Adventure Sites in Moria#
One province of Adventure Sites, which has the map of every site. Using a site says how to run one.
17 sites, levels 5 to 34. What Moria is like.
- Watstead
Watstead is a hamlet in the dunes south of the Inner City. Four peoples founded the hamlet in 2 AWS, the humans the most numerous among them. By 1512 AWS, after famines and plagues, the elves made up over three quarters of its 31 people, and the halflings and the quicklings were gone. The hamlet's greatest loss came in 505 AWS, when the cooper's itch killed nearly a third of the hamlet.
- Chamber of the Blind Eye
The inner sanctum of the Vault of the Architects: a perfect circle of pale enchanted light, sealed for twenty-five centuries against time and the cold weight of the flood around it. The chamber is built around its single heart - the Eye of the Gods, turning slowly above an ornate central plinth, bathing the dressed stone of Menus in a soft otherworldly glow. Side alcoves ring the floor, one of them hiding the tomb of the architect who raised this place; channels carved into the ground run inward toward the plinth, dark now but ready to blaze with stolen power. When the player crosses the open vault door, brass shutters fall, three shield-generators thump to life, and the last fight of the long descent begins on the floor of the holiest room in drowned Menus.
- The Cinder Throat
A smoking vent in the bone-strewn roots of Mt Kyros, glowing red far down its throat. The heat rising from it belongs to no fire on the surface; it is the mouth of the Kyros Underflow, deep in the Emberhollows.
- The Hall of Kings
The royal heart of drowned Menus, breached at last by the Glyph of Passage. Beyond the great warded gates lies the Hall of Kings: a vast bronze gallery where the kings of a drowned city stand on their plinths, blank-faced and patient, lit by the cold blue of failing enchantments. The flood is held back here by wards centuries old and almost spent, so the absolute silence carries only two sounds - the low hum of magic that has not yet died, and somewhere ahead, the grinding of clockwork that knows neither friend nor mercy. This is no haunted ruin like the city outside. It is a machine of a tomb, still armed, and it does not care that its kings are dust.
- The Vault of the Architects
The antechamber to the Vault of the Architects, the last and finest work of the engineers of drowned Menus. A vast circular hall walled in whirring brass gears and caged conduits of magical light, symmetrical as a cathedral and built around a single sealed door at its head. The Architects raised it not as a lock but as a final test of worthiness, meant to open only for a mind that could read its puzzles in their intended order. Two arcing lanes sweep up from the threshold to the door - the western lane past the conduits and the gear-lock wall, the eastern past the cooling run and the resonators - and tonight they are a racetrack: the player on one side, Artificer Kaelen and his Choir engineers on the other, their diamond drills screaming against bronze the lock would rather be reasoned with. Dormant guardian sentries stand in the wall-niches, stirring whenever brute force wakes them. The air runs hot with strained machinery and the cold shimmer of leaking power.
- The Grasp - Service Bridge
The service bridge the soldiers call The Grasp: a narrow, ancient span of dwarven stone slung over the smoldering fissure of the Great Divide where the ergs desert breaks at the rim of the deep, patched with hasty separatist iron. The map runs as one long, lethal corridor - from the Loyalist staging post on the near bank, out across the exposed span under artillery and pillbox fire, to the fortified enemy bunker dug into the far cliff. There is almost nowhere to hide and a hundred feet of toxic steam waiting below for anyone knocked from the edge.
- The Northern Front - Trench Line
The Morian front, where the Loberian Dryland is being chewed to mud and bone. The map runs as one grim spine from south to north: the Loyalist Forward Camp on the near ground, a chaos of tents and starving soldiers; the open killing-field where artillery walks its barrage across the churned earth; the front-line trenches dug in against a screaming Separatist charge; the obsidian-spired sniper alley; the breached eastern flank that must be sealed; and at the far end the secondary line, where the survivors fall back into the cold mud to count who is left. It is a meat grinder, total and merciless, and every yard of it is paid for in men.
- Moria - The Iron Sands Gate
The south-east quarter of Moria, the Morian Capital, between the Triumphal Plaza and the gate the army marched out of to the Iron Sands. Sands Street runs down from the plaza to the south wall, and the street under the wall runs on east past the city's permanent war memorial to the Iron Sands Gate, its registry, its rim forge and its inn. Off these streets the houses keep their walled compounds, each with a gate, a yard, a banner and a practice post; one stands stripped and barred, its house gone out to Watstead. At the heart of the quarter the oldest house tower keeps its roll. The war is won, and the masons are still cutting names.
- Moria - The War Yards
The War Yards are the walled training grounds of Moria, where every Morian, man, woman and child, learns to fight, and where the mothers and widow-generals run every lesson. At the centre lies the Great Yard, a square of beaten sand with drill lines, sparring rings and the overseers' stand. Around it crowd the armoury and its forge, barracks halls, the archery range, kennels, remount stables for Kyros war ponies, the engineers' sheds and the overseers' hall. The war is over and the yards are half empty and half full: recruits who never marched, veterans home with wounds, racks with gaps in them, and a board of names nobody has wiped.
- Moria - The Watch-Fire Wall
The north-west corner of the Morian Capital, inside its walls: the ward of the fire-keeping families, who tend the city's watch-fires and light them when something comes out of the wastes. The North Gate lets the road in past a tally table where every arrival is counted, Gate Street runs down to a small market only now reopening, and soot-smudged streets wind south to the Hall of the Fire-Keepers against the south-west wall. Beacon baskets stand stacked on the towers, the fuel store smells of pitch, and the drums of the War Yards carry over the east wall. The war is over and won, but the doors are chalked with names, and some houses are shuttered for good.
- Nomad's Respite
Nomad's Respite: the long, scarred road out of the Morian Capital's gates and north toward the distant mountains of Crecia, a travelogue across a desert still raw from the war. The map runs from the city gates out past the rusted wreck-fields and abandoned trench lines, through a rock shelter where a sandstorm catches the traveler, to the temporary camp of the nomad elder Kadir at its heart - a place of cautious hospitality, hidden Choir poison, and hard-won directions north - and on past the desert wastes and the ancient cairn-marked trading road to the border, where the green smudge of the Crecia foothills rises at last out of the sand. It is a journey of ghosts and whispers across a land of forgotten empires and a just-ended war, the quiet between the storm of Moria and the search to come.
- The Battle of the Iron Sands
The Iron Sands: a vast, flat killing-field of metallic black shingle under a smoke-choked sky, where the great open battle of the Morian war is fought yard by yard. The map runs as a broad advance northward from the Loyalist forward command post on the southern edge, up through the churning sands where the enemy vanguard charges, past the striding Iron-Clad Walkers and the mine-cratered no-man's-land, with the high ground of the Ridge Line to the east and the wreck-maze of the Boneyard to the west, all the way to the heavy command walker of the enemy's armored commander dug in at the smoke-blackened north. The metallic sand fouls magic and forces the fight down to honest steel; the safe ground moves forward only as fast as the line is pushed.
- The Canyon of Whispers
The Canyon of Whispers: a desolate, sand-blasted canyon system deep within the Morian Desert and far behind enemy lines, where jagged rock walls fold into a maze of cover and killing-ground and the wind moans through the clefts like mourning voices. It was once the sacred burial ground of a forgotten Morian tribe, and faded pictographs of grief still line the stone. The map runs as a linear infiltration from the canyon mouth in the south - the Silent Watch's insertion and exfiltration point - up past the enemy lookout's perch to the narrow chokepoint where the convoy road bends, on to the convoy itself and the POW cages, and to the rear ground where the team holds off reinforcements while the freed prisoners flee back out the way they came. The mission is precision, not destruction: disable the convoy, spare the cargo and the crews, and bring every captive out alive.
- The Loyalist Grand Command Camp
The Loyalist Grand Command Camp: a sprawling, haphazard tent-city thrown up on the barren rock of the Morian Desert behind the Iron Sands front, a temporary capital of canvas and dust where the whole machinery of the army gathers, argues, eats, and schemes. A constant ochre haze hangs over everything, smelling of sweat and cooking rations and fear. The tracks that bring the army in reach it at two picket posts, from the Iron Sands on the east and out of the desert on the west, while the camp gate on the south faces only open rock. From the gate a main avenue runs north past the mess and the quartermaster's depot, the parade ground, the war tent and the officers' quarter, into the inner camp of archives and the Silent Watch's training yard, and finally to the guarded northern threshold of The Strategist's personal encampment - the one place in the camp no ordinary soldier is allowed to go, and the session's destination.
- The Strategist's Personal Encampment
The Strategist's Personal Encampment: the guarded heart of the Loyalist Grand Command Camp, a single large tent that is at once a war room and a hermit's cell. Past a flap watched by the Silent Watch lies a spare antechamber where petitioners wait, and beyond an inner divider the command tent proper - a long table buried under the maps of the whole Morian front, a desk with a few poignant personal effects, a shelf of books older than the war by centuries. The air inside is wrong in a way no one can name: the noise of the army outside falls away to nothing, the lamplight throws no shadows where it should, and an artifact in a visitor's pack begins, very faintly, to pulse. This is where the legend the camp made into a god takes off his helm and becomes, at last, a man with a name - and the place where the player learns the truth they crossed a world to find.
- The Triumphal Plaza
The Triumphal Plaza of the Morian Capital: the grand central square of a city worn thin by a long war and flooded today with a weary, hopeful crowd come to greet their savior. The map runs from the triumphal arch at the plaza entrance up a petal-strewn grand avenue - market row reopening to one side, the public feast to the other - to the steps of the newly-raised Grand Rostrum where Lythantos addresses the nation, past the plaza's heart with its shrapnel-scarred monuments and a temporary memorial wall, and on to the Palace Gates and the quiet courtyard beyond, where the cheering falls away and the Avatar speaks his private, bittersweet farewell. It is a dialogue-heavy homecoming: the end of the Morian war, and the turning of the road toward Crecia and the war still to come.
- The Obsidian Siphons
The Obsidian Siphons: the industrial hell the Silent Choir has driven down into the Great Divide, the vast rugged fissure where legend says clashing gods tore the world open and bled it. The legend is proving true, for the energy the Choir now taps here is the literal blood of the world, raw primordial power welling up the deepest vents, and they have clad the fissure in obsidian and iron and built massive Siphon Towers over the most volatile fissures to pump that power north into Amone and accelerate the collapse of the ancient seals. The map drops from the fissure rim through a warren of scaffold and catwalk and smoldering vent, past Siphon Tower Alpha with its shuddering coolant pipes, across a narrow span over a river of open magma, to the Regulator Hub at the heart of the works where Master Artificer Krell rules his machines and his flame-born constructs. The air is thick with toxic steam and the roar of harnessed geothermal power, the heat alone is lethal to the unprotected, and everything here exists to feed the thing rising under Amone. Overload the central regulator and the whole network dies at once, in fire, and the fissure comes down behind whoever is still running.
