> I have a question about travel in Sartar.
hmmmm, I guess the answer would be YGWV ?
I mean, it depends on your portrayal of the various rivers involved, as well as any seasonal variations you might want to depict, and any amount of geographical realism you may wish to include.
Or if players ask if their characters can ford a river anywhere, decide on an ad hoc basis whether the river is deep or broad in that location, if it's easily fordable or not, etc, just for story reasons.
It could be worth remembering that the banks of these rivers will not have been engineered to make them navigable by barges, as so many European rivers have been, and that rivers in hilly country can be either rapid and shallow (but subject to huge seasonal variation), or deep and unfordable except in specific locations (this depends mainly on whether the valleys are deep and narrow, having deep unfordable waters, or broad and uneven, having easily fordable ones -- though this can vary tremendously depending on a great number of different factors).
Experience as a hiker, even though this is through a modernised countryside, has taught me that there are few rivers that cannot be fairly easily crossed, though you may need to travel a little up- or down- stream to find a ford, bridge, or ferry. The hardest rivers to cross are typically found in the flatlands, rather than the highlands, and these are the ones where everybody would need to all use the only crossing point for miles around. These are of course highly strategic locations -- so that if you can see no description of such a strategic location in the source materials, this would be an indication that the river may have several crossing points.
Finally, if you are organised enough you can probably make a crossing of any river at nearly any point, either by creating a makeshift bridge, or building a raft, or having a single character heroically swimming across with coils of rope to be hung over the waters, or whatever other solution appropriate to the characters and storylines. Armies can do this either easily or not at all, mainly depending on supply line limitations, though the great rivers are significant barriers even to an army...
The existence of farmlands on both sides of a river is no indication that is easily crossed by the way, but merely that cultivable land exists on both banks.
I would probably only go to the trouble of providing more details about a specific river, including its seasonal variations, if it were to feature more heavily in the background, as the River of Cradles does in a Praxian campaign for example, or as the great rivers such as the Oslir or the combined Creekstream River below the Marsh do in the geography.
Julian Lord
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