Realms Beyond - Camping and Survival

The latest from Realms Beyond looks at camping and survival.

Travelling the World: Camping and Survival

 The world of Argea is vast and full of wonders. While exploring the world map, your group of companions will travel through lush forests, climb magnificent mountain ranges, trek through arid deserts and treacherous swamps, and even sail to long forgotten isles. Your adventures will carry you far and wide, either on the soles of your feet or on horse’s back.

But travel is not an easy task: your adventurers will get tired, hungry, thirsty, and fed up with the monotony of the road during a long journey. Your wizard will have to rest to restore his magical power, your cleric will have to meditate upon his faith; and most of all, after a long day of traveling your entire party wants to take off their sweaty clothes and heavy armor, sit down around the campfire, enjoy a hearty meal and end the day with a game of dice or cards while listening to their musically skilled companion play his lute. 

When you’re exhausted after days of travel but still far away from the nearest inn, when you’re lost in the freezing north and need to warm your cold limbs, when the heat of the desert makes you want to wait until nightfall to continue – you set up camp and allow your party to have some well-deserved rest. A campsite can be put up anywhere in the wilderness, but not every location offers the same comforts.

Click for high-res version

Aside from the elementary feature of resting to recover spells and heal wounds, in Realms Beyond your party members will be able to use the camping time to cook and eat, chat and play games to relax, go hunting and fishing, forage for berries, mushrooms and herbs, treat their wounds, craft potions or identify items, scribe scrolls, and even make music around the campfire. The chances of a successful hunt or finding ingredients in the wilderness depend on the environment, however – you won’t find many plants in the desert, and wildlife is more abundant in woodlands than on the plains.

Camping isn’t without its dangers, either. Hostile groups or natural predators might assault your camp while you sleep, and if you are ill-prepared for the weather, your characters might catch a cold or worse. But camping in the hostile wilderness is a necessary risk to take, because the longer you travel the more it tires out your characters and the more it consumes your adventuring supplies. Eventually, your party will become exhausted, your supplies will run out and you’ll risk starvation and dehydration. Camping lets you rest and take some time to gather food and water from your surroundings.

In order to make your camp a little safer and more comfortable, you can stock up on camping equipment in town before you set out into the wilderness. A kettle for cooking, blankets to keep you warm while you sleep, a boardgame and a musical instrument to serve as entertainment. Camping in Realms Beyond is a game of resource management: you have to weigh the dangers of resting in an unknown area (and risking an ambush, or worse) against the downsides of forcing your party to press on. It adds just one more issue to the list of things you will need to consider before leaving town and setting off to unknown territory.

The equipment and supplies you need to bring with you largely depend on the area you want to journey through. Proper footwear, warm cloaks and a couple of blankets are almost a necessity in the frozen wilderness of the north, and taking additional firewood along isn’t a bad idea, either. In the desert, you should take a few additional waterskins along, as water is scarce and the heat is parching. When and where to rest is always an important decision, too: in the desert, it might make more sense to rest during the day and travel during the night, when it is cooler. If your party is already tired but you know there’s a river a few miles ahead that would be perfect for fishing, it might make sense to press on to get a reliable opportunity to stock up your supplies.

Sometimes, however, you might also wish to rest while you’re exploring a dungeon. Your casters have spent all their magical energy and have no spell slots left, your fighters are wounded and you doubt you could make it through another fight. But resting in a hallway patrolled by monsters isn’t the best idea. Within dungeons, you can only rest at pre-determined resting spots placed in sensible locations by our level designers. These work in a similar way to Dark Sun: Shattered Lands and Knights of the Chalice. Some dungeons might not offer you a resting spot at all, forcing you to carefully manage your limited resources until you get through them. Others might offer you a resting spot close to the entrance, so you can rest before every encounter. This system of resting in dungeons allows us to craft varied and diverse dungeon experiences that all play differently.

[...]