Boil and Bubble: Quick and Dirty Travel Spells for DFRPG

Guest Post by Kalzazz

The Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game has some rather elaborate rules for overland travel, including uses for Survival, Navigation, Weather Sense, and many other skills, oh my. It does not however include particularly convenient rules for the use of spells during said travel, despite including spells such as Quick March, Create Food, and Create Water.

Quick March is a particular offender, as the spells only use is overland travel, but, to say cut a 30 day trip down to 15 for a 6 member party that it is 6 x 15 = 180 rolls for the round trip casting the spell! However, the rules for travel time modification by Weather Sense, Navigation, Hiking, etc. are clear, at most one roll per person for the discount.

Create Food: As per Survival, Naturalist, or Fishing, but affects the entire party. Stacks with those skills for foraging, so if a scout succeeds at Survival in a party with a cleric who succeeds at Create Food he doesn’t need to eat at all! Affects the entire party is a fair use for a spell that all it does is create food, as opposed to Naturalist which finds details on monsters, and Survival which covers the all important skinning dragons.

Create Water: As per Weather Sense.  The Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game rules do not imply that characters are actually needing to carry 40 days of water with them in most cases, so they must be spending time finding water, stopping where the water is and so forth, so successful use of Create Water will speed their travel. Bad use of course means they spend more recovering FP than they would have looking for water, they anger the Rain Gods, etc.!

Quick March: on a success decrease travel time by 20%, on a failure increase it by 10% and on a critical failure increase by 20%.  In all cases observe the FP penalty when you run into an encounter on the road as noted in the spell. The 20% discount is bigger than other skills give, but, the spells only purpose is speeding overland travel, and it imposes a FP penalty. It is not a full 50% discount because some time is spent recovering FP etc that is not not spent traveling or dealing with critical failed spells summoning a demon and the like.

These are 3 spells that seem like they should be relevant, but which could result in a terrifying number of dice rolls if convenient rules were not used, these rules fall in line with the existing travel rules and allow casters who learn these spells to contribute to the party without bogging down in the minutia of casting over and over.

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