Free fantasy / D&D travel-time calculator for writers and game masters. Compute journey duration over distances in miles, kilometers, or hexes, factoring in travel mode (foot, horse, wagon, sail), terrain modifier, and daily hours of travel. Outputs days, hours, and ration consumption.
Built and maintained by Paul Clark, Redmoon Software · Last verified · Sources
Use during session prep to size travel arcs against your players' patience. A 100-mile journey takes a real-time evening of narration — too long, and players check out.
D&D 5e's DMG travel-pace tables give the same baseline. The tool wraps them in a one-screen UI so you don't flip pages mid-session.
At a foot normal pace, your party will take 4 days and 1.3 hours to cross the 100.0-mile route, consuming approximately 20 rations total.
Distances entered in your chosen unit are normalized to miles, then divided by the effective speed (base speed × terrain multiplier) to get total travel hours.
Travel hours per day default to 8, the canonical D&D travel pace before exhaustion. Push to 12+ for forced marches; drop to 4 for cautious exploration.
Ration count is one per traveler per day, rounded up.
Real-world walking and riding speeds plus D&D 5e travel-pace tables. Custom speed lets you override for unique modes.
One ration per traveler per day of travel, rounded up.
A 0.5× terrain modifier reflects the steep slowdown from terrain in most TTRPG systems; you can pick the multiplier explicitly.
Input
100 miles, on foot (normal pace), forest terrain, 8 hours per day, party of 4.
Output
4 days 4 hours of travel — 16 rations consumed.
At 3 mph × 0.75 terrain = 2.25 mph effective speed, 100 miles takes 44.4 travel hours. Split across 8-hour days, that's 5 calendar days; 4 rations per day × 4 travelers = 16 rations.
The speeds are the tabletop convention: about 3 mph on foot at a normal pace, 2 at a slow one, 4 pushing hard, with mounts and vehicles scaled from there. Over an eight-hour travel day a normal pace is roughly 24 miles, which is the figure most systems build their overland rules around.
They are conventions rather than physics. Real sustained marching over rough ground with a load is slower than 3 mph, and a horse cannot be trotted for eight hours. The numbers are calibrated to produce sensible-feeling journeys at the table, not to model logistics.
The terrain multiplier is where most of the variation lives: a road at ×1 against mountain or swamp at ×0.5 halves the distance covered in the same day. Ration consumption follows the rounded-up day count times party size, so a journey that spills a few hours into an extra day costs a whole further day of food for everyone.
The gallop entry is the trap. Twenty-five miles an hour is a real speed and it is sustainable for minutes, not for a travel day — a horse ridden at that pace for hours dies. Use it for a chase scene, never for the journey leg.
Not modelled: weather, forced-march exhaustion, river crossings, needing to find the road, or the party stopping for anything. Those are the interesting parts of a journey and they belong to the referee.
The method behind this tool, so you can check it rather than take it on trust.
Travel paces follow the common tabletop convention (roughly 24 miles per day at a normal pace over 8 hours).
Your system’s own travel rules govern at the table. The terrain multipliers here are a planning convention, not a rule from any particular game.
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