I grabbed this off a kickstarter vaguely understanding it was the ripped out and expanded 5e version of well regarded journey rules from Cubicle 7's Middle Earth game. That coupled with 'support your European game houses' got me to lay my money down.
Cover art by Antonio de Luca
First impression - unexpectedly chonky! Great art, nice interiors, good printer smell. Lots and lots of stuff in here. After reading through it I realise this is a giant nouveau cuisine hexcrawl - all the good stuff you need to populate hexmaps in a wide variety of terrains are just shifted into lists instead of a map key. Even if you never use the journey rules, 5/6ths of the content in here is great inspiration for populating your worlds.
So what is all this stuff you get in the book?
Chapter 1 - Roles - 6 pages on party roles for a journey
Chapter 2 - Journey Rules - 25 pages of new mechanics
Chapter 3 - People Along the Way - 6 pages of encounter set up
Chapter 4 - Ancient Ruins - 20 pages of ruin generators
Chapter 5 - Encounters - 238 pages, the meat of the book
So what is in here chunk by chunk?
Roles gives us four new journey-related roles - the Leader, the Outrider, the Quartermaster and the Sentry - and walks through how each class can play them. There are a couple of checks associated with each of the new roles that grant bonus dice or allow other means to ease the journey. The role also comes with a set of options to contribute to Group Travel Checks which are the backbone of the travel mechanics. The goal of all this is to create a better sense of working together to make the journey and give all classes something to do above 'follow the ranger/druid' currently typical of being out in the wilderness.
Journey Rules are broken into three stages - setting the route, preparing and making the journey - with the overall objective being to tax a parties full range of skills and abilities. These are for multi-day journeys in principle but are noted as being adaptable for things like crossing an enormous city. Once a destination is set and the distance reckoned by the DM, we determine the Journey Difficulty which feeds through to all the Group Checks - this is driven by terrain and weather which I like in a high concept sense - you might risk bad conditions over decent terrain, or hazard dangerous lands in good weather but both at once is asking for trouble. You can max out your difficulty at DC 30 by attempting to traverse an active volcanic zone during hail storms.
There are Preparation rules to help reduce the Journey DC through actions before setting out - with an option to simplify this out if not interesting to your table. Rest during a (capital J) Journey is restricted to a single short rest, taken at a time of your choosing. No long rests during this hazardous enterprise. To quote "to mitigate the risk of fatal trips, low level groups may want to avoid lengthy journeys altogether". Here is the teeth to make the wilderness meaningful again.
Once you set off, making the Journey, we get a Group Travel Check against the terrain plus weather minus preparation DC and then get a number of encounters driven by journey length and whether or not that check succeeded.
People Along the Way is the key to using the Encounters section with guidance on how to bring the terrain specific encounter tables into play. As a whole this section is good general encounter creation advice with twelve sample encounters rounding it out.
Ancient Ruins covers five steps - who built it, age, original function, current state, current function. I do love my ruin generators and this is a good one with thumbnail descriptions of potential builder races and thoughts on their architecture then a nice workflow for generating the site and aging it up to today. This is very good stuff indeed.
Encounters opens with more guidance on how to use the following tables by type - chance meetings, boon, hazards, monsters, wonders - and then follows with sixteen terrain specific table sets ranging from Farmland to Hellscapes, Open Waters to Underground. For each of the terrains we open with five list - weather, flora and fauna, local inhabitants, points of interest and possible journeys - of elements to help paint the scene for encounters. Then we get the actual tables - Chance Meetings, Hidden Reserves, Bumps in the Road, Needing Assistance, Danger Afoot, Natural Wonders, Monster Hunt, Places to Rest, Old Memories, Dark Places, Deadly Fights and Fateful Encounters - all 1d10 with ~ 4 line descriptions for the entry. The table titles reflect the kind of encounter rolled back in the Journey Check - some are typical dangers on the road, some open to the players taking risks and others plain boons.
Of all the stuff that has come through the door recently this was the one that he in-house testing team picked up and went 'oh, interesting' - a high threshold indeed, indicating broader appeal than my book-goblin induced hoarding instincts.
Going through it I was struck that while this says '5e' on the front, the references to mechanics throughout are just to relevant skills - there are no monster stats just names so with minor effort this could be adapted for your preferred D&D edition or even bolted onto another game system entirely with relatively little effort.
All told there is a neat little mechanics package on the front of a gigantic block of locations and encounter seeds - easily comparable to old school hex-crawl content out there. For each terrain we get 120 locations - 12 x d10 tables - and with 16 terrains that makes a beefy 1920 different locations. Even if you never used the mechanics, all those location content is well worth having.
You can find other reviews by Jared Rascher on Gnome Stew, Libertad on ENWorld or Sparky McDibben on Giant in the Playground forums
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