Traveling and Logistics

Traveling is an important part of the session. Logistics may be weighed out pound for pound as items like food, water and whatever sundries your unlikely adventuring party might need. In a West Marches environment however, there exists an option for players to have their travel covered by player infrastructure and modality.  

Logistics

The Nebula is a hazardous place and the mathematical grit of preparing to travel it can be a bit inaccessible and dry. To prepare for a trek into the unknown, players must select a starting point and then a destination for their journey, this encompasses the breadth of a session. The following codifies what a settlement is capable of supplying and some creative extensions of it's abilities.   1) A settlement's attitude cannot be hostile to the entire party.

2) A settlement can supply a trek to a point location up to three levels above the settlement's level without causing a crisis on the way.

3) By default, a settlement can enable travel up to three connections away in the Nebula POI Exploration Mode. Typically, it does not cost anything significant (for an adventurer) to acquire these services.

4) Settlements can have infrastructure that enable different modalities of travel. These can allow different types of movement that can loan out different advantages to traveling adventurers and are expressed at the settlement as a trait that offer variation in services with a fee.

Connection Security

Security is an important resource for adventurers. The ultimate resource of players and the player characters is time. Depending on the length of the session based on the contract, safe travels provide a quick and uninterrupted trek in harmony with the ludonarrative. Encounters, particularly combat encounters slow the limited time available for the players to achieve their goal- but also represent the dangers of traveling within the narrative causing adventurers more stress, the loss of more supplies and the escalation of fatigue. Ergo, creating a safe threatre for other players through successful Security missions can provide future explorations of the Nebula with a simple note of their travel across a connection instead of a chance encounter. When a party experiences an encounter on the connection and deals with it in a way that permanently pacifies the threat, rewards should include some progress across this connection's security.   Result of crossing a connection example.  

The Horselords are traveling on their steeds across the Arborea/Leshrenia connection in order to face off against the forces of the ruthless Warlord Kohlrabi of the Burning Steppes. Leading the pack, their goblin wolfrider Gingertoes is acting as scout and lead across the way. It is an unsecured astral connection and know the risks of crossing this threshold. The Game Master prompts them to make a survival check for negotiating the crossing.
Taking in account the mounted creatures providing a status bonus of +1, and a critically successful survival check of 30 giving the party a circumstance bonus of +1 the Game Master rolls a flat check for the encounter to see if they avoid notice on the way. Rolling a 4, the players miss the DC of 16 by 10 and are given one of the harder encounters for the table. The encounter takes about fourty-five minutes to resolve at the table, thankfully the rest of the two hour session has no more random encounters. Should the party have traveled over something safer, the Game Master would have concluded travel there with little more than "The connection is cut across by brisk gusts of air, as you delve into the verdant realms of Leshrenia your trek across it is unimpeded".