He nods, stamping his feet to keep warm. "Very well, go ahead."
I guess this town is not used to visitors. No gossip for me here.
Guida will resume her redcap route. She'll take off once she's a reasonable distance away from town so as not to attract attention.
The northern pass proceeds two or three mile with a bend midway that allows you to take off, then opens up to a valley a mile and a half across. Near the river where the main path winds through the valley are a few peasant huts, but further in you can see a large humanoid- it appears to be a troll walking through the massive snow banks.
Guida won't seek troubles for troubles' sake. She'll fly past the troll, preferably flying arround a fair distance away to avoid drawing attention to her.
Another 10 miles up the narrowing valley takes you another thousand paces higher, and the weather is getting extremely cold and the snow fairly thick, even on the floor of the valley. You ca see the mountain above that matches the description, but the circle of blue stones for you to put the fire in is not visible, apparently covered in snow.
Guida curses, searching for where she might need to dig to locate the circle of blue stones.
The ground has a solid foot and a half of snow laid out as a smooth blanket over the ground.
How large is the valley area that's at the base of the mountain?
There are two branches whose tips are 350 paces apart as the closest thing to the mountain, which widen in a triangle shape until they merge into the overall valley, about 180 yards away from these apex, which continues back to join the rest of the larger valley where it is about 370 paces across and 100 yards from the point where they join. If the stone circle is further back than that this section of the valey is about 500 paces across and 750 paces deep.
Guida is going to walk alongside the length of the mountain, not the interior of the valleys, but within a few paces of the mountain as she thinks the rock circle is likely to be there, not two hundred pace from the mountain line. She's hoping that, as she walks through the snow, she'll uncover one of the rocks of that blue circle. She can be heard shouting every few minutes. At the start of her walk, it sounds something along the lines of:
"Hello?"
"Matterhorn?"
"Anyone hear me?"
She'll do a couple of back and forth trying to uncover the first rock by clearing some snow with her walking path, let's say maybe an hour or so.
Does she simply pick one of the two branches at random? Or does she follow the base 180 paces up one way then back down the other? I'm trying to get an idea where you are actually searching with this pattern. Think of it as two triangles like cat ears with the ear tips pointing towards the mountain, where the edge of each ear is 180 paces long.
The cat ears image has been helpful. She follows one branch and then goes up the other branch before coming back the same path, widening where she's walking to locate the rocks.
Actually, now that I think about it, she has Eyes of the Treacherous Terrain as an effect in her walking stick. Is it dangerous for her to accidentally trip on that rock circle? If so, would activating the effect reveal the stone circle to her sight by virtue of it being a treacherous area?
unfortunately eyes of the treacherous terrain don't have the ability to see through material, and the snow means the ground cannot be seen.
After 40 minutes walking, back and forth along the ground (make stamina roll for enduring the cold) she finds a ring of stones, and stooping to brush them off discovers that they are in fact blue.
9 for the stamina check. She will clear the circle and build the fire.
Clearing the circle is easy enough, but what wood is there is damp with snow.
I was thinking that she would pull some tinder from a tinder box and light it up with flint and steel.
That's fine for lighting the tinder, but it won't get much of a fire going. If you want to try that without wood though you can.
Would Guida have crossed any trees on the way there or that would be within sight that she could harvest wood from?
The last trees she saw were a couple of miles back.