Campaign: Search for the Lost City of the Suel

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Time to update some developments in one of my spin-off Sea Princes Campaigns. After having exploited the Mines of Hokar, the players consulted with everyone they could (including the Seekers) on a new location to find adventure. In the end, party member Ivy Nightfall chose a place she heard vaguely about from her elven childhood; the Lost City of the Suel in the Suss Forest. A sage was hired, ships chartered and supplies were gathered and they sailed forth from Monmurg to Gryrax, capital of the Principality of Ulek. Leaving their sage behind in the town of Thrunch, they hiked north to Ivy's secluded homeland of Celene with the plan to search by water, beginning from the Handmaiden River and then following the current south down the Jewel River.

Much to my player's surprise (not really), my set up for this new adventure is an old school hex crawl much in the same fashion as my dungeon crawl in the Mines of Hokar. I created a map of the Suss-Pomarj-Wild Coast region for the players to view and track their search through the tangled wilds. I'm using my favorite hex within hex paper. The large hexes is a standard Greyhawk 30 miles across while the smaller hexes are 5 miles each. As the Suss is thick and hazardous to move through on land, each 5 mile hex constitutes 1/3 day's travel/searching while travel by water is more rapid for example.

To facilitate the speed of this crawl I created several charts, mostly of wandering but some for specific keyed locations with a random chance of being found within the forest confines. For example, I have your obligatory day and night wandering monster encounters. These charts also take into account the Suss being more dangerous on the east bank than the west. I also have a small chart that tells the content of each searched hex:

1. Empty (chance to get lost)
2. Empty (no effect)
3. Strange Flora
4. Natural Hazard
5. Found Trail (random direction)
6. Keyed Location

The Strange Flora Chart is a fun list of herbs, flowers and such that I've culled from many game sources over the years. Those with enough knowledge of nature can find these rare bits of plant life, each with a game application from healing properties to poisonous effects. Natural Hazards is a short list of obstacles to overcome like quicksand, brambles or disease carrying insects. Trails can lead to wandering monsters but also can potentially lead players astray. Needless to say, a ranger or druid is invaluable for their skills here.

The Keyed Locations are special points of interest that, taken as a whole, paint a picture of the ancient story the characters are trying to discover in the heart of this forest. To demonstrate, the players so far have found a cavern of latent evil (think Dagobah here), named elven arms/armor lost within the thickest bramble patches and most recently a stone marker that can potentially be a clue to the location of the Lost City itself.

The Lost City campaign is a true grind, yet the Suss is not an overly large region, so searching it shouldn't be too daunting time-wise. Scale this system up to a truly vast area like the Burneal Forest, Amedio Jungle or the Corusk Mountains and you could have a long term campaign indeed!