Publisher's blurb:
Your adventuring group may be one that likes to skip from town to town without any concerns of how the group got there; a "fast travel" system. That's great! But if you want the dangers and difficulties of journeying through the wilderness to mean something in your game, consider picking up The Explorer's Guide to the Wilderness.
The Guide lays out simple rules for DMs who want to give their players more options when traveling between locations, including navigating the wilderness, player actions during travel, and how to calculate random encounters. The core to its system is in how environments are described; like monsters, environments have full stat blocks, including "ability scores" such as Navigation and Resources. Characters traveling through an environment must deal with the challenges presented by that environment, and make checks against the DCs listed in the stat blocks to succeed at certain tasks. The Guide includes sample stat blocks for common environments such as forests and hills, but DMs are encouraged to alter them as needed or create entirely new ones for the environments within the world. Finally, the last section offers alternate features and abilities for player options such as the Ranger class or Outlander background, which would otherwise trivialize the rules found here (and if they do that; why even run travel this way?).
These rules are designed not to be complex or highly in-depth; they are simple and serve only to help DMs run travel in a more interesting and engaging way.