I wouldn't make a lot of exploration rules, I'd make a lot of exploration tables. The important thing is content, and creating it easily and quickly.

Old D&D (the kind I run) is very exploration-based. I have hexmaps of areas spanning a thousand miles in a direction, to a scale from 5 to 20 miles to a hex. Littered in these areas are places to be found. A lot of random encounter tables (not just for monsters, but personalities, locations, plots, etc.) come in handy. The OSR blogosphere is full of this sort of stuff.

Similarly, old games like Traveller might be like this; exploring planets (a lot of them, spending little time on any one), possibly looking for resources to trade or exploit...

You have to define what you mean by "exploration-based", though. What are the PCs actually doing? Are they trying to find lost cities filled with treasure? Are they trying to find a way home? Are they trying to find resources? That's going to define what you actually need from the system.

Quote Originally Posted by tensai_oni View Post
Bad idea.
Exploration is all about finding exciting, unique places. "Randomly generated from a table" is the polar opposite to that.
Almost, but not quite.

"Randomly rolled from a table and given life by a good GM" is exactly what I think works great for wilderness-crawling D&D, for instance. Every place does not need to be uniquely hand-crafted. In fact, wilderness map keys should be sparse and short, and the places are brought to life on the fly by the GM's descriptions and imagination. (Once you've got the entire area mapped out, you can flesh out individual locations at your leisure, though, turning a one-paragraph note into a dungeon, etc.)