I know that CoSS assumes the players spend up to 4 months to accumulate 120 Discovery points (30 points per month), but I am also noticing that the PCs can move around at a fairly rapid pace. Ex. walking from the Spear of Righteous Anger to the Spear of Spear of rest in under 1 hour. These seem hard to reconcile, no?
Bear in mind that they are over that time fighting hundreds of each enemy, dealing with rival factions and not just walking the city they are doing archaeology. They are spending hours pouring over carvings reconciling what they find with what they already know and it takes time to "make the discovery." They also have to dig through dirt and mud, cut back vegetation, move rubble and so on.
Also many of the sites are only described in abstract. It is assumed that each of the large buildings is assumed to dungeons in themselves.
It is a ruined city, while magic helps preserve it, it did nothing for the damage done from the Earthfall impact, so I see the city as having some substantial rubble to be over come, additionally, it's not staright line movement, it streets and ally ways.
I overlaid a grid on a PDF with 1/4" hexes and gave it a scale of 300ft, which is what I'm allowing my PC's to move in a minute of ground movement. obviously flight, mounts, climb speeds, etc change this.
If they're taking the time to explore, then I am charging them an hour of time per hex.
These are completely abstract, but help with tracking spell duration, etc
One of the players is a cartographer, so like on the Shiv, as he maps the area I usually allow them to increase their ground movement rates appropriately to again, abstractly reflect their increased familiarity with the terrain.
Yes it is.
So, I increased the size of the place. By a lot. What I wanted was a ruined city that felt like an entire gameworld to explore like the ruins in the Fallout games. My reasoning was that the Azlanti were advanced and the city would have had time to develop a huge population. I mean, look at how many people are in the United States after only 240 years!
So my Saventh-Yhi is kind of like Sharn from Eberron. Towering districts and subterranean levels over 36 square miles, roughly the size of modern Paris. All those little pyramid things you see on the map are equal to a Vivec cantar ala Morrowind. Just a staggering amount of stuff to explore.
So, yeah. I guess what I mean to say is the city should be a lot bigger than the handful of city blocks the scale on the map would indicate.