I have taken the map of Shiv and overlay it with a square grid. Each squire side is a mile; therefore a squire is a squire mile. The book says…
It’s best to simply assume that the PCs, regardless of their group’s actual speed, can move about 1 mile every 2 hours due to the fact that it’s never possible to move in a straight line in the wilds of Smuggler’s Shiv.
I am assuming that this is just walking a mile as a crow flies. So how long would you say it would take the group to search/explore a squire mile?
I guess for simplicity you could just multiple the time consumed by particular number depending on how thorough they want to be. If they want to do a thorough search where they look up every tree and under every bush you might just multiple it by 3 or 4. If you do this I'd have them hitting the heat and needing to make saves for that and diseases. I'd also consider throwing out some reward/s for this though so maybe they come across a random bit of loot such as a skeleton with a useful nonmagical object (say sword/quiver of arrows/backpack with useful gear). Basically some sort of pay off for taking the time and the risks.
If its just a case of we'll do a search if we come across something interesting then you do it in game and have the group stop. I guess theres a third option with the taking a slower travel rate to ensure they don't miss anything or so maybe you just double the time for that approach.
Having surveyed plots of land, this my anecdotal thought on the matter...
A crew of five or six people, spacing out thirty meters, surveying the terrain of Wyoming (arid planes, with little vegitation other than sage brush, but some hills, and plenty of cracks and crags in the ground) take about a two to four hours to do a full block (one square mile). Now, this depends largely on the terrain, and exploring junlge is going to take a lot longer than exploring here.
As to how good of a search we're talking about. Depends on the surveyers. The better people are at looking, the faster things seem to go, but there is also the matter of staying on transect. Walking a straight line for a mile is nowhere as easy as it may sound. Even when you have a compas. Especially in dense vegitation.
Given what you're asking specifically, I would say somewhere in the range of 20-30 man hours. As in one guy takes 20-30 hours to search a square mile of jungle. Two guys take 10-15, and so on.
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I overlaid hexes on top equal to about a half mile per hex (this way I could move them one hex for one hour when not on a trail, or four hexes per hour when on a trail). If they entered a hex that had one of the encounters, I just gave it to them (with some exclusions, like the treasure pit). Didn't require any extra time. The PCs aren't explorers in this book, they're castaways. At least in my experience, the last thing they want to do is spend *extra* time searching every hex.
The way they have it written you can spend alot or a little time exploring the shiv.
A) if you want to do alot of exploration i suggest more animal encounters (nothing uber dangerous just a wild cat, or snake) to mix in with the encounters as written.
B) if you want to chase the baddies to the destination, just follow the encounters as written a shove the pcs in the right direction occasionally.
Karui, I am going to have them the squire encounter the first time they enter the squire.
I think I will have then travel through the squire at 2 hours per squire. If the ‘search/survey/explore’ the squire they have a chance to fine something like a skeleton with equipment or washed up debris that useful or nest with some large eggs, but also they can find the quickest path and be able to go through a squire quicker. I am thinking about an hour or an hour and a half.
I... I can't tell if you're intentionally misspelling 'square' as 'squire' all the time or not. :)
Thanks for asking it. I was going to go crazy...
How many squire miles make up a knight?