Journey through the Jungle

[Traitoreous]

First, if your character is called Neddip or Alberich, please stop reading now. Now when that's out of the way I can start.

Sooner or later my party will have to walk through a jungle. They would know the general direction where they'd have to go and they would have an NPC noble traveling with them. I'd like to insert some primitive halflings into the campaign here, so they can help them later after a few sessions. I also thought that maybe traveling through jungle would cause exhaustion? I'd like help with making the walk interesting with weather issues, nighttime and the NPC noble. Thanks in advance.

The party consists of four level four adventurers. A dwarven barbarian who used to be a pirate, a tiefling bard who is a well-known noble from a far-away land, a gnomish druid from the North and a stereotypical elf ranger. The Ranger is not a revised one and the druid serves in the circle of the moon. Neither the dwarf nor the tiefling have a lot of experience in traveling in the wilderness.

[JellyPooga]

This (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?500682-Jungle-encounters&highlight=jungle) thread might help.

[MBControl]

I like the idea of the primitive halflings living and traveling through a series of tunnels around the island. They would probably be following and observing the party as they travel through the jungle. Your party may even notice one or two of them along the way.

In real jungles, when the sun goes down, the bugs come out. I would like to see swarms of fire ants, and spiders and that kind of thing.

Rain. A lot of rain, and always being wet, can cause nasty health problems unless they are able to get dry.

In my mind, I see a bunch of crude traps and pitfalls along the way. The old swinging spiked log, snares.

What about a dead end. The characters are left with a choice. Fight the dinosaur (or whatever) or jump off the cliff to the roaring river far below.

A LOT of jungle animals and plants are poisonous. If the PC's are gathering food as they travel, I would call for nature checks often, as they run the risk of becoming poisoned. This goes for fresh water as well. Unless they purify the water with Purify Food and Drink, they should be boiling the water first. This might be difficult to do if it is always raining. Even if they find a covered area, is all the wood too wet to burn long enough to boil water.

Tropical storms bring not only rain, but gale force winds. How does factor in?

Sleeping might be difficult. The jungle is too thick to travel at night so they have to travel in the day, swarmed with bugs at night. I could see this exhausting the PC's

I seems I'm looking at this as a true survival test. If you are able to make the environment tough, even the smallest encounters will seem much tougher.

What if you set up a Assassins Creed style agility puzzle that requires your most agile character to swing through vines, crawl through caves avoid traps etc, in order to unlock an ancient gate or something, securing passage for the rest of the party?