Travel, Transport & Communication
People, goods, orders, and news all move the same way: carried by someone, along some path, at the cost of time and effort. Establish the conditions of movement and the system handles the rest.
What to establish
Geography that journeys cross: terrain, roads and tracks, rivers, bridges, ferries, fords, ports where they exist. Transport that the world actually has: feet, horses and other animals, carts and wagons where appropriate, boats and ships where waters allow. None of these appear by assumption — a road exists where you place it, a ferry runs where someone operates it, a horse exists where someone owns or lends it.
Seasonal truth matters enormously: which routes close in winter, which rivers flood in spring, which roads become mire in autumn rains. Establish the pattern and let every journey inherit it.
Lodging and rest follow the same rule. Inns, guesthouses, religious hospitality, and household shelter exist where your world maintains them — not wherever a traveler happens to be tired.
Journeys are ordinary until proven otherwise
Familiar travel in safe conditions simply succeeds and consumes believable time — part of a day, a day, several days — judged from distance, terrain, season, method, and condition. There are no universal speeds, no movement points, no formulas.
Travel is not an automatic encounter. A road is not guaranteed safety, but neither is it guaranteed danger. Danger needs genuine cause: known banditry, war, wild country, foul weather, a broken crossing. Do not populate journeys with bandits, storms, or strangers merely because someone traveled. Uneventful arrival is a successful journey.
News needs a carrier
Information moves at the speed of feet, hooves, and hulls. Establish who carries it: messengers, merchants, travelers, officials, clergy, soldiers, sailors. Each path has its own speed, reach, and reliability — and each can fail, garble, delay, or go stale.
Hold the information separations firmly: a public fact is not universally known; elapsed time is not automatic knowledge; every telling needs a plausible path. The king's death in the capital is unknown in the valley until someone brings it — and what arrives may be partial, wrong, or outdated. Different settlements believing different things about the same event is not a bug. It is the world.
Example
News of a toll dispute at the bridge reaches the upland village three ways: a carrier rides through the next day with the toll-keeper's version; a merchant arrives a week later with the travelers' version; the reeve's letter, sent by the slow official post, arrives last and contradicts both. The village argues for a month about which is true. No system tracked the messages. The paths you established did the work.
Good Builder Question
How would news from this town actually reach the neighboring valley, and who would carry it?
You Usually Do Not Need...
...every road mapped, every journey leg recorded, every messenger tracked, or every weather variable persisted. Establish routes and carriers as context. Record movement only where someone's location, a delivery, a delay, or a consequence genuinely matters — and let ten thousand uneventful trips pass unrecorded.