Edgewise
Legendary Pubber
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- Sep 27, 2017
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I've had a project on the back-burner for a few months - a mid-fantasy hexcrawl where the PCs are charged with blazing a trail from one hex on the map, through a forest, to the other side of the map. There's an ancient road that ran through the area, although in some places it is entirely overgrown and in others there are obstacles the PCs might want to steer around.
The mission was initially intended to be pure exploration, the party being hired to scout out the path that a trading company wants to take through the area. But over time, that has morphed into the idea that the PCs are in charge of directing and protecting labor crews in cutting a traversable route. I struggled to consider how it would be valuable for the party to merely traverse the map and report back, and it was harder to make into an adventure - hence the change.
Now I'm struggling to determine the required labor (as well as materials and expertise) to do such a thing. This is being designed for Old-School Essentials, so I want to keep the mechanics very simple. Basically, I'm trying to determine how many person-hours it would take to cut one mile of road through a forest. Such a road would not be paved, but could conceivably be used for humans, draft animals and carts. Essentially something level, wide and straight enough to manage this kind of traffic.
Once the road is complete, the trading company would maintain it, so that's out of scope. My assumption is that the project would probably need one skilled construction overseer, and would benefit from skilled labor (though it could probably get by with green workers). In terms of the materials and their cost, I'll probably just handwave that as some ratio of labor costs and require materials to be carted out on a periodic basis.
But I'd like to be more accurate in terms of determining the hours of labor that would be needed for a mile through different kinds of terrains. Being off by more than an order of magnitude could look really silly to anyone with any clue (which doesn't include me). Forest and hills, with an outside possibility of the swamp - I'm guessing the latter might be prohibitive.
There are also a few cases where the players might need to commission bridges, so I should probably look into that, as well.
I'm pretty clueless about this stuff. I have zero experience with clearing terrain, leveling land, cutting trees, considering drainage, etc. Like any homeowner, I've done isolated small jobs of this sort but nothing on the scale that would give me any insight. Any suggestions or ideas are appreciated.
The mission was initially intended to be pure exploration, the party being hired to scout out the path that a trading company wants to take through the area. But over time, that has morphed into the idea that the PCs are in charge of directing and protecting labor crews in cutting a traversable route. I struggled to consider how it would be valuable for the party to merely traverse the map and report back, and it was harder to make into an adventure - hence the change.
Now I'm struggling to determine the required labor (as well as materials and expertise) to do such a thing. This is being designed for Old-School Essentials, so I want to keep the mechanics very simple. Basically, I'm trying to determine how many person-hours it would take to cut one mile of road through a forest. Such a road would not be paved, but could conceivably be used for humans, draft animals and carts. Essentially something level, wide and straight enough to manage this kind of traffic.
Once the road is complete, the trading company would maintain it, so that's out of scope. My assumption is that the project would probably need one skilled construction overseer, and would benefit from skilled labor (though it could probably get by with green workers). In terms of the materials and their cost, I'll probably just handwave that as some ratio of labor costs and require materials to be carted out on a periodic basis.
But I'd like to be more accurate in terms of determining the hours of labor that would be needed for a mile through different kinds of terrains. Being off by more than an order of magnitude could look really silly to anyone with any clue (which doesn't include me). Forest and hills, with an outside possibility of the swamp - I'm guessing the latter might be prohibitive.
There are also a few cases where the players might need to commission bridges, so I should probably look into that, as well.
I'm pretty clueless about this stuff. I have zero experience with clearing terrain, leveling land, cutting trees, considering drainage, etc. Like any homeowner, I've done isolated small jobs of this sort but nothing on the scale that would give me any insight. Any suggestions or ideas are appreciated.