Your party sets out to the Mire of Haunted Dreams. Eighteen days of thick Feywild jungle lie ahead of them. But as each day of travel passes, you and your players grow bored of hearing the same phrase repeated again and again: “We make food, find water, and take watch in shifts.” By day three, you're ready to skip over the remaining days of the trip.

Travel can often be the least interesting part of a journey. To your party, the destination might be more important than what happens along the way. But travel is an opportunity to explore storylines that are put on hold when the party is facing down a boss monster or exploring a dungeon with deadly encounters. It's also a great way to add depth to your setting, whether you're exploring a homebrew world of your own creation or trying to escape a Domain of Dread from Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. 

To make travel engaging in your Dungeons & Dragons campaign, approach it in the same way you'd plan a combat encounter: choose a style, represent the location, and give the players something to interact with. Here's what to do.

Easy steps to making travel engaging

1. Choose your style of travel
2. Bring the environment to life
3. Interact with your party

1. Choose your style of travel

The style of travel you choose will affect how you describe and run the journey. You might opt for a quick montage, providing succinct but flowery descriptions of the party's journey. Or you could up the ante of the journey by adding in environmental dangers that threaten to delay the party on their quest.

Consider these approaches to travel presented in the Dungeon Master's Guide to see which best suits your style and players:

Travel-montage approach

If the purpose of a wilderness trek is to get the characters to where the real adventure happens, gloss over the wilderness trek without checking for encounters along the way. Just as movies use travel montages to convey long and arduous journeys in a matter of seconds, you can use a few sentences of descriptive text to paint a picture of a wilderness trek in your players’ minds before moving on.

Source: Dungeon Master's Guide

This method of narrating travel is best used when the party's destination is more important than what happens along the way. Use the travel-montage approach when the party has an unavoidable and pressing concern, a looming threat, or a ticking clock they must prioritize. When a portal to the Abyss opens and thousands of demons pour out proclaiming war on the Material Plane, it's hard to ask your party to look at some cool flowers or talk to a traveling pickle salesman.

The travel montage uses occasional descriptions and draws attention to noteworthy features of the land. It generally skips over the bulk of the journey and instead paints a picture of the overall trek for your players. In such an approach, consider what details will stick with your players, such as the transition from one biome to another. Here are some concrete examples:

• A watchtower that has been melted by a dragon’s acid breath
• Steam vents that belch stinking fog onto an icy road
• A flower-laden wagon that is swarmed by humming birds

Hour-by-hour approach

If wilderness travel features prominently in your adventure and isn’t something you want to gloss over, you will need more than a descriptive overview to bring a long and harrowing journey to life; you’ll need to know the party’s marching order and have encounters at the ready.

...Wilderness journeys typically feature a combination of planned encounters (encounters that you prepare ahead of time) and random encounters (encounters determined by rolling on a table).

Source: Dungeon Master’s Guide

This method takes a slower and more resource-driven view of travel and is best used when the path ahead is a mystery, when there is no looming threat, or when the party is in a shockingly unfamiliar place, such as the Shadowfell, Feywild, or other plane of existence.

Though fifth-edition D&D isn’t well suited to survival gameplay, the hour-by-hour approach can be key in environments or locations teeming with hostile creatures and other dangers. This approach uses marching order, resource management, and random encounters to encourage the party to micromanage their spells, abilities, and equipment to ensure they have enough strength to be useful when they arrive at their destination.

With this travel approach, you'll have to consider exact and more mundane happenings on the road that encourage players to interact with their environment. For example:

• The party finds a fig tree drooping with ripe fruit
• An armored knight on horseback waves as she passes
• A swath of muddy road is covered in elk and wolf tracks
• It pours rain for the second day in a row, forcing the party to cross a swollen river or take a detour

You’ll never know when players will want to interject to gather resources, investigate the area, or rest. Having details such as those offered above will ensure you're ready whenever someone asks what they see or hear in the vicinity.

Cinematic approach

My preferred method of travel is the cinematic approach. It cuts away from the party to describe other scenes or reveal details of the world. Afterward, the attention snaps back onto the party after some time has passed to see what headway they have made on their journey or what obstacles have appeared on their path.

A great method for knowing when, where, or how you return the focus to the party is to ask the players if their characters will be using any of their various survival or foraging features on the journey (such as a ranger's Natural Explorer feature), or making special accommodations for themselves with equipment, downtime activities, etc.

Here's an example of the cinematic approach:

The party climbs atop their mounts and turns their noses west, toward the sinking moon and rolling hills of yellow grass in the last days before snow sweeps across the Fields of the Dead.

Half a world away, a mercenary opens his leather satchel and pulls free a spyglass, which he offers to his commander. Sitting atop a bull of interlocking metal plates, the warlord known as Koh removes his black iron helm. A cascade of golden hair drapes around his shoulders and atop his ivory-colored cape. He peers through the spyglass at the defenses of Proskur and smiles. “Ready the dragon,” he says.

Five days have passed and you all have kept a strong pace on your journey. The sun has dipped below the horizon and you've already made camp in the last bit of failing light among the bleach-white bones and rusted equipment that litter these fields. Sanshe, you know you're only two days from Baldur's Gate, these hills are like a second home to you. Have you been foraging or hunting at all? Make me a Wisdom (Survival) check to see what you’ve scrounged up.

2. Bring the environment to life

Now that you’ve picked a style of how to narrate travel, it’s time to decide what you even want to say, starting with the world around the party. While on a quest, your party has to juggle their character sheets, their party members, the story, and a host of other cumbersome details. On the road, though, you have time to tap the breaks and describe the world around the characters, as well as the dangers that might lurk there. There should never be a time when the party sets foot inside the Forest of Enormous Swarming Spiders without seeing a spider, for example.

As they travel, the party can interact with the things that make up the world around them knowing that such interactions will be temporary and not delay their present goal. They might see impressive vistas of mountain peaks stretching in all directions, be choked with swirling dust, be blistered by hot wind, or come across hyenas and vultures fighting over the scraps of long-dead giants, all without sacrificing their objective and forward momentum. Travel is an opportunity to show off the world they might not see day to day — including the changing seasons, inclement or enjoyable weather, and non-player characters (NPCs).

How other creatures act can reveal more about a location than just the environment. Does the party run into farmers who are armed with simple weapons and unwilling to have even a passing conversation with them? Are patrols commonplace on the road? The state and demeanor of these kinds of characters can set the tone better than any amount of boxed text — and it opens the door for more roleplay.

3. Interact with your party

The most impactful and important part of this three-tiered strategy is giving your party a lot of things to interact with on their journey. Travel is your chance to touch on each aspect of D&D that players enjoy! Once you know the style of travel that works best for your party, you can work elements such as these into your session:

Acting and storytelling come to the forefront when the party has time in the early morning, at night, or while traveling quiet stretches of road to safely speak with one another or friendly NPCs. You can spark conversations with questions as simple as, “Has your character ever seen such high mountains?” Giving the players an invitation to talk to one another can lead to character growth and party development (or drama).

Exploring is, at its basic level, travel by a different word. Tempt the characters with peculiar landmarks or strange creatures. Let them rest at abandoned campsites where they can discover what happened to the previous occupants. Let them happen upon carved statues with riddles or even buried treasure. Anything that might lead them to spend their night investigating rather than sleeping is worthwhile. But don't punish them with curses or deadly encounters when they do so, or you'll risk teaching them not to trust your world enough to risk exploring.

Instigating and fighting come about when the party gets to interact with other NPCs or creatures. Offer rewards like a shortcut to the party's destination when they makes friends with a passerby or follow an injured creature to its den.

Optimizing and problem solving go hand in hand more often than you'd expect. During travel, prompt the party to discuss their plans for whatever threat they might be traveling toward. Give them time to prepare and discuss things before they arrive, when they'd be more likely to take foolhardy action. During travel, they might have to circumvent obstacles or risk long delays in their journey. Such obstacles can be as mundane as a flooded river or as fantastical as a pair of wizards fighting one another in a duel that's lasted a century. Letting your party resolve problems can make travel rewarding for your players.

No one solution suits all

Just as with every other aspect of the game, you can't please everyone, and that's okay! Some players will prefer a hex grid with painstakingly detailed accounts of rations and foraging checks every adventuring day. Some players enjoy not talking about travel at all. Others will prefer a cinematic style with touchstones of interesting encounters.

But with a willing party and a bit of practice, travel can set the stage for every aspect of the game people enjoy. And by offering your players opportunities to do the things they love while on the road, they can come to enjoy the journey that comes with being an adventurer.

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JB Little (@DropTheDie) is a full time content creator, freelance writer/editor/layout artist, and producer of 28 bestselling D&D 5e publications on The DM's Guild. He's a Mississippi native currently living in Las Vegas spending his days working with as many peers and beloved companies as possible.