Map

The world map is a grid where each square has a height and an enum for the terrain type. Each of these affect both the speed of travel and the difficulty of climb/swim check to avoid injury. We should not try and create our own, we should be able to find both height and biome data from some open GIS dataset. At minimum, it should be easy to find modern data for these, but there may also be a historical dataset that we can use.

Height

Traveling from a lower height to a higher one may require the characters to make a climb check (based on upper body strength vs weight) based on the slope, and traveling from higher to lower may require the characters to make an agility check.

Terrain Type

As this is an enum, we can store extra information in each variant. For example, the "River" variant could include its depth and velocity, both of which would contribute to how hazardous it is to ford.

In addition to the costs imposed to traveling, it may also affect stealth and detection. Forest cover may largely prevent detection from flying enemies but also make it much easier for an enemy to ambush you, presenting a trade-off of risk which you might assess based on which enemies are known to exist in an area and which you are better able to defend against.

Pathfinding

As described in the travel page.

Weather

This probably isn't worth putting in the MVP, especially for such a temperate place like Italy, but eventually there should be a weather map that affects the way that you travel though terrain. Heavy snow would slow down land travel, frozen lakes and rivers become possible to cross without swimming (but also risky if the ice is thin), and rain makes climbing very difficult.

Points of Interest

For the MVP, there is no need for any point of interest other than enemy camps/lairs/nests relevant to active quests in an area as well as settlements. The former are simply placed randomly (though not too close to any other point of interest), the latter should be obtained from a GIS dataset. If we can't find historical GIS data on Italian settlements then we can just use modern data and rely on Cunningham's Law to fix it.

Underground

In our setting, there is ostensibly a vast underground network of caves, crypts, tunnels, Ratling under-cities, Dwarven strongholds, and even antediluvian ruins. But this sounds hard, therefore we shouldn't bother with it for the MVP. All of the quests will conveniently take you to overland locations, which don't even need to have structures.

Halbe: You are essentially being hired by local municipalities to clear out homeless encampments. If only we had this in the IRL modern setting...