Adventure Sites in Dumasque#
One province of Adventure Sites, which has the map of every site. Using a site says how to run one.
17 sites, levels 1 to 28. What Dumasque is like.
- Elder Gorim's Hall
The heart of the Geni district on the night they crowned a stray their hero. A broad packed-earth square spreads before Elder Gorim's hall, ringed by the open forges that burn brighter than ever, hung with iron-grey and ember-orange banners, and roofed only by the desert stars. Where the Geni once tested a nameless wet-lander at their gate, tonight they throw a feast a generation will remember: long tables groaning under roast and date-wine, broached barrels of mead, the stamping thunder of victory dances, and the whole tribe roaring the name of the Breaker of Chains. At the square's quiet edge stands Gorim's modest stone hall, where the celebration drops to a hush behind a heavy curtain and the real work of the night - cracking the Conductor's dying riddle and turning a poet's puzzle into a road north - is done.
- The Geni Proving Ground
The sacred arena of the Geni, keepers of the oldest honor-ground in Vhall Oasis. A great circular sand pit lies open to the desert sky, ringed by tiers of weathered stone stands and walls carved deep with a thousand years of champions' names. To one side the open-air forge roars and rings without pause, its anvils fed by hauling stranger-hands; to the other the spartan canvas of the Geni homes snaps in the dry wind. Everything here bends toward strength: the thud of practice blades on the training ground, the ritual rack where steel is saluted before it is drawn, and at the heart of it all the hot sand where outsiders are blooded into the tribe or shamed out of it. The desert presses close on every side - sun-scorched ergs and blowing grit - but within these walls there is only the trial, and the watching, judging eyes of the Geni.
- The Polvi Clan Hall
The spartan heart of the Polvi district, hard against the central market of Vhall Oasis. Where the rival Hebna gild every lintel, the Polvi build in bare sun-baked stone and naked iron: a proving-yard of heaved blocks at the gate, a clan hall of racked axes and ancestral pride, and beyond it the open Plaza of Judgment where the whole oasis airs the matters no single tribe may settle alone. No gold buys passage here. Strength does. The player comes carrying proof of the Conductor's dishonor, and the only weapon that will throw it true is the banked fury of Elder Kaelen and the proud, scar-counting tribe at his back.
- The Ribcage Pass
A narrow canyon torn through the colossal fossil ribcage of a dead leviathan, deep in the Sands of Bone. Pale ribs the size of watchtowers arch overhead and pinch the path into a ringing maze of bone, the only way forward for any traveler bound for Vhall. The desert trolls hurry through it, and for good reason: the loose, hissing sand of the chokepoint is the favorite hunting-ground of a sand-wurm, and the high arches hide scorpion dens and circling bone-vultures. The heat presses down like a hand, the wind keens through the bone like a flute, and the white dunes shimmer at both mouths of the pass with mirages that promise water that is not there.
- Vhall Oasis - Central Market
The neutral heart of the Vhall Oasis: a vast canvas-and-stone market pitched in the shade of date palms, ringed by the banners of all ten troll tribes and built around the shimmering lake that keeps the city alive against a thousand miles of dead desert. Every glance here is weighed by Rokson, the honor-code that governs the oasis, and a tribeless wet-lander walks its lanes as very nearly no one at all. This is a safe place that can turn lethal on a misread word: trade and gossip flow in one breath, ancient feuds simmer in the next, and at the market's edge the proud Hebna gate keeps the Conductor untouchable behind it.
- Vhall Oasis - The Anvil Rows
The Anvil Rows are the Geni district of Vhall, a quarter of forges south of the Caravanserai where the hammering starts before dawn and the soot never settles. The Geni are smiths and sellswords known across the Sands of Bone, and for three generations they have taken no side in the tribes' feuds; that neutrality, and the oasis they hold, make their plain iron-gray a kind of power. Charcoal arcades and ore yards feed the Long Forge and its bloomery, armourers and grinders finish the work, and at the mercenary hall the tribes hire Geni spears. At the district's foot the Geni Gate opens on the road to the Grand Proving Ground.
- Vhall Oasis - The Banner Halls
The Banner Halls are the quarter west of the Central Market where the tribes of Vhall keep their city lodges, each behind its own walls and under its own banner: the river-blue Toleer by the market arch, the salt-trading Saltwell, the Hopli, the weaving Quice, the Ubaru who wash the dead, the Polvi and the Gevlar against the city wall. Every lodge has its banner court, its elder's speaking place, guest rooms and a cistern counted by the cup. Between them run narrow lanes where nobody steps aside first: a shaming stone, a neutral well kept by the Geni, a wall where a feud is written in chalk, and at the edge, the house of the nameless.
- Vhall Oasis - The Caravanserai
The caravan quarter of Vhall lies south of the Central Market, where the desert roads end and the oasis begins. Its one through road runs from the Market Gate past the tally house, where every load is weighed and tolled, down Harness Row and Dyers' Lane to the watched public well, and on along the Smoke Road toward the Geni forges of the Anvil Rows. Off it lie walled caravanserais, the camel market against the outer wall, the Saltwell salt house, the spice and date warehouses and a drinking house nobody respectable admits to. Water here is sold, never given, except the one cup Rokson owes to anyone who asks. Everything else is bargained for.
- Vhall Oasis - The Counsel Houses
The Counsel Houses are the scholars' quarter of Vhall, a walled college east of the Central Market built round shaded courts. No tribe will take a verdict from another, so Dumasque's scholars counsel the heads of all ten and keep the record of Rokson: rulings and precedents, genealogies, water rights, old feuds and how they ended. A long colonnade runs in from the market past the porters' gate, the court where elders wait and the porch of public disputation, and ends at the Hall of Judgment. Behind it lie the library, the copyists' gallery, a cistern garden and an observatory roof. The quarter smells of ink and lamp oil, and voices here stay low.
- The Canyon of Tolls
A narrow red gorge cut through the Tilton Drylands, where the few outside caravans bound for Vhall must squeeze single-file between sheer oxidized walls. The merchant trail enters from the open flats to the south, runs up the throat of the canyon past the wreck of a stalled caravan, and climbs to a fortified staging camp where the Conductor’s false bandits have raised a secret toll-post. Above it all, hidden ledges look down on the camp like the seats of an amphitheatre, and an old Wet Era ruin moulders in a side cleft. There is almost nowhere to hide on the canyon floor and every gun in the camp is sighted on it: the perfect place to bleed a caravan, and a death-trap to walk up uninvited.
- The Conductor's Spire
The Conductor's spire, the tall and once-proudest tower of the Hebna district, now stripped of its banners and guards and standing open for the first time in living memory. Inside is a monument to plundered decadence: a war room whose walls map the Silent Choir's grip on all Sedia, stairs winding up past looted art and treasure to a sanctum at the very top, where the disgraced master waits alone in the humming heart of a mana-core he has rigged to overload. The map climbs as one long, narrowing ascent from the open base, through the spoils of a continent, to the great window where the campaign ends in revelation and fire - and then back down a dying tower with two minutes to live.
- The Grand Proving Ground
A vast circular bowl carved from living sandstone at the city limits, where the bone-dry harshness of the Sands of Bone gives way to the green of the Vhall Oasis. For a thousand years every binding judgment of the ten tribes has been settled here on the sacred sand, beneath the high Elders’ Stand and a ring of snapping tribal banners. Today the great drums beat and the rim is packed to bursting with Trolls of all ten tribes, come to watch their wet-lander champion answer the Conductor’s chosen blade in ritual combat. The Champions’ Gate stands at the south; the Walk of Judgment runs the long axis to the duel-ring at the heart of the bowl; the far gate opens onto nothing but sun and waiting steel.
- The Battle of Ash and Fire
The Battle of Ash and Fire: the decisive engagement of the Morian war, fought across a scorched stretch of the Loberian Drylands where the ground is churned earth and ash and the air crackles with magic and the roar of thousands. The map runs up a hidden flanking canyon - mouth, narrows, throat, and overlook - that brings the player and the openly-fighting Avatar Lythantos out behind the enemy line, then across the broken battlefield beyond: the enemy rear guard, the siege battery pounding the Loyalist center, the shattered formation, and finally the Warmaster's fortified stronghold where the battle, and perhaps the war, is decided. This is where Lythantos stops hiding and fights as what he is, and where the player stands at the single hinge-point on which the whole battle turns.
- The Scholar's Outpost
The Scholar's Outpost: the green, forested borderlands of Crecia where the Morian desert ends at last and the scholarly kingdom of the north begins. The map runs from the green threshold where the sand gives way to grass, up a forest road past a streambank and a wary border checkpoint, to a secluded valley camp of Grand Library researchers - the peaceful heart of the session, a sanctuary where Researcher Elara welcomes the player, recognizes the seal on Lythantos's clue, and sets them on the road to the Library - and on past the old imperial road toward the north and the next chapter. After ten sessions of war and desert, it is green and quiet and kind: the closing of the March of Armies and the opening of the scholar's path.
- The Grand Chapel
The public face of the Monastery of the Yellow Dragon: a grand hall of vaulted stone, dragon motifs, and sacred censers where devout monks keep the old rites, unaware that their Head Monk Gregor has sold the order to the Serpent's Coin and that a hidden stair in his chambers descends into a desecrated ossuary below. The chapel runs from the courtyard fountain up the nave to the high altar, with side aisles, a shrine to the Yellow Dragon, the refectory and larder to the west, the bell tower to the east, the monks' cells and the door to the scriptorium, and, behind the altar, the prior's range and Gregor's too-fine chambers over the trapdoor down.
- The Scriptorium
The monastery's ancient library, reached through a shrouded door off the chapel: centuries of religious texts, dragon lore, and forgotten histories shelved beneath vaulted ceilings thick with dust and reverent silence. The Scriptorium Keeper still tends the reading hall and the tablet vault, guarding the order's oldest prayers, while deeper in the stacks the syndicate has begun quietly looting the archive of anything it can sell.
- The Ossuary of the First Seal
The Ossuary of the First Seal: the Monastery of the Yellow Dragon, a remote ancient monastery built into a sheer cliffside, once a place of meditation and now a grim ossuary of deathly cold and oppressive silence. Its protector-monks, the sworn guardians of the first of the seals that bind Dekkashraen, were wiped out in a sudden silent Choir attack decades ago, and the site has been a place of shadow ever since. The map runs from the frost-rimed cliffside gates through the whispering cloisters and a ruined chapel, into the bone-walled Hall of Skulls where the monks' remains are kept, and down to the Seal Sanctum at the monastery's frozen heart, where the first seal is carved glowing into the bedrock. There the necromancer Vahl of the Silent Choir tortures the spirits of the dead guardians to bleed the seal's integrity, and the player must fight through his spectral wards, cut him down, and stabilize the seal with the soul-anchor before its cracks spread. It is a classic dungeon crawl turned on the highest stakes in the world: the first lock on a sleeping god, and the cult straining to break it open.
