Titus surveyed the task with a scowl, looking around to count his men and make a quick guess at the depth of the water, the distance between the edge of land and the top of the water, and the distance that must be spanned.

"Our situation here lad..." Titus said to Zimmer, one of the younger Moolyaggers who often aided him, "Is trying to design the best bridge we can in the amount of time we have with the resources we have. We can build a beam bridge, a suspension bridge, an arch bridge, or make one of pontoons, essentially a beam bridge and a very fast one to assemble."

"We don't really have any pontoons Titus." Said Zimmer.

"No, but if we have lots of trees, we could cut them down, take seven logs of roughly the same size and place six around the central one, picture six coins laid out on a table with one coin in the middle, our logs would effectively act as a much larger log, and reasonably effective quick pontoon, we could float several of the as piers and span them with logs, and have a bridge, albeit a crude one. The question becomes, do we have a great deal of available wood to work with?"

Zimmer looked around, the answer being rather obvious. "Can we use such a bridge here though?"
"That depends. Obviously if the water is far below banks we would not want to do that, the supporting pillars would be so tall that their weight would sink the pontoons, even if it was sturdy and stable enough not to slide and collapse, how far below is the water? And how deep is it, we will need to take a sounding. In any event, we will need a great deal of wood first, and this must be acquired, we have quite a few people to use, though Zimmer, if you could please get me a head count. In the meantime, tell the men to start setting up camp, we'll obvious be here for some time, and tell them not to go wandering about by themselves."
"You think there may be bandits about?" asked Zimmer.

"Its entirely possible, even in the best of times which these aren't, and a lone man faces many needless perils, mundane or otherwise, even someone simply not watching where he's treading while woolgathering might break an ankle in the mud, of which we have plenty. Besides, I don't want anyone sneaking off to take a nap." Titus clapped Zimmer on the shoulder then waived him off so he could return to scowling at the river as he tried to estimate its breadth and depth.

OOC: Need to know -
approximetly how many people in available
how wide the river us
How far down the water is from the edge of the canyon
Whether we're in the middle of a forest
How many days before we need the thing done
and whether or not they plan to transport anything heavier then a two-horse wagon



OOC: Unless I'm specifically playing cleric or paladin I usually default to 'the local pantheon', go the flat-earth atheist route, or follow Qunecil'Nyquil the God of Mass Human Sacrifice when evil or Metagamur the Wise Advisor of Adventurers. I'd say this fellow would tend to follow the equivalent of Vulcan.