The Bleak and The Pearl [SoloDark] Intermission 2: Creating the Everburning Forest

The adventurers have a map to lead them through the Everburning Forest. Let's break this down and start figuring out what this means. 

First, some lore. The Everburning Forest is going to be a valley with a lot of geothermal activity, lava pools, and the burning smell of sulfur. At some time in the past, the pre-Barthic Ancients developed flora which could resist the constant burning heat and low oxygen and which to this day thrives in a place where even the Bleak has trouble penetrating. 350 years ago, a young Jonias Grunkheart found this forest/valley through local legends and went in with a team to build a workshop to study the Ancient technology and to find out how to channel it. Such technology was used by him to create the burning light of the Lighthouse. 

Now, let's populate it. 

Flipping through Bestial Ecosystem Created by Monster Inhabitation (Courtney C. Campbell and others), I wanted to pick a couple of "faction" types that made sense in an ever burning forest. Efreeti made sense to me but I was thinking maybe just a single entity who has been cast out from the City of Brass and found some solace in the valley (and possibly, long ago, worked with Jonias). Another one was lizard folk but I was immediately put in mind of Romancing Saga 2's Salamanders and so we'll use them instead. Besides this we can use fire elementals and fire beetles. The salamander tribe is not necessarily going to be an enemy (at least not until I absolute fail reaction rolls again). I'll save the question about the efreeti being a boon or bane if the adventurers encounter it. 

With those ideas in mind, let's make up a basic map using some ideas talked about at the end of my contemplating hex-crawls post. Rolling 10d6 "green", 1d6 "red" (to represent the workshop), and discarding all green 1s I come up with the points of interest and get a rough number of paths. I then roll another set of 5d6 "on top of it" to represent difficulty of terrain. 1-3 is varying degrees of easily passable. 4-6 gets increasingly hard to traverse. Then for each path, I roll another d6 with 1-3 being "in good condition, lower is better" and 4+ being a path that will require some trouble. Putting that all together, I get...

I pick the blue star to be my starting point. There are two dead ends off of it that are passable. There's another path the south that is harder to traverse with very rough terrain to get through. The air is harsher and the lava pools are wider while the path breaks down. Then, there is a clear and obvious chunk that takes a couple of hours (the left over bits of some road that has not yet been reclaimed) but it passes by a significant element. We'll make that the salamanders who hunt the road. After another point in the road, another long stretch through less passable terrain happens. However, the workshop's path is collapsed (workshop was a 6 so no paths to it). At this point, the characters will have to go off road and deal with the issues. 

In the distance, in the deepest and roughest portions of the Everburning Forest, is the makeshift manse of the efreeti. Now I'm going to roll on the Overland Hex Maps table to learn roughly what everything else might be though I will not dig too deeply into elements. I get the "4" and the rightmost "3" are holy shrines. Stopping spots on the way for researchers to reset and to perhaps even worship the Ancients. the "middle 3" and the "topmost 2" are "natural landmarks". We'll have one be a crag and another being one of the largest trees. We'll make that the one-time home of a Sulfur Dryad but we'll see what's up when it is found. The other "2" is a cave complex which could be interesting. 

Putting this all into Hex Kit (using Thomas Novosel's Strange Tile BW hex pack) and then taking some liberties with exact layout, we get... 

The intended path will then be to start at a ruined tower (which was the 5/crossroads). Head south to the crumbled roll until you get the first shrine. Head deeper into the relatively clear forest past the salamanders you come to the First Burn tree and then find another shrine. Here, you have to leave the path and head through the rough terrain until you find workshop. Go to far, and you end up in the territory of the efreeti. 

What exactly the shrines are and the cave complex and such...we'll figure it out. 

Step one is to start at the beginning: gathering up fire protection something and then figuring out the tower as a start and going deeper and deeper. 

Other details will be developed as I go. For those that want to see this with a hex overlay, with each hex this time being about 1.5 miles or so...it looks like this...