Regional Map Overview

The last couple RPG sessions have seen some discussion of simply running away from the Green Pass region entirely, and leaving the area to its grim fate of eventual conquest and pillage. Here's a short summary of all the different directions that the party could go, based on a zoom-in view of the world map.

The world of Proxima, at the northern end of the occidental basin

Notes:

• The party is currently at the very easternmost edge of the hex with the fortress icon, labeled "Green Pass".
• The scale is roughly 200 miles per hex. Traveling along roads means that it's possible to cover this distance in a week or so. Traveling through rough terrain can more than double this time. Moving through a thousand miles of hill or forest hexes would take several months.
• That's all desert to the southeast. Desert requires you bring along water as part of daily rations, consuming a stone of food and water per day. For a party of ten, that works out to 3000 stone of water per month, which would require a fleet of camels to carry. Although there are alternatives to bringing water along...
• There are other passes through the Great Barrier Mountain Range, in addition to Green Pass, but none of them are civilized.
• Most of the realms on this side of the mountains are chaos-states run by high-level necromancers, witches, or evil warlords who rule populations of orcs and such, and who use humans only as slaves.

Directions the party could try to go:

• Directly back through Footman's Notch, into the Green Pass region: This follows a presumably safe road. However, it's under the control of a Durnovaric garrison that might not be entirely willing to allow the passage of normal traffic from the east, especially for a party under a cloud of suspicion as being the kind of grave-robbers who probably triggered the crisis in the first place. There's already been serious political pressure to close the gate, to prevent the migration of suspected cultist infiltrators.
• North along the edge of the mountains: This leads to a vast wilderness of cold high-elevation pine forests, and eventually to the northern sea. At this time of year the weather is mild enough to be above freezing, but still chilly overnight. In the winter, this area is choked by snows. There are plenty of fierce beasts and magical creatures here, but the only sentient inhabitants are small and isolated settlements of hostile kobolds and other such mountain-dwelling beastmen.
• South along the edge of the mountains: This is the rumored direction in which lies a great passage through the underdark beneath the mountains. Pirates far away on the Larcenous Shores send their prisoners to the east in desert caravans, using the tunnel to deliver their captives to the chaotic lands in the east to live unhappily as slaves for the various immortal Undying Lords who live in the Hyperborean Basin, hundreds of mile to the south of Green Pass. The exact tunnel location is unknown to Durnovar, but probably well known to the slavers in the area.
• East into the Hyperborean Desert: This is the location of the vast ruined cities of Thule and Nerigos, the true imperial centers of power, citadels of which the nearby city of Umeskelion was merely a satellite. Both cities are nearly a thousand miles away, accessible only through the trackless wasteland of shifting sands that have slowly buried them.