Hey guys, I'm writing a short story about a guy who needs

>>1070968
Ok lets do this.
First, Europe was not as poorly populated as you may think, for example France before the plague (1347) was densely populated and population levels have not been reached again until modern age.
Making fire with flint and stone, being exposed to bad weather with wool clothes only, crossing mountains, fording rivers, get low on provisions in unpopulated areas and having to deal with all kind of bugs likely are the biggest natural threats.
However humans pose a far more serious threat, robbers and highway man are common, theft and fraud are rampant, and as a stranger your word counts for nothing. Traveling alone is very dangerous at the time.
Your protagonist likely would have taken the ship whenever possible or followed established trade routes and streets and if he has any kind of brain, teamed up with other people.

>>1070968
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palfrey
Your dude would likely have used a traveling horse, suitable for long distance riding.

>>1070974
OP here.

I get the logic of groups and rivers, but these are frames I have to work within. Othervise splendid answer. Thanks.

>>1070979
Ok, just saying one guy traveling alone in the medieval time is crow bait. Either he gets fucked by bandits, or then by suspicious townsfolk who take him for a bandit. You need a good backup story for that. If you try to enter a town and you are a stranger from strange lands then people will ask you where from where to and why, and if they are not satisfied with you answers you might end up in jail.

Same with bad areas, You camp alone at night, and your horses have a new owner, and your throat likely has been cut.

For your setup, you'd need 1-several travel ponies, gear including food and pots, cooking gear, a linen tarp, wool blankets and clothing, maybe some leather garments. utility knife, cleaver/hatchet, flint& stone lighter kit, and maybe some medieval med kit. False tinder fungus for example is haemostatic and disinfecting.

Your dude likely has a good knowledge of plants and will be able to identify dozen of wild edibles from tubers to berries and gather food whenever possible. snarring smal game, glue-trapping birds and fishing are also possible, large game is off limits.

All in all your dude must have tons of experience and make do with very little comfort.

So this isn't Europe, just a place similar to medieval Europe in climate/technology/culture but sparsely populated?

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>>1070968
It can happen that for days on end you are lost in the woods. The only guys you'd might meet are Zeidler (wild honey collectors), hunters or charburners.
Being lost in the woods without a map and nobody in sight can fuck you right up.

>>1070968
For unpopulated lands in medieval-ish times, perhaps your protagonist should have a reason to specifically avoid very populated places if you wish to place him in Europe.

Getting lost I'm not sure is an issue. Your protagonist has to be experienced enough to be /out, so he can for example check the flora for markers of direction (trees with lichen on the south side, ant nests facing south and so on) depending on where you place him. He could even check where the Sun rises and sets to, to figure out directions. Or travel at night, looking at the stars, if he travels in the steppes or some huge open areas.

>>1070989
OP here.

Indeed this.

With a lack of coin, crossing bigger rivers might be an issue. Since most big bridges would be toll bridges in your setting. Your character might need to detour miles to find a spot to wade through if he has miscalculated the amount of money needed to travel.

In unpopulated areas, roads tend to be quite narrow and muddy. Your protagonist might be held up by some forester loading up his cart or by a cart that has gotten stuck in the mud.

Expect your character to experience a lot of cold nights, as making a fire would draw attention from bandits.

OP here.

Still monitoring. You guys are great.

>>1071172
To help with the cold nights, the traveller could wrap himself in a bag sewn (guts) together from bear/wolf hides with skin side up + greased for repelling water. And sleep on a pile of leaves.

As for bandits, why would they roam in places without people. Better places are next to the only known roads, no?

>>1071212
Re: bandits, it's my guess that they'd do their actual scheduled bandit-ing by the road but make camp away from said road to avoid lawmen/soldiers/rivals. Wander inadvertently into Camp Bandit, get robbed postmortem.

>>1071149
So this is one of those unpopualted-medieval-knight-in-full-plate pseudo fantasy shitflics then?

>>1070968
It's also quite possible that your character's worst enemy could be his own imagination. Medieval Fairy tales about monsters might seem silly, but when spooky forest noises wake you up at 3 a.m. for the 4th night in a row, it starts to wear on your mental health. Especially if it's in pseudo-medieval Europe, where superstition was very alive

>>1071389
Just because you are a wussy that is afraid to sleep out in the woods alone.

>>1071402
I'm not talking about a modern person with outdoors experience . I'm talking about some guy from a fictional medieval Europe who is probably illiterate and believes in witches

>>1071495
And likely had tons and tons more outdoor expirience than you'll ever get.

>>1071548
I don't understand the hostility. I never said I was scared of the woods or lacked experience. In fact, i often go solo camping on weekends. I've been doing it most of my life and I'm no longer a young man anymore and haven't been considered young for at least thirty years . But unless I'm mistaken, OP seemed to imply his rider was a city-dweller. People often get scared on their first camping trip, even adults. Hell plenty of people on this board and /k/ who frequently go /out/ post about how they had an "encounter" with some sort of meme monster, when in reality it's just nothing. All I'm trying to do is help drum up a story idea for OP that stems from internal rather than external conflict. I'm no writer though, so it probably came off more cliche than I meant for it to.

>>1071553
Your point is valid. No flashlights, remember. Lots of room for imagination at night.

Lots of superstition about witches and monsters & such.

>>1070987
That suspicion of strangers would have another side to it: curiosity. People in little villages get bored. They might be quite happy to hear stories and songs that they haven't heard before, and news of the outside world would be precious.

>>1070968
>What (especially environmental) hurdles, that may seem insignificant or would not even be imagined by a city-dwelling person, would such a rider potentially face?

Dragons

>>1070968
>What (especially environmental) hurdles, that may seem insignificant or would not even be imagined by a city-dwelling person, would such a rider potentially face?
Rain/floods, wolf/boar, disease/hygiene, the list goes on and on.

How would a medieval adventurer or knight-errant have eaten? I've read about how poor they were and how difficult the travels were, but they had to have eaten on a somewhat consistent basis, right?

They didn't have fishing kits or anything of the sort as far as I know.

>>1071769
Hard cheeses, taters, dried/ cured meats, hard sausages, root vegetables, dark breads, salted fish, pickled things, prolly a skin of wine. I'll assume he has/ had enough coin to properly outfit himself for the journey. Pretty much the same stuff I take /out/

>>1071769
>They didn't have fishing kits or anything of the sort as far as I know.
They had as a matter of fact. plus they used a lot more edible plants than we do today. Also hunting was integral part of life for a noble or free man.

>>1071769
Fishing with nets was quite common

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>>1071794
line&hook too.

>>1071784
>>1071790
>>1071794
I completely forgot about net fishing there. Even using fish hooks does sound pretty portable on second thought. I should do some more digging to see how wilderness survival worked in the medieval ages. Surely they had to face nature more than any of us did.

Living off the land was a natural thing but it seems a lot more difficult for somebody that is constantly traveling to do.

>>1071841
You travel in intervals, like you make camp, hunt/fish/forage and fill up your supplies, then you travel until your supplies are exhausted, and repeat.
You can have a look at 18th century camping, lots of things are similar.
of course this would never have happened in the real medieval, as Europe was densely populated back then and you'd like just ate at inns and hospitals most of the time.

>>1070968
Good job on having an accurate timespan for that sort of trip. Too many writers try to treat horses like cars and have them go on for forever. Lots of miles in a short period can seriously fuck up a horse and potentially kill it if it's not taken care of well.

For one, the rider will need to go at a pace that allows the horse to eat and drink well.

If you want a great example in a book of long horse trips and how it wears on both horse and rider, check out The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy.

Have his horse die, and then when he eats part of it he gets sick and almost die..

>>1072615
He would get off the horse and walk for considerable stretches, just to give the horse a break.

>>1071402

You're a retard. Go read up on why people were terrified of the night, up until the 1900s.

>>1073768
where would I read that, in the big book of wussies?

>>1070968
create conflict and have it take longer where he struggles to arrive in the dead of winter. losing a toe or two and eating an already dead stumbled upon animal due to his lack of preparation with bringing along food.


you know.. make it worth reading