In Pathfinder 3, the players are asked to check in on Fort Rannick because reports haven't been received on time. The fort is 450 miles from Magnimar. It takes 9 days to get there by horse and 19 days for unarmored medium-size humanoids travelling by foot (and 28+days for medium armored medium sized humanoids and unarmored halflings or gnomes on foot).
It sounds like there's fairly regular river trade, and even if messengers don't travel by boat there could be messages sent that way. It takes a week by water, so it's been twenty-three days of silence.
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As you point out, a round trip takes some time. Suppose a pair of rangers make the round trip roughly every month. That would seem a fairly rare event in the daily intrigues of Magnimar. A month is a long time to wait for info.
I could have sworn that in Pathfinder #2 it mentions "Sending" as the means of contact between Fort Rannick and Magnimar. My impression is that the Black Arrows are so small in number, that they couldn't spare to have anyone travelling on envoy duty for weeks at a time.
As far as pay, I'd think it rather modest since Magnimar has an interest in keeping a strategic trading and territorial city so close to Korvosa's borders. I also peg the Lord Mayor as someone so well versed in red tape and wheels and deals, that he knows how to make gold grow on trees. He knows how to play with favors, skim off taxes. As the players iced the Skinsaw men and a Brother of the 7, the Lord Mayor froze all assets of Ironbriar.
Isn't sending limited to 25 words? And a 4th/5th level spell? And keyed to a single person? What happens if that person is asleep or otherwise indisposed when the sending arrives?
Perhaps, but I'm sure they can ask, "How's the Fort? Still there? Need anything? Any news?"
Isn't sending limited to 25 words? And a 4th/5th level spell? And keyed to a single person? What happens if that person is asleep or otherwise indisposed when the sending arrives?
If a regular contact schedule is used then you don't need to worry about waking someone up. As for the spell level, you would only need a cleric, sorcerer, or wizard on hand to use a wand. I would suspect a cleric is used as they would double as medics.
The 25 word limit is not a problem if you do messages like a morse code message.
For example: "Ogre activity light. Scouts report possible reorganization. New Attack may be soon. Request additional supplies in next shipment. Reports will return with supply train."
Isn't sending limited to 25 words? And a 4th/5th level spell? And keyed to a single person? What happens if that person is asleep or otherwise indisposed when the sending arrives?If a regular contact schedule is used then you don't need to worry about waking someone up. As for the spell level, you would only need a cleric, sorcerer, or wizard on hand to use a wand. I would suspect a cleric is used as they would double as medics.
Wouldn't such a wand have a street price of 27,000gp? And each 25 word report would cost 540gp to make?
Also remember you don't need to use round-trip time for messages. The Fort just has to post a message with a courier or other mail carrier. As soon as they stop doing that, you count the time to send the message (say 9 days? By horse but not by river). That means about 3 weeks of silence, from a dangerously isolated outpost.
Maybe the Fort did check in with Magnimar, and Lord Mayor Grobara just wants to clean the PCs off his hands by NOT telling them there's any problem, but also having the deniability to say
"Well, we heard one short message, it went , erm, where's that scroll where we wrote it down on, oh here it is: "help, there's ogres attacking us, they've killed about AAAAGH help please help us AAAAGH it's grabbing my AAAAGH make it stop AAAGH that's not right-" but we couldn't really tell what was going on, so we didn't think it was worth telling you."
I can see the Lord Mayor being more than a bit Rudgutter-ish, but less eating of eyeballs.
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Apparently none of you had to report to superiors on the state of affairs of your research/business/organization. These are usually hours long events, sometimes into multiple days. Heck, as a Graduate student I report weekly on research and this usually takes an hour.
The "nobles" and other power bases will question the heck out of the Forts envoy, all with different purposes. Look at any congressional hearing for an example.
A sending of 25 words or less, or a birds chattering is hardly enough.
There's also Correspond which is 25 words per round at a minimum of 7 rounds (175 words). With Dream Travel, one can travel up to 3,900 miles minimum. There's also Greater Teleport and the spell version.
In Pathfinder #2, we do have an example of carrier ravens, and I'd imagine a code could be arranged to write a vast amount of detail and/or via "Secret Page" or "Shrink Item." Perhaps there "is" an envoy, granted, but to follow up without receiving one after some time could still be resolved rather quickly through the above means and wouldn't take hours and hours of grilling to figure out that nobody's home.
Wouldn't such a wand have a street price of 27,000gp? And each 25 word report would cost 540gp to make?
Yes, but that might not be a issue if it was produced by a government.
Personally, I favor the use of messanger birds for routine messages, while sending detailed messages back when they get supply shipments.
Before the invention of mass commubication (the telegraph, for example) it was not unusual for most frontier outpost to not send detailed reports unless it looked like trouble was coming, sickness broke out, or something similar happened.
In this case, a routine message might be sent every week via carrier bird, while a detail log report might be send back once every few months when supplies and payroll arrived.
Simply not having heard anything from the fort in a while would warrent sending someone to check-in on them. If a previous messanger bird suggested that the Ogres may be preparing for another attack with no follow up message would easily lead someone to assume the worst. At this point it is better to send someone to check before sending supplies and gold.
A few rangers check in at Turtleback Ferry every couple of days for supplies. So figure about one week with no contact from the fort and the mayor will advise Magnimar of the situation by sending news a trader headed that way. Another week goes by and still nothing but silence from the fort, officials decide to send a horseman to Magnimar with the news and a plea for help. A third week goes by and it is obvious that the indigenous wildlife is being driven out of the forest, at this point a group is assembled and sent to investigate the fort, they disappear. By now 3+ weeks have gone by with no contact, it's obvious that something is not right in the region, and a patrol has disappeared. Combined with the knowledge of what / who inhabits Kreegwood and Turtleback Ferry’s remote location, I think it would warrant magical communication with Magnimar with a request for immediate assistance.
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I assume that when they normally would have noticed a large attack as what happened in HMM they would have send a message by spell if possible or one of their birds with a message for reinforcements. The fort is normally designed to withstand an attack for enough days as it takes to receive reinforcements.
It's just like in our dark ages, a siege could take a long time, long enough to get reinforcements if possible by sending out messages by air or horse.