Adventure Sites in Menusia#
One province of Adventure Sites, which has the map of every site. Using a site says how to run one.
7 sites, levels 9 to 35. What Menusia is like.
- The Grand Promenade
Once the proudest avenue of the drowned lower city of Menus, the Grand Promenade is now a silent canyon of black water. Coral-crusted towers lean over a boulevard wide enough to march an army down, their windows dark, their doors gone soft with twenty-five centuries of brackish water. Nothing moves here but the slow currents and the drifting dead - the drowned citizens who re-enact a panic that never ended, grasping at rescue centuries too late. Far down the avenue a single tower still holds a faint light, the one structure the magi sealed against the flood. The map is a navigational ordeal as much as a fight: razor coral, lurking anglerfish, and fallen masonry choke the way between the white steps at the avenue’s north end, where a tunnel climbs away into the rock, and the vented gate at its south end, where the road points on toward the Tower of the Magi and the Fallen Palace beyond.
- The Tower of the Magi
At the far end of the drowned lower city of Menus one tower still holds a light. The magi of Menus sealed it in the hour the flood came, and twenty-five centuries later their seal holds: behind a pair of pale stone doors and a light-lock only a magus could open, a skin of light keeps the water out and the air in. Anglerfish hunt under the lamps on its drowned plaza and barnacle-crabs gnaw at its footings, but inside the air is dry and stale and breathable. The ground floor half-flooded where the water seeped under the membrane, the magi's rooms above, the library and its jealous Librarian above those, and at the crown the ward heart that holds it all together, with a balcony looking east down the Magi's Way to the gates of the Fallen Palace.
- The Silent Jungle
The Tropics of Dumit after the Great Silence: the vibrant, magical jungle of Menusia become a mundane, ominous wilderness. With the balancing magic of Lythantos and Ettephemone gone out of the world, the forest is a pure unfiltered wild for the first time since the gods made it, the shimmering colors faded to a dull wet green, the melodic humming replaced by the harsh natural racket of predators and insects. The map is a survival traversal, blazed north by a broken column of Allied survivors leading out of the gray ruins of Amone: from the jungle edge where the old sacred path simply ends, along the hacked Survivor's Path through undergrowth prowled now by ordinary, ward-less jaguars, past a dead boundary-stone that no longer glows and a river whose bridge is gone (crossed only by a hand-built raft), to the Far Bank and the defensive First Camp where the survivors light an honest, magicless fire against the first night of the silent world. Every hazard here, predator, river, hunger, wound, must be met with mundane skill and leadership rather than a single spell, and the jungle that was a wonder for an age is, suddenly, just a large and dangerous place that does not care whether these people live.
- The Cradle of Creation
The Lost City of Amone, the Cradle of Menes: an ancient, ethereal city hidden deep in the Menusia tropics, the birthplace of the first gods and the cradle of all life on Sedia. Slender towers of white stone rise wreathed in soft silver light, humming with a faint melodic vibration, the whole city singing quietly to itself across more than twenty thousand years of hiding. The map runs from the deep tropic threshold and the silver mist that veils the city, through the shimmering white gate and the singing Whispering Gardens, along the resonant white stone streets to the central plaza and its Mirror of Souls, past the eternal silver flames and the Silent Watch post to the base of the Silver Spire, up the stair inside it to the shining peak where the Avatar Lythantos has made his sanctuary, and finally north past the spire’s foot to the Cradle of Creation itself, the grand open-air amphitheater where the three first came to Urd and where the ritual of Divine Unmaking will be attempted. Amone is a sanctuary: no blade is drawn here, the city’s own magic forbidding violence, and the white stones glow brighter as the bearer of the Eye of the Gods walks them. It is the oldest and most sacred place in the world, the serene and enormous ground on which Chapter 9 ends and the final reckoning begins.
- Amone - The Outer Wall
The outer wall of Amone under siege: the ethereal beauty of the Cradle marred by the smoke and fire of total war. The silvery light of the city is eclipsed now by dark clouds of magical ash, and the slender white battlements that were never built for war have become the front line of the last stand of the age. The map runs along the outer wall from the West Gate through the central ramparts, where Elder Gorim and the Geni trolls hold the worst of the fighting, to the East Wall, where Forge Master Thrain's dwarven engineers duel the Choir's docking siege towers. Behind the wall the ground rises through the ramparts to the Pylon Plaza, where an ancient shrine-crystal powers the failing shield and Choir saboteurs come to break it, and on to the inner plaza where Warmaster Vorg himself walks into the breach. Beyond that the survivors fall back through the Inner Circle Gate to the Second Line, where Lythantos's Silent Watch bars the inner city's north road, while the wounded are carried east through the Stretcher Postern into the Cradle. The Choir has committed its whole remaining strength to raze the city and stop the ritual, and every hour the wall stands is an hour bought for the Avatar and the rite below. It is a total warzone at the birthplace of the gods, epic and desperate, the opening battle of the end of the age.
- The Source of Menes
The Crystal Falls, the Source of Menes: a breathtaking, perilous series of cascading waterfalls deep in the Menusia bayou, where the water itself is infused with raw magical energy and shimmers with a crystalline brilliance. Ancient legend names this the first thing the gods made, a spring of pure life from which the rest of the world flowed, and one of the most powerful ley-line nexuses on the whole continent. In truth the falls are the water of Menus: the Ancients' mechanisms still pull it up onto the plateau and into the drowned city, and here, at the plateau's edge, it spills over, which is why it runs with magic. The map runs from the humming bayou edge where the boats put in, through the disorienting Singing Reeds where wind and magic conspire to turn a traveler in circles, along channels prowled by predators grown to unnatural size and given potent magic by their nearness to the source, to the Shimmering Pool at the base of the main falls, where the arcane concentration is so high the very air burns the unattuned. There the Guardian of the Source rises, a non-sentient but overwhelming manifestation of the world's own defensive magic, to answer any hand reaching for the Heart of the Falls. Beyond the parted waterfall lies the Grotto of Mana, the hidden cave where the Heart, a naturally grown crystal of pure primal power, pulses like the world's first heartbeat. It is a place of staggering beauty and lethal magic, a wellspring of the arts the Ancients left in the water, and the ritual at Amone cannot be completed without what grows here.
- The Obsidian Cradle
The Obsidian Cradle: the nightmare reflection of the Cradle of Creation, the world glimpsed through the corrupted Mirror of Souls at the heart of Amone. Where the true city is white stone and silver light and a soft melodic hum, this dark twin is all cracked obsidian and sickly violet glow, and the humming has become a discordant scream. The Mirror of Souls was made to reflect the spiritual health of the world, and this is what the world's soul has become under the weight of the failing seals and the rising god of destruction: a place where gravity shifts without warning, where distances lie, where the dead and the failed rise up as Echoes to speak the player's own doubts back at them. The map climbs the same familiar path as the true Cradle, threshold and gate and gardens and streets and spire, but every landmark is warped into its own grieving opposite, up through a Hall where past battles replay on shards of glass and on past the foot of the black spire to the Obsidian Cradle at the path's end, where the Shadow of Dekkashraen wears the faces of every enemy the player has ever beaten. Cleanse the corruption at its source, and the Mirror returns to its serene silver stillness; fail, and the reflection becomes the world.
