Hex-maps and high-mobility magic

My home game got another boost of mobility over this most recent level up with Wind Walk and Teleport. This has lead to a chunky shift in gameplay which makes 'broad shallow' prep the name of the game from here out. I had talked about high-speed hex-crawling before; large distances were crossed with multiple things noted in passing but only a few key locations were interacted with - on par to a standard session - but even higher speeds enables new party approaches.

Previously we have been dealing with ~ 8 hours of flying time at ~ 30mph using the Spelljamming Saddle so 3 x 10mile hexes per hour - as fast as a galloping horse, sustained as long as the pilot can stay awake. Wind Walk gets that up to 60mph, doubling that. The red circle on the map was the previous 'one day' limit of their operations - the second arc is their new limit.

This past session the players were ~ 3 sessions deep into chasing down a particular quest goal - settling their immediate problems, getting their gear and themselves into position and staging to a plateau above their objective. And then they decided to spend the entire session flexing Wind Walk to scout for the location of an enemy stronghold associated with a different 'quest line' so to speak. Both are strands of a potential undead apocalypse, one divine, one arcane - divine had been solidly in focus until they decided to detour and scout the arcane thread.

I had prepped in detail for the divine thread before the session but did have enough of a sense of what the arcane thread was to be able to wing it; most importantly I had done some general region prep on who was likely to be seen during over flights which included foes tied to both strands and I was able to use those. Some previous thought on the timetable of the arcane foes also allowed me to pretty quickly extrapolate what must be found in their stronghold if they are at the point they were in the plan.

Mobility multipliers like teleport and wind walk are interesting to deal with because teleport is manageable - you have to know a place to safely go there so player interest is expressed and either it is a return to a known location or you, the DM, have a chance to ponder what the place is like while they figure out how to get a good enough read to risk teleporting there. High speed flyers are more of a challenge as discussed previously but still they are a somewhat manageable scale; the key is whether or not the location is known. Rapidly travelling to a known place with high level magic - sure - you lose the travel encounters but fine.

Pure speed multipliers like Wind Walk make high speed searching of an area for things known to be around somewhere *on a whim* into a new challenge; with magics like this in the back pocket there is no prep-time because the heroes can just decide, cast the spell and go.

I find it can be made somewhat manageable by splitting it out into 'fast transit' and 'exploring'. In fast transit you zip over locations without finding out much about them - you might spot some very obvious things or stuff that is coincidentally just under your flight path but you have not explored and have almost certainly missed things. Exploring from the air - even at high speeds is going to take some time; roaming about to get all the angles on things and watching for activity and movement.

The problem is that anything suspected to be present can be gone after in a single session where previously finding and getting there would give time ahead of the arrival to prep the location. Now stuff can get hunted down from rumour lists much faster and more effectively. The perception of opportunity cost of stopping to look at 'interesting distractions' has also changed - previously if exploring by land or slower air, the time cost of stopping to investigate something was not so great relative to how much else could be achieved in that time. An hour spent poking around a ruin at the cost of an hours wind walking is a significant amount of potential terrain that was not explored (6 extra hexes) which makes it less likely that incidental sites found will cause diversion.

For the session just past the party spent a day searching across a suspected set of hexes to try and narrow down the enemy bastion then regrouped, discussed plan of action and went back the next day again. This made a two day diversion from their main plan and they burned off a ton of magic to infiltrate and escape un-noticed which I felt was fair.

At this point most of the world is accessible to them - the key difference is their own perceived efficiency in 'just go reconnaissance it ourselves' compared to researching or otherwise hunting a place down on the ground. I think I am just going to have to start giving myself permission to call a ten minute break to dig through generators or roll up a location if they sprint for the horizon in future instances.

The utility of having a basic timetable and archetype encounters for factions has proven worth the effort; the thing I was missing was archetypal locations for any of the factions they might possibly go after which might make an evening digging through Dyson maps or something similar worthwhile. If you are faced with similar high mobility parties, a handful of generic locations in the back of your GM binder might be similiarly worthwhile.