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So, I probably should explain the title, right?). See, as someone who's become a little obsessed with dungeon crawling as of late, I tend to portray any "on-foot" exploration of a significant landmark as pretty time-consuming activity — we're talking dozens of hours, potentially days, spent in cramped dark hallways. When I tend to run this stuff, my mind always goes to that moment in the Mines of Moria, when Gandalf, in response to concerned Frodo, says: "It's Gollum. He's been following us for three days". As a kid, THAT was the moment when I realised that actual days had gone by, with fellowship going to sleep and waking up in complete darkness, with nothing but their torches illuminating the way forward.

Now, when I'm actively preparing to run some Forbidden Lands, I started to think: how do I implement this stuff in FB? We're not talking massive hex-exploration of the underground, but specifically Adventure Site exploration. With each turn taking 15 minutes, a typical adventure site — let's take "Weatherstone" as an example — can be fully explored in under 3 hours. So, there's no way a situation would arise where players would need to roll for their Food and Water supplies — there's simply no way to stretch an exploration of an adventure site to such a degree. But I'd really like to, because that's kind of huge element of fantasy of dungeon crawling, at least for me.

And so I come here, looking for any tricks or ways to "slow down" exploration phase of the game. I know that some rooms might take multiple turns to explore (even though the only example that I can find are "Caves" in "Stoneloom Mines" of Raven's Purge) and that some obstacles might add additional turn or two for PCs to overcome them, but I'd like to hear if there's any general approach that is more... versatile. Something that can be used on more than a few rooms in a dungeon.

A way I did it in a non-Forbidden Lands campaign once, was simply to have a different maps for all the important locations undergrounds, and then they needed to track for some time in between these, making survival rolls and using food and such. Then when they arrive, you go into some kind of 15-minutes per room adventure-site time, it was an adventure they really enjoyed with the main city underground and so on. After around seven gaming sessions in that complex, they were actually sad to leave.. I didn't plan on them being there forever, but in the end they were having so much fun so, that would have been a better thing to do in hindsight.
So the way to do it is simply lot of underground adventure sites (well, I had one that led up to an "evil" fortress on the mountain, but they more of less had to go down again from there as the inhabitants flied to get there), they can probably be half the size of existing adventure sites and like them down below. Often having to backtrack between one another or becoming lost and ending up somewhere else. I had a dark elf settlement in the dark down below that added a threat but that they really were not supposed to enter, I don't even think they encountered them other than one or two non-hostile encounters, but it added tension, when they got lost and so on.

If you want to write you own stuff, but keep to the lore, the Winding Ways (mentioned in the Bitter Reach) would be perfect for something like the above.

But other dwarven settlements would work fine. Like Jonas's homebrew variant of Wailer's Hold could probably be modified to fit, if one wanted.

For other locations you would need to rewrite existing maps and add off-shot paths, I guess, if they pick these off-shot paths they loose time, need to retrack and you could add that they loose a couple of hours and implement your own random encounter table, for some random cave encounters?

Maybe someone should move this to the GM forum, so as a player read at your own discretion (I couldn't find the format for spoilers here?):

The dungeon beneath Stonegarden is pretty extensive if you wish it so. Even my players spent a couple of days down there, and I'm not big on crawling through one and the same dungeon for too long . Climbing down the first flight of stairs took three hours (in-game only, thankfully)! The key for me personally is, that it must make sense for a dungeon to be this big. And the Stoneloom Mines definitely don't fall in that category. Additionally, that place kinda lives off its deadly inhabitants and a claustrophobic horror atmosphere. Camping is so much out of the question down there that it also doesn't make much sense to me to stretch that out to more than a day, or it will just lose its creepiness. Maybe FL is not the place for megadungeons... but if you like to design your own, I think Stonegarden is a good place for inspiration. It doesn't have too many rooms, but these rooms are all large with lots of stuff to do and NPCs and environments to interact with. Players like to stay longer, if there is something to do. Otherwise it's just... time.

Depending on the party's abilities one of the great time sinks is the need to spend a quarter day resting to recover. A few badly pushed rolls, a combat that goes poorly etc. and the time can get eaten up.

In general I agree that adventure sites in Forbidden Lands are a matter of hours not day with some very few exceptions. You would need mega dungeons. One of which I think is actually the Spire of Quetzel. It takes a little work, but the maze sections and the ghost city are huge areas that could use some expansion.

But unless you want to really expand places like that there isn't a ton of room for it. Players need to be able to get lost in vast labyrinths for it to take days to explore a single location.

Mega dungeons or huge branches seem like possible solutions) Though, I'd like to ask for some thoughts on the possible issue that kinda "comes with the territory" — what about the rolls for Torches? Cause, while making players roll for Water and Food is a non-issue due to their "Once-per-day" nature, Torches are "consumed" on 15 minute basis, which would mean... a lot of rolls.

One method for generating big yet manageable caves/dungeons comes from "Veins of the Earth" — a rather evocative supplement that is dedicated solely to underground exploration (rather amazing read, by the way). The book offers a really nice system for building cave systems (it even simulates 3D environments, with rooms having exits in ceilings and floors), with the typical end result attached with this message.

https://imgur.com/a/8h5WpcA

As you can see, it strongly resembles a typical Point Crawl, but with each "route" that connects one room to another being assigned a number of turns that it takes to cross, as well using differently styled lines to portray route's accessibility (Straight line for Wide Shafts, Dashed for Tight Crawls and etc.). From the looks of it, a lot of time is assumed to pass while going down those "Routes", as they can be pretty damn long. But because the book itself is a supplement to another system — Lamentations of Flame Princess to be precise — it tracks resources such as Light in, well, units. So, 1 hour (6 turns, each 10 minutes long) is 1 Light consumed. Basically like any other system out there. Forbidden Lands, obviously, utilises Resource Die for Torches, which makes things... complicated.

As an example, I've just rolled some dice and got a Route that would take a party 9 turns to cross. In one system, it's 1 tick off the number of accessible Light. In the other, it's 9 Dice Rolls. Obviously there's no point in actually making players roll for that, but what's the fun and easy alternative that fits the FB design style and doesn't conflict with the system that much? That's, I guess, what I'm asking.

DM can potentially make players roll only once per hour, instead of per turn, but that introduces the idea of different time scales onto Resource Die system, which is already rather abstract — it feels almost as saying "You roll for Resources when I, the DM, feel like it — can be once per hour, can be once per day".

So... I devised a system that was bought up on here talking about the Spire of Quetzel.

When I originally made the system it was a thought experiment on how to create a maze for an RPG and have it be fun. It kind of fits for this when talking about particularly large places.

The system can be found here. https://forum.frialigan.se/viewtopic.ph ... hilit=maze

In terms of time, and incorporating another thread of light, each roll traveling the inbetween paces can be a turn or half a turn, or whatever. Up to how big you want to make the place and how difficult traversing it you want it to be.

So... I devised a system that was bought up on here talking about the Spire of Quetzel.

When I originally made the system it was a thought experiment on how to create a maze for an RPG and have it be fun. It kind of fits for this when talking about particularly large places.

The system can be found here. https://forum.frialigan.se/viewtopic.ph ... hilit=maze

In terms of time, and incorporating another thread of light, each roll traveling the inbetween paces can be a turn or half a turn, or whatever. Up to how big you want to make the place and how difficult traversing it you want it to be.

I find that things always break down once you start to equate real world time into RPG time units. A 3 hour long D&D combat really only last 30 seconds? I've found that once you get over that mindset many things flow better. A quarter day isn't 6 hours exactly. It's enough time to do a thing that takes a quarter day to do. A turn isn't 15 minutes. It's enough time to do a thing that takes a turn to do (and requires a Torch roll). You can, 100% work out that there are twenty-four 15 minute turns in a quarter day so spending a full day exploring a dungeon (2 quarter days) is X turns and thus Y Torch rolls.

Or you can just say "you spend some time, why not give me a Torch roll" or "you've been down here for quite some time and are tired/hungry/thirsty". FL really breaks when you try to get to granular and similuationist about it.

As long as torches are still abundant, I just bundle the rolls. We do some nice delving, maybe fighting, maybe falling into traps or discussing that it would have been a good idea to start marking the way ten tunnels ago... and then I say, ok, you've been here about an hour, please roll for torches four times. That way the maintenance doesn't get too much in the way of playing.