Your characters start in one place. You would like them to be in another place, and the magic system doesn’t include teleportation. That means it’s time to depict some travel, which can range from the best moments of a story to the equivalent of needing to eat your veggies before dessert. Which end your story falls on depends on both understanding how travel works and properly setting expectations. Also, having more than one horse per person. That’s very important.

Generously transcribed by Michael Frank. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.

Chris:  Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris …

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: So Oren, I want my protagonist to go on a dangerous journey to the center of this dark, enchanted wood. But then I realized I also want a friend from their hometown to just to be there when the protagonist arrives. And to be clear, this is somebody that the protagonist left behind at their hometown.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: So they needed to get there ahead. And I was just thinking, well, I suppose the town could just invent a transporter while they are traveling. You know? Problem solved.

Oren: Is that you the later seasons of Game of Thrones?

Chris: [Laughter]

Oren: Which is funny because I never watched later seasons of Game of Thrones. That’s just a thing people say about it. To me, reading the books, it was the opposite. Suddenly in the books it takes forever to get anywhere.

Chris: Yeah, that’s sort of hard. The catch-22 of travel where you want something to take a long time, but you also want it to be super fast whenever it’s plot convenient.

Oren: Right. We made the mistake of being into fantasy, and usually in fantasy stories you don’t have super fast transit. You know? Usually a hallmark of fantasy is that you’re limited in how quickly you can move around. Which, you know, is cool and flavorful until you need to be somewhere. Then it’s a pain.

Chris: I do suspect that in space it’s easier to make everything just move at the speed of plot. ‘Cause you know, space is big and amorphous and it’s not that you couldn’t establish, like, Earth to Alpha Centauri-whatever takes this such and such time, and then later have it be a different time. But …

Oren: I mean, that is something that has been increasingly noticeable to me in every iteration of Star Wars and Star Trek, which is that travel times seem to shrink. And I don’t know for sure. It’s not like I’ve measured them. But I’ve just noticed that, especially in the newer versions of Star Wars and Star Trek, it kind of feels like when they want to go somewhere they’re just immediately there.

And maybe it was just more about the pacing of the actual scenes than real travel time, but it certainly felt like it took a little longer to get places in older iterations of both franchises.

Chris: I mean, I can believe that because usually the pace of stories is also continuously kind of sped up as times pass. But in this case, it’s partly about the believability of how fast. Does it feel real? Does it really feel like they’re traveling if they go there instantly? But like, once the audience gets used to, “okay, we could get there, but it felt like a day passed.” And that becomes realistic, you can kind of keep pushing the boundary if you want characters just to show up instantly.

Not that there isn’t reason to want some delays in travel. We can talk about fantasy. That’s one thing that’s interesting is just by being in different settings fantasy tends to have a very different relationship to travel than science fiction often does.

Oren: Although, I mean with certain magic systems, if you want, you can just start introducing teleportation magic and say, “I don’t wanna deal with that anymore.” It’s not my favorite.

Chris: Yeah. You better put some restrictions on the teleportation magic.

Oren: Yeah, it’s a huge ability. It has a lot of ways that it can potentially interfere with the plot. It’s not something I typically like to introduce.

Chris: Yeah I mean, I think if you wanna use teleportation magic, again, it’s a lot easier if you make it more an analogous to modern day travel or you travel to a portal zone and then you can go from one portal to the other as opposed to spot to spot teleportation.

Oren: Yeah, just being able to teleport wherever you want is gonna ’cause you some problems.

Chris: I mean, it helps if you have to have been there before or if you need an accurate picture of it. I mean, in modern day an accurate picture would be nothing. In some fantasy settings an accurate picture would still something, but I think even those will wear down.

Oren: Oh man! This is a great new plot idea. So you need an accurate picture of something, right? And in modern day, that’s not a problem, except because the internet is now flooded with slop. You look up a picture; is that really what it looks like? Is this a real picture? Who knows?

Chris: [Laughing] I just love the idea of like—so what happens to you if you tried to teleport into something that’s been like slop-ified. So it has something weird in the picture. Like a crab turning into a cabbage, you know?

Oren: Not good things happen to you. Let me tell you.

Chris: Do you go to the alternate slop dimension? Ah man.

Oren: you come out really convinced that you can replace forty percent of your workforce with an LLM.

Chris: [Burst of laughter] Oh no. Let’s get back to the speculative fiction. Let’s escape again, please.

Oren: Yeah. The optimistic fantasy world.

Chris: [Chuckling] Let’s go back to the optimistic fantasy world.

Oren: [Laughter]

Chris: So yeah, science fiction, it’s not that there’s no considerations. I do think that the trope of aliens leaving behind warp gates is particularly interesting.

Oren: Yeah, sci-fi authors love alien warp gates because they both give an explanation for where this technology came from and why the rest of your setting doesn’t seem that advanced. And they help create a reason why people don’t just blow them up if there’s a problem because you can say that they’re made of, like, special alien stuff or like, we can’t rebuild them or they’re invincible. Because that’s a problem with if you have some kind of warp gate system, it makes any kind of interstellar fighting very hard.

And you see this in Babylon 5, where in Babylon 5, after a while they just kind of gave up and every ship could open its own warp gates now. So the actual warp gate next to the station really didn’t seem like it mattered that much. Whereas in like, The Expanse or in Mass Effect their teleportation gates are made outta weird alien stuff. And so they either are afraid to mess with it or it’s too difficult to destroy, so you just have to accept that ships are gonna be coming through that.

Chris: I did notice in Star Flight Academy how they did have to come up with a reason why Discovery—the Discovery ship couldn’t just use its special drive to come to their rescue.

Oren: Yeah. They had to give a reason for that. It’s funny. The spore drive would’ve caused less of a problem if it hadn’t been a prequel, but it’s still kind of a problem. It’s like, your ship can teleport anywhere? Like, alright.

Chris: Again, it’s that point to point teleportation. Because at some point in time just having every single ship, every single force on the enemy or on the good guys be able to go anywhere instantly—that’s just a very different kind of conflict with very different logistics.

Oren: Yeah. I’m not gonna say you can’t do it. I am gonna say that most writers don’t know how to write that. I certainly don’t. 

Chris: I mean, for the purpose of storytelling, we usually need stories where our protagonists are isolated. ‘Cause usually, you know, we have our little scrappy hero who is supposed to be the person who saves the day. And we have to come up with reasons why more powerful people can’t help them. And being physically isolated is a pretty important component of that. So if people are doing teleporting anywhere that certainly makes that harder. Which is why Starfleet Academy of course decided, oh! You know, Discovery’s just busy right now. Can’t come.

Oren: Yeah, they had a techno battle thing about it. Don’t worry. It’s fine.

Chris: The other thing that’s interesting is the fact that technically the speed of travel should usually affect the speed of communication.

Oren: Yeah. That’s another thing that is hard to wrap your head around as a modern person. The idea that messages in a lot of fantasy settings can’t go that much faster than a person can travel. There are some options. Fantasy settings can have limited communication over distances. You can set up smoke relays. If you’re a little more advanced, you can do something like the clacks towers from Discworld, which are based on a real thing. The Discworld versions are a lot more capable than the real version, but you know, they exist. And the more advanced you get the more options. But generally speaking, there isn’t a lot of information that’s going faster than a human can travel. And that’s also the same in some sci-fi settings actually. In some sci-fi settings there’s no intergalactic wireless. Messages move at how quickly a messenger ship can get there.

Chris: Although I do think in a lot of Star Trek episodes don’t they have some very long distance video calls?

Oren: Oh yeah, yeah. No, Star Trek doesn’t work like that. In Star Trek you can Zoom with anybody at any. And they have an explanation for that. They call it “subspace buoys,” which is how they explain how you can call Earth to anywhere in the Federation. But Voyager can’t call Earth ’cause there aren’t any buoys in the way.

Chris: But Voyager does eventually. Is it when they reach the buoys?

Oren: No, they access an ancient alien communication network. So sort of, but not Starfleet’s. I think it’s the Hirogen who used to be real big on building interstellar communication networks, and then they decided to be “diet Klingons” instead. Interesting cultural evolution.

Chris: I guess the useful thing of having all of your protagonists doing a long journey—traveling from one place to another—is if you have like one spot where people have the ability to communicate across the galaxy, then they’re only gonna be there for a temporary time, and then you can just take it away again.

Oren: I mean like, if you’re having it based on infrastructure you have a lot of flexibility. Because if you want your characters to be able to get messages and not have to go across the universe to get them, you can say, oh well, we stopped at a planet that had a big subspace antenna and so we were able to get some mail. But now we’re going out into the less developed area, so we’re not gonna be getting those.

Chris: But I will say that if you do want—kind of regardless of what you do, this is one of those things where if you’re doing it consistently it’s probably gonna constrain you at some point. There is no perfect solution that means that everything is plot convenient for you when you’re plotting as possible, but still is gonna seem perfectly consistent to the reader.

Oren: And you have to decide how much do you wanna lean into this? Because if you look at, for example, just a relatively recent example in real history in the run up to the American Revolution a lot of what happened had to do with the speed of travel. There were several attempts to cool down tension between the colony leaders and Parliament in the UK, but these messages take weeks to get across the Atlantic. And very often something happens while you’re waiting for a message.

Like the British general is waiting for a message from Parliament and the message says, “Don’t do any fighting stuff.” But before he gets that message he sees the colonials are up to something shady and he decides, “Well, I don’t have a message saying I’m not supposed to fight them yet, so I’m gonna go fight ’em.” And you have that kind of dynamic, and that can be fun, right? It helps. It makes your world more immersive. It helps you feel like you’re not just modern people wearing costumes.

But it also gets confusing and difficult. The further you get into a long story the harder it is to keep that up, because the more times you’re gonna risk your character, like missing the crucial information they need to be at a certain place for the story to work properly.

Chris: Yeah. And today everybody’s so used to having their cell phones that the default mindset is like, oh, this is really inconvenient. That character’s over there, but I just want them to know the things.

Oren: Right. Oh man, in role-playing games that’s especially bad because all the players are sitting around the table and they can just talk to each other.

Chris: Yeah, at this point I swear when I’m role playing, it’s like whatever. The team just has a hive mind.

Oren: Yeah! The party hive mind. Recently, we did a little mini Delta Green game and it was set in the ‘60s and I gave you guys walkie talkies. The idea was supposed to be that these were not as effective as regular cell phones. They were supposed to have limited range, and they were supposed to be kind of dangerous to use because they operate on a frequency that other people can listen in on. But after a while it just became clear that that was not what you guys were thinking of them as, and I hadn’t really made that clear in the game. So I just let them function effectively as cell phones, because that was clearly the direction we were going and I didn’t feel like fighting that.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, unless you really are in the mindset to leverage those communication gaps for drama, it just becomes too cumbersome to like, okay, you know? The other players just watched us play this out, but now I gotta repeat it over the walkie-talkie in character. But again, if you want actual travel adventures, which is what fantasy tends to lean into, because by nature it kind of is usually in a setting where traveling is a lot more cumbersome. And we were talking about Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, which is a travel story where clearly Percy is supposed to be having travel adventures, but it’s awkward because it’s in modern day. So we have to start with an excuse for why he can’t fly.

Oren: ‘Cause Zeus is mad at him.

Chris: Zeus is mad at him, so he better not get in a plane.

Oren: Fortunately, he can’t take a high speed train because this is the United States, so he can’t do that. And for reasons only he and two other twelve-year-olds are allowed to go on the trip, so they can’t drive either. So you know, that worked itself out. [Sarcasticly] Don’t pay too much attention to the explanation for why only him and two twelve-year-olds can go. Just don’t worry about it.

Chris: But yeah, the same thing goes for, again, that balance between do you wanna have a venture while traveling or do you want people to get somewhere instantly? In a lot of fantasy settings one of the tricky things is anytime there’s water people will travel by water. But boats are just kind of—oh! Oh no! I was about to say boats are boring and Oren is— [Laughter]

Oren: [Indignant] How dare—I do beg your pardon, madam!

Chris: Look, there’s just less things for characters to do when they’re on a boat than there is when they’re land traveling.

Oren: Look, they got so many different kinds of knots that need to be tied and there’s a lot of cleaning. You gotta clean boats all the time.

Chris: [Noncommittal] Yes. Uh, it’s very exciting.

Oren: [Chuckling] That is actually an example of the difference between what I was in my notes referring to as active travel versus sedentary travel. Whereas in active travel, you’re either walking or riding a horse maybe. Like, the idea is that it requires constant effort on your part as opposed to sedentary travel where you are just sitting down waiting. If you’re a passenger on a boat or if you’re on a train or in a car that’s mostly sedentary travel.

It’s easier to skip over all that. People don’t expect you to cover it as much because it’s just sort of assumed, yeah, the boat will get where it’s going eventually. Whereas if you’re traveling on foot, it’s like that’s a little bit more of an effort. Readers may expect a little more from you there. 

Chris: Yeah. Let’s talk about that, because that is an issue with fantasy. Do you have to show the traveling? Just because there are many stories where that’s not really what the writer has in mind as far as what they want to depict. Now I’ve discovered that I apparently like depicting traveling, and so I basically designed the plots for my stories to have tons of travel adventures, and that’s part of the fun for me.

But if you’re like, doing a political intrigue and your character just has to move from city A to city B, but you feel like you have a setting where that journey is really perilous for some reason, then it becomes a lot harder to deal with. Because traveling also doesn’t feel like it should be part of the story, but you also don’t feel like you can skip it.

And the reason is basically if there is an expectation by the reader that it is gonna entail a lot of hardship or danger. That it is risky in some way. Then that means it’s basically an arc that kind of starts a plot arc right there.

Oren: And it can be a little frustrating. Because if you’re like, okay, this story is about the dangerous politics of “Elftown,” but between you and Elftown is the cursed forest. And I’m like, okay, I guess it should be hard to get through the cursed forest. But I really wanted the politics of Elftown. Like, this cursed forest is taking a while.

Chris: Yeah. So that’s tricky. Again, one thing you can do if you can: make the travel feel more routine and easier than—basically it’s more natural to skip ahead. And it’s not all about like, if you’re walking or sedentary. If this is like a really well traveled road that is maintained by some empire, there’s not a lot of bandits because the security is good, and there’s tons of people on it that feels a lot more like modern roads. That feels very routine, matter-of-fact. And then instead of making a big deal in your narration, I mean you do want to mention how long it’ll take, but instead of making a big deal out of the fact like, oh, I gotta travel across X, Y, Z, you just focus on the destination presented as not a big deal.

Oren: Yeah. I’m trying to remember what the order of operations was when I was editing the travel sequence in my novel. ‘Cause I remember, I think what happened was that readers were feeling a little bored by it until a more exciting thing happened partway through. But I didn’t feel like I could just skip over it, because as part of the tension I had in fact set up that this was gonna be kind of a dangerous trip.

So I think in that instance, the solution ended up being to more properly set expectations that this was gonna be risky, and then have the risk kind of discharge itself in a major conflict scene. And then afterwards set the expectation that now I’m gonna summarize ’cause now we’re assumed to be safe, so don’t worry about it.

Chris: So I think there were multiple things going on in The Abbess Rebellion. One of them actually was the fact that you just had a lot of information to convey, given the fact that it’s got political intrigue. And so you have, I know, some early character conversations that were there that were really important for setting up the story that were just happening while they were traveling. And so one of the reasons we couldn’t make that tighter is because that was actually information that the audience needed to know. You also did set up an arc, but it didn’t come to a head right away, of that maybe there would be danger on the road. And then later the summary—again, I think a lot of this was just the setup work that also happened to happen at the same time as the travel when there was quite a bit of summary that was covering here’s what the land looked like, the different provinces looked like along the journey as they got closer to the capitol. And again, that was kind of a way to tell readers here’s what the state of the empire is. Because that matters to the story. And so there was a lot of setup being done, and I think that was part of that. In that situation, it wasn’t just the management of tension that was the issue there.

But I do think if it’s just tension in a lot of cases, kind of something similar to what you did where you do have an initial arc, but then you resolve it and then you skip ahead is a good technique. So basically I’d try to identify, okay, what is the central issue that you’re gonna have with traveling? 

Is it just an issue of like, oh, well my character has been very sheltered and pampered and so they’re not used to like the hard life on the road and we need to show them adjusting. Is it like, okay, they’re gonna be locked on a boat with somebody they don’t like and there’s an interpersonal issue that could be there? What is it? Or is there some initial dangerous step in the journey that can end after they get to a more crowded road, for instance. And then have a little arc over that that then shows readers, okay, this is what traveling is like, and here we’ve gotten over—me and this person who I don’t get along with have learned to coexist in some manner. Or, here I’m sore, but now I’ve adjusted to riding on a horse. Or whatever it is.

Try to make it an interesting tense arc that’s fun. And then get done with it. And then just, alright well, the rest of the journey is gonna be routine now. Then jump forward to the destination. And then fill in, oh, this is the state of my character. They’re so tired, they’re so stinky. They’re so dirty, they’re so worn out. Whatever it is. And then you can kind of backfill: oh, the journey was routine or there were a lot of long days or whatever it was.

So that’s kind of like a middle ground that, alright, we recognize that there is some inadvertent tension created over the traveling and so we’re gonna keep up to that, but try to keep it as short as we can.

Oren: And I realized as I was talking that this is a situation that I’ve seen a number of authors struggle with. Which is your leader is in the capitol or whatever, and you want to have them go check out something that’s happening out in the provinces and go look for and see for themselves. And in a modern story this would be easy. Your character would hop in a helicopter or in a car, and it wouldn’t take too long. But if you’re in a fantasy setting that is a long time to be gone from your capital, especially if plotting is afoot. So this is the thing that I’ve definitely noticed. It feels like everyone just takes a pause, like, “Nah, we’re not gonna do any plotting while the main character’s gone. Don’t worry about it.” Which is incidentally, in real life why the court often traveled with the king. ‘Cause the king needs to go see things outside the capitol, but he can’t afford to have all of his nobles like, scheming while he is not there. So he brings them with him.

Chris: Wow. Does that mean that they were often coerced?

Oren: I mean not necessarily like, “Come with me or I’ll kill you.” But like, “Everyone else is doing it.”

Chris: “You will feel my displeasure if you don’t come with me.”

Oren: Right. Like, “I’ll be upset.” And also everyone else is doing it. So if you don’t do it, then you’re not gonna get the influence ’cause you won’t be where the king is.

And you know, various kings have done this to various degrees. King—I think he’s Louis XIV. Whichever one the Sun King is of France. He was famous for getting all of his most powerful nobles really isolated in his relatively tiny castle and palace area, and just having them be constantly in very close proximity to him with very little contact with the outside world. 

Sometimes they would do stuff like that, but at its most basic the traveling court is basically a way for the king to be able to keep tabs on all his powerful people. And in return, the powerful people have access to the king which is something they want. So it works out for everybody.

Chris: I think another good question when we do want travel adventures is how dangerous should travel realistically be? Because there can definitely be something where it’s like, oh! It’s super dangerous. It’s like, okay, but how do people trade? Because people should be trading and it can’t really be that dangerous if every single person is set on by bandits.

Oren: Yeah, I do wish people wouldn’t use bandits like random encounters. It’s not like banditry never happens, but I do think it deserves a little bit of setup. I don’t think you should just assume that the moment you walk outta town, you’re likely to be attacked. Because if that happens people are going to respond differently. Like if the countryside is that dangerous then the way people travel will be very different.

First of all, where are all these bandits coming from? Bandits don’t just materialize out of the air. Who are these bandits and how have they been able to hang out in this area that is apparently both rich enough to support them robbing people, but also doesn’t have the resources to drive them out?

And there are answers. You can come up with solutions to these questions. I just think you should think about them. Same thing with monsters. If monsters are constantly attacking travelers then there aren’t gonna be very many travelers. Travelers will adapt.

Chris: I just want people to stop using wolves. Like they’re just murderbots or something.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, animals will almost never attack a group of people. Especially a group of armed people. Mmm-mm, no. That’s almost not going to happen. Not impossible, but extremely uncommon.

Chris: Yes. Wolves are not murder machines. Other wild animals are not murder machines. So I mean, you could increase the likelihood of danger by giving your protagonist a unique misadventure where they kinda lose their way. And then there’s more danger off the main road, for instance.

Oren: Yeah. Having to go through an area that isn’t well traveled is already a danger, right? Maybe they have to do that. That in itself, that’s gonna suspend a lot of what we were just talking about ’cause it’s specifically not well traveled.

Chris: It’s also worth noting that in a low tech setting, like many fantasy settings, roads really do require maintenance. It’s interesting how long Roman roads were used past when they were built, because of just the work that it takes to build roads and maintain them. But having those pathways established is actually really essential because that determines whether you can use wheels or not. ‘Cause wheels require a flat surface. So I mean, if you have just a dirt track and an open prairie that’s already flat you might be able to make wheels work, for instance.

But in most forested, hilly areas you can’t use wheels unless there are actually roads. And for that there has to be somebody keeping the roads clear. So if you have a situation where you’ve got a bunch of isolated villages and you’re supposed to be really far from civilization and there’s no big empire that’s got crews manning the roads, then that’s not gonna be an option for people. Which is why animals are more useful in those situations.

Speaking of animals, animals can be really fun. It’s definitely a good thing to do a little research. And in many cases you could use something other than a horse to give it a little variety. But note about horses: you do need a horse for every person and then another horse to carry any packs. 

Oren: Yeah, that was something I really liked about The Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, is that he has multiple horses.

Chris: Yep, multiple horses. So if you want your humans to ride a horse rather than walk with the horse, there should be more than one horse per person. But other than that, the animal that’s used really does change the travel experience enough that it’s worth looking up.

For instance, oxen have probably better stamina than horses, but they have to rest midday when it’s hot ’cause they’re sensitive to the heat. So that means you kind of have a long lunch break every day. Camels apparently got very good stamina, but they’re very hard to get going in the morning. So like people sleep on camels, because once you get them going you want really long days and you never wanna stop because once the camels stop they won’t walk again. I find those differences very interesting and they can add some interest to travel.

Oren: So sadly, no research yet on traveling by bear, but we’re working on it.

Chris: Yep. [Chuckles] I’ve been trying to research reindeer for doing a story that has just a little minimal mention of reindeer. And I’m finding what I can, but the information on reindeer—I wish it was a little bit more plentiful.

Oren: Well you heard it, folks. Please send us all of your reindeer sources.

Chris: Yeah, do it.

Oren: We have a need. Alright. Well with that I think we will call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you would like to fuel our tanks or feed our four horses, since there are two of us…

Oren: [Snickers]

Chris: …you can support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon Jabber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s the professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.