Quote Originally Posted by AdAstra View Post
Makes sense. I will point out that fires are definitely going to increase detection distance substantially. In general, if you have line of sight on a fire at night, you will see it, no matter how far away it is. Thick smoke could also be visible from a great distance during the day as well. Deliberate smoke signals could reach hundreds of miles. From an in-game perspective, I would treat any outdoor fire as visible to everything with LOS at night.
Good to know. How hard is it to localize a fire at night though? I mean you can see it, probably get a rough bearing on it, but as far as ranging?

Might even be able to work this into part of the fort infrastructure. A line of watchtowers, hill forts, or mountain camps between the two main forts, using a variety of means to transmit limited information between them, as well as provide quick reinforcement to anyone ambushed while travelling between, or reduce the odds of getting cut off, etc. Maybe that's something that's still being actively established, and the players can participate in their construction and defense? Could also serve as a weakpoint, the first thing a hostile force would likely attack, giving players a chance to cut their teeth on say, a small band of goblins that took over a watchtower.
My current (after changes) idea is as follows.

The "ideal" site for a fort is already fortified by a band of the enemy, but not particularly well due to the inherent disorganization of their forces. The Dragonslayers (being hot-heads) jumped the gun on a planned operation to liberate and rebuild it. Because they're hot-heads lacking any sense of tactics, they managed to take the fort with significant losses.

That was a day or so before the party sets out from the Wall, accompanying the mercenary group (who were supposed to take the fort and would have done so much more deliberately and with fewer losses, but...) and a group of engineers/supplies to rebuild the fort properly. The main fort will be relatively secure, but there's lots of wild territory between the fort and the Wall (and even more on the other side), and none of the groups there are really suited for small-unit independent operation. That's where the party comes in. There are abandoned mines, ruins, and beast lairs on the "safe" side, as well as a couple old kingdom watchtowers near-by on the "wild" side that are juicy targets for liberation. If they choose to retake those, the main fort becomes basically secure and they'll have good intel on what's going on out around them. If they don't, the NPCs will...eventually. And with losses. My world puts the normal cap on capabilities at about the level 3-ish range for humanoids (with a fat tail though), so most of the NPCs are weaker than that. I spent some time yesterday creating rough outlines and locations for 30-ish points of interest in the area--some friendly, some neutral, and some decidedly hostile.