militates against deep places. Unless they're a city or an implausibly stable hole in the ground, for some reason.

Where's the mud???

[1] To name just one such option: whilst obviously it's fine to simply recognize and live with some of the moral iffyness of certain tropes, to tell a story where the characters behave in a way that's interesting rather than good and the narrative is about that and everyone has fun like they would reading Blood Meridian or something, it's also possible to simply evade certain of these pitfalls by fully realizing the rural/'wilderness' population. That family of crazed incestuous cannibal farmers become a lot more palatable if the PCs have slept in the barns of half a dozen farmers of varying degrees of pleasantness and human fallibility along their path to Bloodthorpe or whatever. YMMV with how far you want to take this principle, of course.

Muddying the Waters

On a real walk in the wild a mile is interesting because of the mud, the little stream for water, the slope that's steeper than it looks, the apparently-open forest that turns into a wilderness to block your path

The stream! The blessed beautiful hillside stream after a day hot hiking (the accursed sheep shitting twenty feet up it).

I think wilderness is richer for being like this, and whilst it does force you to spend more time in prep it also means doing things takes longer. (My endorsement of measured, slice-of-life play can wait for another post). 

So, uh, what are our solutions?

Rulers of the Land

Things immediately get a lot easier when you stop using hexes and start using measuring sticks. It's the difference between playing Risk and playing Free Kriegspiel, more or less. It opens up a degree of tactical infinity, because all of a sudden there are more than 6 or generously 12 directions. 

And, yes, there's a debate as to whether hexes are just a measuring stick. Consider this piece a blow on the side of using them as such, if you use them. But practically, the majority of people and games don't seem to. And if you're going to use variable wilderness travel times - I think you should if you want more granular and interesting travel, the Alexandrian's hexcrawl system is a good start - then the main use of hex-as-ruler (regular travel units/encounter checks) suddenly becomes an active inconvenience as you have to start thinking in 1/3 and 1/8 hexes. You know what a good alternative ruler is that already has fractions of every unit marked on it?

If you give your map a scale in cm and inches, you can conveniently measure tenths, quarters, eighths, sixteenths and eighteenths of a standard travel unit! Albeit you no longer have a standard travel unit, but it's the thought that counts.

With this ingenious implement in hand, you can draw a naturalistic map, with all the weird little squiggles and patches and side-roads your scale will accommodate. You might even want to do zoomed-in versions of more complicated areas - a 'barren' tundra* can probably be mapped to a larger scale than a low mountainous rainforest.

'My players will be bored by endless decisions on this scale. Either they'll get lost in all the side-roads and get nowhere, or they'll just keep navigating the most efficient path and ignoring everything else!' Thank you, Strawman, good point; it is a risk we have to take into account, but can be avoided. For your trouble, have eight situations which might trouble your assumptions:

Getting Lost

1. The players wander into a terrain type they would rarely choose to enter, or linger where they would otherwise hurry on, which contains interesting but not deeply attractive or valuable content (marshes, ice-covered lakes, flood-prone ravines w/o embedded dungeons, etc). You no longer have to embed something conventionally 'gameable' in the narrowly objective-focussed sense to draw them to such places! They get a new challenge!
2. Similar to the archetypal first OSR session where the players work out that not all fights can be won: After one bad experience with a circuitous route, players may begin to adopt more plausibly premodern perspectives on the vastness of the world and dangers of the wilderness...
3. Or they may take the opportunity to develop out-of-game strategies or hone PC abilities in order to deal with the issue in future. In one game that I ran late last year, a group of PC knights who got lost in the wilderness with no navigational knowledge between them quickly began using up limited resources to make a trail when they had to navigate through dense forest away from the tracks of the giant creature they were following (which could simply step over certain obstacles they couldn't). Necessity is the mother of invention and the maternal grandmother of interesting, fulfilling play!
4. https://straitsofanian.blogspot.com/2023/01/how-to-be-erased.html

The Most Efficient Path

1. Always choosing the best path is a serious weakness if your opponents know the region better than you do, effectively telegraphing your location for ambushes, roadblocks, etc. This means that A) it may not actually be most efficient resource-wises insofar as your life is a very limited resource, and B) regardless, choosing it is a tactically (well, operationally) interesting choice which might inspire debate, especially after the third ambush
2. Less dramatically, lots of other people will pick the same route, increasing the chance that they run into othwer plto 
3. If PCs really don't know the region and it's somewhat complex, they might need to ask directions, which means engaging with local NPCs who might require persuasion or have ulterior motives.
4. Sometimes what's apparently efficient when you set off isn't (might even be much more dangerous) when the weather/political situation/plate tectonics changes. If PCs are aware of the possibility of the change, there's a risk/reward calculation; but it's OK to surprise them, too - so long as they could have learned it somehow, this is a reward for careful research, and if they really couldn't it might still be an interesting challenge (though this latter approach is questionable).

That saaaid, you have to find your own balance. It may be that some sections remain skippable, just as some journeys are dull. Moderation in some things.

This allows you to introduce some complexity to macro-scale exploration, but what about the specifics of what players run into?

*here recite the Litany Against Colonial Perspective, but this is being used as metonym of 'any zone with relatively homogenous elevation, topography and flora',  not 'rurr hurr muh wasteland uninhabited frontier fantasy', you read the preceding section (I hope)

Crawling through fields and hedgerows

At some point, scaling the map down becomes inconvenient. Playing exploration on battle-map scale for hours upon hours may not go down too well, though there are surely circumstances for it - it's basically what the spelunking cave-generation system of the original Veins of the Earth encouraged. But I think that 'random encounter' systems can probably create a decent fascimile of ultra-local terrain, used with some regularity (or better yet, with regularity accounted for by a single die):

Every 1/2 mile through a given terrain type adds 1 to a Minor Travel Encounter pool. When characters travel through that type of terrain, roll 1d100, subtract the number rolled from the Pool and roll again until the pool is 0 or less. For every roll before that last one, the characters experience one thing chosen by a roll on a terrain-appropriate chart. If a Minor Travel Encounter extends the distance of the journey (not the length), increase the pool size appropriately, beginning rolling again if it returns to positive.
MINOR TRAVEL ENCOUNTER (D10)

1-2 Inconvenience - a minor and unhelpful incident, like dropping an object in a PC's quick-access slot (is it waterproof? How dry's the ground?)
3 - Accident - A PC is put in a position of some minor personal risk by a slip, trip, etc. Some kind of save, with the DC varying on the terrain but typically not going above 10 or so except in rare cases.
4-5 - Broadly Negative Feature - a piece of smaller terrain which slows or hinders the PCs - fallen log across the road, boggy patch, bare smooth wet rock patch. Mark it on the map.
6-7 - Broadly Positive Feature - a piece of helpful terrain, like a bush loaded with blackberries or a clear stream (note that thorns/blockage might also be an inconvenience, but the terrain provides something of use). Mark it on the map.
8-10 - Detail - a patch of wildflowers of no particular medicinal use, distant burst of birdsong or other moment of particular note that doesn't do anything directly helpful/harmful. Might be terrain; if so, mark it on the map.

The distance thing accounts for faster travel taking more risks, though as not all the results are risks it isn't quite perfect. The Minor Travel Encounters could be filled in with area-appropriate results, in nested tables if needed or with rotated-out encounters as described here, to produce something like this:

Minor Travel Encounters: Chumplerye Border Hills 

Going to express this in 5e DC terms, hopefully the conversion process is evident.

Inconvenience (d6)

1-3 - Tiring - A cool breeze, sharp incline or one too many rest stops requires each PC to make an additional DC 5 Con save or suffer a level of exhaustion.
4 - Clumsiness. Each PC makes a Dex check. Lowest roll drops 1 object they normally keep for quick access or are using in their tasks this watch. If the ground's wet or it's fragile, this might be an issue. Otherwise, it's fine but might spur some roleplaying.
5-6 - Something in your shoe - spend your action this watch looking for it or move at minimum speed or leave it and 99% chance it's nothing & is endurable, 1% chance you need to make a DC 12 Con save against blood poisoning.

7-8 - Bloodsucker - One random PC contracts a tick. Do not reveal this to players until next camp, when Perception DC or Passive Perception 16 from the PC or 21 from an ally will notice. A check for ticks automatically reveals it. Tick removal procedures can be another post.

9-12 - Cowpat - or other miscellanaeous shit, now coating one character's shoe (lowest Passive Perception, marching order tiebreaker). Until you can thoroughly clean it off it's going to impose disadvantage on all social rolls against the kind of person who doesn't like the smell of shit.

Accident (d4)

1-2 - Slippery moss - DC 5 Dex save or fall over badly, dropping anything held and suffering 1d6 Bludgeoning damage. On a natural 1 (if that's low enough to fail) suffer 2d6 Bludgeoning damage.
3 - Shifting stone - As per Slippery Moss but the save is DC 10 and the additional damage on a natural 1-5.
4 - Branchfall - Perception 12 to spot in time to call a warning; if not warned, one random PC must make a Dex save or suffer 4d4 Bludgeoning damage 

Broadly Negative Features (d16)

1-2 - Steep paths - Reduce speed by 10% for next hour or  everyone saves as per Shifting Stone, above
3-5 - Overgrown trail. - Disadvantage on all rolls to navigate or pathfind for next hour; lead PC suffers 1d4 Piercing damage.
6-7 - Unpredictable topography - Disadvantage on all rolls to navigate or pathfind for next four hours and, if lost, roll a scatter die or spin a spinner to determine direction for each subsequent watch.
8 - Deceptive shale - As per sheep-trail or short scramble, below, but the DC is 20 and does not appear to be so, and on a failure roll the fall damage twice, drop lowest.
9-12 - Boggy patch - DC 5 group Str save; on a fail, lowest-Survival PC loses their boots. If everyone fails, -10% total move speed.
13 - Wind channel - PC speed reduced by 10% as long as they move on their current bearing. Effect ends when they crest a substantial ridge.

14-16 - Field of large creatures - like cows. Dangerous only if antagonized or spooked, or curious or hungry or horny or...

Broadly Positive Features (d10)

1-2 - Somewhat-intact shack - A place to shelter; four walls, a ceiling that will keep some rain off and a doorway that could be blockaded with bits of the old detritus inside. 20% you can retrieve usable farm equipment.

3-4- Clear stream. Water that doesn't need purifying (without this result, successful checks to forage water require a DC 5 Con save, boiling, or a spell to avoid infection.)

5 - Sheltered overhang. You can get a comfortable spot for a short rest beneath it in any weather, and avoid getting soaked in heavy rain.

6 - Lost sheep. Can be returned to its owner, who lives in a random spot within d6 miles, for (25%) 1d10 copper pieces, (45%) a useful plot hint or hook, (50%) a meal each and a bed for the night and/or (1%) a magic item (95% common, 4% uncommon, 1% rare) reward. Can also be butchered and eaten.

7 - Lucky charm - a small talisman hanging from a tree. Rubbing it grants +1 to next roll. If taken with you, carrying character instead has a useful encounter or piece of information come to them within the next day, then the charm loses its effectiveness. (Nobody said 'less weird' had to mean 'no weird')

8-9 - Sheep-trail or short scramble - a convenient ascent up an otherwise-difficult hill, if followed (DC 10 Athletics to climb, failure leads to a d6*10 ft. fall) then effectively doubles movement pace for next hour.
10 - Wild beehive. Provides 1d4 days of rations in honey, if you're willing to brave the bee swarm within. Smoke will calm them to total placidity.

Details (d12)

1-3 - Sunny spot. A patch of light skims across the landscape, giving a blessed moment's relief from any adverse weather or in good conditions allowing for some blissful basking.

4 - Root-patterns. Criss-crossing roots and shale-faults form a checkerboard effect that looks eerily cybernetic.

5-6 - One billion bluebells - Pretty :) Adjust to season.
7 - Old chalk icon - Cut into the hillside. Symbol of an old religion, DC 30 Religion to recall useful information and DC 20 Religion or History to recall pop-folkloristic lies 
8-9 - Cutaway - The path ahead is cut about 5-10 ft. deep into the ground, usually to go through a small rise.

10 - Fault - all of the rock suddenly twists ahead of you, with two different types coming together - chalk one side, shale the other.
11-12 - Rusted farm equipment. If within 6 miles of the coast, 30% chance rotting boat parts instead.

One of these for any given terrain in an area, but you could share some entries, so similar tables for, say, forests, patchwork farmlands and coastal dunes.

And then the advantage/sorrow of roads is that you get to skip all of this.

Shitty Little Maps

Essentially the same as the section above, but more specifically defined, when you're setting up a battlemap in advance make sure you note the annoying little bits of terrain that might only inconvenience weak or unlucky characters. If you're worried about making lots of rolls slowing play, make 10 rolls for each section in advance and write them down in your notes, then use them as the base die-roll for anybody passing through, crossing them off as you go.

Going to express this in 5e DC terms, hopefully the conversion process is evident, but here's a map based on a better drawn one I've got sat in a sketchbook somewhere which may become a full adventure at some point. 

N.B. I've used a square grid here because that's the norm in play for most people AFAIK, but I apply my ruler-use to battle maps too when I use them.

KEY:

Short Hilly Grass - contour lines demonstrate elevation. Moving up a contour costs 5 ft. of movement; moving along etc. does not. Characters knocked prone must make a DC 5 Dex save or move 5 ft. towards the nearest contour line, or the cliff if that's closer. On a natural 1 they move an additional 5 ft. if they fail. Base saves: 2, 7, 11, 3, 6, 17, 13, 19, 16, 7
Grassy Bog - Muddy: DC 5 Str save or a shoe is stuck, character cannot move. Save on turn to end effect (DC 10, may re-roll a fail if you sacrifice the shoe). Moving faster than 15 ft./turn requires a DC 10 Dex save or the PC trips and falls prone, whilst whatever they're holding goes in the mud. On a natural 1, anything dropped is lost and requires a turn searching to retrieve. Base shoe saves: 3, 14, 8, 11, 4, 19, 5, 18, 18, 14 (I recommend letting the PCs make the saves to get out live at the table); Base trip saves: 20, 6, 13, 14, 4, 20, 3, 11, 5, 8

Small Pools - Difficult terrain and too shallow to swim. Bottom is muddy: DC 5 Str save or a shoe is stuck, character cannot move. Save on turn to end effect (now DC 10, may re-roll a fail if you sacrifice the shoe). Base shoe saves: 16, 16, 7, 14, 19, 15, 17, 5, 12, 20
For any fall onto the bog the base damage die is reduced to 1d4, so a fall from 60 ft. would deal 6d4.
(1) This pool contains the corpse of a sheep with a barbed arrow stuck in it. DC 10+turns exposure Con vs. infection if a character in the pool is below 1/2 hp (make a note, have them roll after the encounter). The arrow is of strange make, usable if retrieved (requires a full action). It could be magic. I like hiding lost magic items in shitty little battlemaps; nobody's found one yet. Let's say that (thematically and amusingly) the arrow sticks in whoever's hit, gives them disadvantage on all Survival checks and saves versus terrain, and requires 8 Max HP damage (DC 25 Medicine check halves) to remove. It was made by a trollish sorcerer.

Granite rock - Protrudes 5 ft. above the ground level in most places, except past the cliff line where it's 60 ft. up. Slippery if wet. Sheer. Rough but without large handholds. DC 15 to climb dry, 25 wet, Advantage if you're already on another square of rock. Failed checks to climb result in 1 slashing damage, or 1d4 on a natural 1, and sliding down 5 ft. If still on granite, another check must be made immediately to rescue the climb. 

Thick ferns - Difficult terrain. May obscure a crouching character. 5% per time moved through or 15% per turn stood within of contracting a tick. (Do not reveal this to players until next camp, when Perception DC or Passive Perception 16 from the PC or 21 from an ally will notice. A check for ticks automatically reveals it. Tick removal procedures can be another post). Fire damage can burn the foliage away: 1 or more if very dry or dead, 7 or more normally, 16 or more if wet. Double that damage consumes it instantly; otherwise, the area burns for 1d4 and has light cover from smoke for a turn. 

Shell Beach - Normal movement is not penalized, but moving faster than 30 ft./turn requires a DC 5 Dex save or the chaacter trips and falls prone, suffering 1 Piercing damage from sharp shells. A character Dashing barefoot suffers 1 Piercing damage as their feet are lacerated. Assuming the PC is wearing shoes, after 3 turns of movement on the beach they've filled with shells, having the same effect until taken off and shaken out. 
Any fall onto the shells (including from being knocked prone normally) does 1 extra damage, but due to their relative give the base damage die is reduced to 1d4, so a fall from 60 ft. would deal 6d4+1. 

Shallow Water - Difficult terrain, can swim at 1/2 speed. As per shell beach for barefoot characters, and 5% chance per turn of treading on a Big Spiky Crab for 1 Piercing damage (the PC does not know what they have trodden on. Play this up. It hurts. People know rockfish exist IRL :) ) When the tide's receding, movement towards shore is halved. 

Deep Water - 10 ft. deep, normal swimming possible. When the tide's receding, movement towards shore is halved. There's a pool of isolated deep water by the granite rock in the sea which is instead 20 ft. deep. There's nothing relevant to land-dwellers at the bottom. Descending below 10 ft. in it will however induce a DC 5 Con save once per turn against a level of Exhaustion from cold water shock. 
Cliff-edge - 50 ft. high. If a character on the edge Dashes, falls prone, or suffers damage in excess of half their HP, DC 10 Dex save to avoid going over. As per Granite Rock to climb except that a failure results directly in a fall.

Cliffside stair - rock-cut, easy to descend or ascend if dry. If wet, moving faster than 10 ft./turn requires a DC 10 Dex save or the character slips and falls. They may choose to fall down the stairs (descend 10 ft landing prone, 2d8 Bludgeoning damage, anybody behind them must also save) or onto the shell beach. On a natural 1, flip a coin to decide which.
Small Stream - Difficult terrain. Moving faster than 15 ft./turn on a turn when your movement intersects with the stream requires a DC 10 Dex save or the PC trips and falls prone, whilst whatever they're holding goes in the water. Melee attacks by a character within the same square as the stream have Disadvantage due to the sloping and slippery footing.
Old Fence - 10 ft. movement to climb across; only 4 ft. high, so some might be able to jump it with minimal difficulty. DC 15 Str check allows a rotten post studded with nails to be pulled out of the ground (can be wielded as mace, breaks on a 1 to hit) or a hole to be knocked through to clear a path. Hung with dead moles (no mechanical effect, but you know somebody has animate dead and feels creative).

If you're using injury systems, I strongly recommend that any character reduced to below half or to 0 hp by terrain damage suffers an appropriate injury: a broken leg, lacerated and badly bleeding palm, concussion, etc. The damage most of it does is not high, and shouldn't be lest we lose characters left and right, so underline the threat it potentially presents by making it occasionally much more serious.

Note that all of this makes the tactical use of PC options (Fly spells, abilities that let you ignore difficult terrain) and of equipment (climber's kit) more interesting. The challenges presented by the terrain are a bit annoying, which means evading them feels exciting and cool and raises resource management questions (fly or fireball) where it might feel a lot duller if these simple tools were being used to easily cross a lava pit that was meant to be a significant obstacle. The terrain affects PC and NPC alike, so it gives both an opportunity to be clever in their approaches, luring the opposition into inconvenient positions whilst minimizing the risks they have to take. None of this is possible if the level of inconvenience the terrain presents is static.

Conclusion

Basically, more granularity to your terrain at every scale is going to make traversing it more interesting, even if sometimes it does that via making it momentarily more boring. This additional granularity can be grounded in real inconveniences and minor-until-they-aren't threats of outdoors exploration rather than heightened and fantastical dangers. Then, when you do bring in the Screaming Demon Vortex, it has a greater impact as something horrifyingly other.

See you later, folks.