Fluxcrawls

I left my Switch at home so I've been borrowing my partner's to play her copy of Shadows Over Loathing, a silly quirky goofy point-and-click RPG in the lineage of the browser-based Kingdom of Loathing.

There's six-ish regions in the game, each having a dozen-some points of interest which you navigate with your character (as a "physical" location with one or more rooms, rather than an abstract point). You can travel from any point of interest to another in the same region, and it may just trigger an event such as an encounter or a detour into another site hitherto undiscovered (the more sites you discover, the less random events are possible, the "faster" you can travel between sites). That's all there is to it!

I had an epiphany while playing that such a structure could solve a "problem" I've had running my pirate campaign, that I feel obligated to locate adventure sites in the geography of their particular island, having the player party hex-crawl from their port of entry to their intended site. It felt boring and repetitive because hex crawls only really work if each hex is an interactive container with something to do, since otherwise it's just an empty box in which an encounter might occur. Point crawls at least boil down a map to specific points of interests, but if you're traveling along a path of multiple points then it still (I think) devolves into an over-proceduralist nothing sequence.

The map structure of the Loathing games compel me. They're something like Nick LS Whelan's flux space (especially his second rendition where flux is the container which situates points rather than a path which connects them), except that new discoveries are integrated with random encounters. So this isn't a revision of flux space as much as an elevation of it into a higher-level procedure for travel in general. I imagine having someone roll a D20 for a random event, whether an encounter or a discovery, and crossing off discoveries after rolling them once. Maybe it costs 1 ration or supply.

Treating regions as flux containers also makes it really easy to plop new sites down as you need. I use a downtime system where one of the options is to 'research' rumors, i.e., invent a rumor wholesale and put it on a random island on the map. With flux islands, it's really as easy as that, no worries about geography etc. I'm not sure if I'd treat travel between islands the same way, because I liked the idea of a slightly more involved 'loading screen', but having one event on sea and one on land sounds like it gets the point across without cruft overload.