Interesting overland travel?

[BuzzardB]

Hello everyone, my crew should be finishing up Chapter 3 very soon and i'm pretty stoked to start chapter 4, but there is about a 2 week travel time gap between where they are now and Sandpoint. Since there is obviously some urgency to their travel I was wondering what you guys did for those two weeks? Hand wave the travel? Roll a few random monster encounters? Describe and detail each and every city and town on the way?

Tell me of your travel.

[Ashkar]

I used between 2 and 3 arch Feast or Ravenmoor, so when the time came, party just teleported there. After that, windwalk all the way.

[Misroi]

My party just teleported back home, so there wasn't any travel time. That's to be expected when you reach this level of play, though.

[Haladir]

Our wizard did have the teleport spell, but the player rolled terribly the first time he used it. The PCS ended up in the middle of the Storval Deep miles from shore without any good means of rescuing themselves! The fighter had to strip off his magic armor and let it sink to the bottom before drowning. The wizard thought to cast extended wall of ice to make a frozen raft for a few minutes while they figured out what to do. Another character remembered that she had a feather token: swan boat, which they used to get to shore.

Consequently, the party got very gun-shy about using teleport!

After defeating the ogres of Hook Mountain, they ended up with a LOT of giant-sized Thassilonian loot, including the armor from a rune giant. They had earlier befriended the Pathfinder Society, and realized that they would probably pay top dollar for the Thassilonian artifacts. I also reminded the players that I also enforce the size limits of bags of holding and similar items: much of the giant-sized loot woudn't fit!

They eventually contracted with a riverboat captain in Turtleback Ferry to bring them back to Magnimar by water, with a load of the giant-sized loot! It took a couple of weeks. I ran some river-based wandering monster encounters along the way... including an attack by hobgoblin river pirates, and another by one of Black Magga's severed tentacles that was growing into... something.

[Diven]

If you are planning on doing overland travel and need to make it interesting there should be at least one encounter per day. Now encounter doesn't need to be combat, they can be social situations, unusually intelligent animals interacting with the party, or even comedy.

As you cross the bridge, you can see that someone has recently built a rather haphazard looking wooden building on the other side. A sign above a green painted door reads "Muggywort's Bar" with a smaller piece of wood nailed to the bottom with "Longshanks welcome". (Replace Muggywort with Gogmort or any other named Goblin from Thistletop if any of them escaped) Inside a hand full of goblins along with a single kobold (acting as the cook) are attempting to run a legitimate business. Exploring the area outside reveals a second smaller building where two goblins are working with a new shiny still attempting to alter a traditional goblin liquor recipe to appeal to races with more distinguished tastes. The party should be the first "customers" to visit since the bar was built and are offered free samples from the first batch of "Gobby burnjuice". These goblins (and one kobold) have recently been civilized and educated by an Imp who had put on a ring cursed to shift his alignment from LE to LN. The goblins will happily talk about their new leader who is teaching how to be more than just raiders, however they don't like bathing every week.
The menu offerings should be a cross between goblin grossness and fine inn food. Things like a whole rotisserie roasted frog stuffed with herbs, literally, the mouth was opened and crammed full of herbs before being roasted.

[Urath DM]

One thing which I am considering doing is to adapt the Caravan rules from the Jade Regent Players' Guide for general use in any Varisian area.

These are rules for operating a Varisian Caravan, and managing it as it travels.

There are some issues with the Caravan Combat rules, so you may want to look at the Jade Regent forums for advice there.