Adventure Sites in Narsis#
One of the Bleak’s places on Adventure Sites, which has the map of every site. Using a site says how to run one.
The city under the province of Tharsis and the warrens around it: the drowned galleries, the Outer Reach where the ruins thin out, and the dungeons Tharsis would rather forget it built. 25 sites, levels 1 to 15.
- The Outer Reach Nexus
Where the marsh sinkhole bottoms out, the frontier ruins of Narsis open into a half-collapsed Vaelari court. This is the Outer Reach nexus - a waystation at the edge of the under-realm, where the boundary between worlds wears thin and the wild caves beyond have never been mapped.
- The Dredging Path - Choir Checkpoint
A narrow throat of the Dredging Path, the beast-carved road that runs deeper into Narsis. Here the great cavern tunnel pinches between walls veined with cold phosphor-light, and the Silent Choir has lashed makeshift barricades and watch posts across it wall to wall. Lamp-fire burns steady against the swaying shadows. There is no way deeper but through the checkpoint - by steel, by coin, or by slipping the dark along the cavern wall.
- The Graveyard City of Dolor
The Dredging Path ends and the dark blooms outward into something vast: a buried Tharsian legion's graveyard, its mausoleums and broken tombs crammed with the living. Washing hangs between headstones, cookfires smoke from crypt-doors, and guttering lamps throw long shadows across an open-air city of the lost. They call it Dolor. The dead lie quiet here, or did until the Silent Choir came preaching from a rostrum of coffins, and somewhere in this warren the cult takes its recruits.
- Choir Forward Operating Base
A network of old dead mines the Silent Choir has reforged into a forward operating base. Makeshift barracks, a sermon-haunted mess hall, a packed supply depot, and Brother Valen's guarded command post are carved into the damp rock, lit by flickering torches and the cold glow of captured Narsian crystals. The galleries echo with the chant of indoctrination and the chink of training spears - a busy, tense, fanatic place, and the heart of the Choir's reach into the deep.
- Deepmarch Gallery
The mouth of the Deepmarch, where the frontier ruins of the Outer Reach give onto the old deep road of Narsis. A vaulted Vaelari gallery runs straight into the dark, its road-lanterns long cold, its processional reliefs worn to blanks.
- The Conductor's Vault
High in the cavern wall above the Chapter Master's dead sanctum, a secret stair climbs into the Vharmas Upper Outpost - the Conductor's Vault. Once a Narsian watch post cut to keep vigil over the under-dark, the Silent Choir reinforced it in black iron and made it the deepest secret of the silence: a windowless War Room where the whole of their continent-wide Symphony is mapped, filed, and kept. The air is cold and dry as old paper, and every wall whispers of a master who was never here and is everywhere.
- The Crypt of the First Legion
A sealed and warded vault beneath the Tharsian graveyard, where the First Legion laid its commanders to rest before their last battle. The air is still and heavy with ancient dust and old pride, and the Legion's own mages wove guardians of stone and steel into the dark. The Silent Choir sends its initiates here to commit one quiet blasphemy: to rob the honored dead of the only army that ever held the deep at bay.
- The Sanctum of Neidan
Where the dead galleries of the Outer Reach give way to impossible light, a vaulted cavern opens around a chain of glowing pools. The water shines from within, pale and clean, and the air tastes of rain on stone. The old Narsians called this the Sanctum of Neidan and held it holy, a resting place of a benevolent spirit of light in the black heart of the under-realm. Tonight the Silent Choir has carried its profane circle down into the glow, come to bleed a crystal of despair into the waters and turn that ancient mercy to blight.
- The Whispering Maw
A reed-choked sink-hollow drains into a black throat of stone, and the throat swallows the light. Cold air breathes out of the dark, carrying a faint wordless whisper that is half the wind and half something worse. Past the narrow gullet the walls fall away into glistening caverns lit only by the cold blue-green of living fungus, where the footing is wet and treacherous and unseen things move just beyond the glow. This is the Whispering Maw - the forgotten spy-road into Narsis, reopened by the Silent Choir as their secret door into the world below.
- The Cistern Road
The middle reach of the Deepmarch, where a great dry cistern flanks the road and a stair winds down into a cold store-vault beneath. The deep traffic of Narsis once watered and provisioned here on the long walk inward.
- The Vharmas Estate Ruins
The buried estate of Lady Erzabet Vharmas, a Crecia noble who carried sunlit grace into the Narsian dark and never left. Elegant fluted colonnades stand half-swallowed by grim under-stone, the roofless courtyard choked with feral surface plants, and over it all looms the raw foundation-wall of the Enclave, the Silent Choir's fortress raised atop the dead house. Enclave patrols measure the rubble with disciplined tread, and on the lower floors the shades of the old household drift through duties an age outlasted. Somewhere among the ruin, a sealed family crypt keeps a secret the Choir never found.
- The Enclave Foundations
The deep foundations of the Silent Choir's Enclave: a claustrophobic maze of repurposed Vharmas-era wine cellars, raw new excavation, and crystal-veined Narsian caverns. This is the fortress's underbelly, its logistics hub and its private hell, threading armory, fungal farm, and a warded prison around the one guarded lift that climbs into the mansion above.
- The Locust Galleries
The brood-galleries west of the warren, where the locust-things lay and tend their eggs. The Vaelari built these halls for the dead; the brood have made nurseries of them, the niches packed with leathery clutches and the air thick with the rustle of small wings.
- Warren of the Maw
The throat of the Abaddon Deep, climbing north out of the old deep road. A ring of worked Vaelari galleries loops around a sunken court, every cell and niche choked with grey silk and the split husks of brood-things. Three ways lead out: down to the deep road, west into the egg-galleries, and up through the brood gate to the vault where the king is kept.
- The Drowned Approach
The drowning western end of the Deepmarch, where the deep road slips beneath black water and runs through a warden’s gatehouse whose portcullis has fallen and whose drowned warden still keeps the post. Beyond the gate the road gives out into a flooded passage that bores west under the marsh toward the Sunken Warren and fills to its roof a few strides on: the end of the long, cold road between the columns of Narsis.
- The Abaddon Vault
The deepest cut of the warren, a drowned Vaelari court the brood keeps for its king. The old wardings raised against whatever sleeps here have been scratched over and defaced, and the husks grow larger the higher you climb, until the throne itself, where the brood-king waits among its hoard.
- Blackcap Hollow
Blackcap Hollow is the halfway place on the deep road between Narsis and the Outer Reach, a long cavern under the fens where marsh water seeps through the roof and feeds the beds. Goblin farmers grow the grey caps, blood shelves and puffballs that Narsis eats, and in the dark of an old Vaelari shelter, under Schzo'ersch guard, the black curly kind the hollow is named for. At its north end the haul trains stop at a stage with stables, a rest house and a clan tollhouse; at its south end the road meets a chasm where the Vaelari bridge has fallen, and crosses on a rope cradle.
- The Chapter Master's Sanctum
The service way up from the lift opens on a different world. Above the grim foundations of the Bleak, the Choir has hollowed Lady Erzabet Vharmas’s stolen manor into a sanctum of incense and dread. Marble floors and looted Crecia masterpieces give way, hall by hall, to a profane library and the old throne room where Chapter Master Kael holds court. The dead of the house have never left it, and the low hypnotic chant of the elite bends their grief into the sorcerer’s power.
- The Sunken Warren
A Narsian warren bored into the rock beneath Mellowdeep Marsh. Brackish water seeps through Vaelari stonework into two descending levels: an upper flooded gallery and, deeper still, a black-water undercroft where the marsh drains into the dark.
- Tharsis: the Low Gaol
The low gaol of Tharsis, cut into the cliff under the west end of the Commons behind an iron-barred door, where the watch of the low town locks up its brawlers and drunks until they are sober or sent up to the keep. A passage under the terrace wall joins it to the keep's dungeons.
- Narsis - The Drowned Galleries
Under the streets of Narsis lie the galleries the Vaelari dug long before the city, and when the Sister fell the lake drained into them. Near the city they are lived in and lamp-lit: cave-fish weirs and smoking lofts, water sellers, a ferry stage on the black water, and the market where necromancers sell and hire out their raised dead, which Narsian law counts as property. Goblin growers work mushroom ledges along the north galleries, reached by punt or by a rope down from the Warrens. Past the last lamp are the drowned deeps: no light, no people, waterlines high on the walls, Vaelari spirals, the roofs of lakeside houses that fell in, and black still water.
- Narsis - The Old Streets
The Old Streets are the buried city's own: the lanes and houses of Narsis that stood by the lake under open sky, before the mages of Menes brought the Sister down on them. The stone houses are older than anything on the surface above, roofed now by the underside of a fallen mountain and patched with goblin brick and orc blockwork wherever the fall broke them. Lamplighters keep every street lit, lifts creak on rope and counterweight, and water drips everywhere. East of Tally Street lies the Schzo'ersch quarter, where the debt boards hang; south, at the foot of the Kings' Stair, the old kings' High Hall keeps the rolls of citizens and sells family charters.
- Narsis - The Stairfoot
The Stairfoot is where the Narsis Stair comes down from the Tharsinian keep dungeons into a great hollow under the fallen mountain, and it is the first of Narsis anyone from the surface sees. The foot of the stair is barricaded and watched, since the stair is the Legion's way in. Round it grew a market of whatever comes down from Tharsis: surface wine paid for in gemstones, and goods sold by fences who pay no house's cut. Up the hollow a haul road climbs past the stables of the dark Narsian royals to the lift house, and to the west the half-buried keep of the old lakeside lords lies crushed under the rock, its archive burned.
- Narsis - The Warrens
The Warrens are the goblin, kobold and orc quarters of Narsis, dug into the rubble the Sister dropped on the city: tunnels one body wide, shored with scavenged beams, opening into chambers where whole families sleep, cook and quarrel. Every goblin and orc here claims a daemune ancestor, and the diggings wind down to a daemune's hall at the bottom of the warrens. The goblins feast or starve by turns, the kobolds burn candles for a dragon they say will come back, the orcs keep a warband hall across the way in from the Stairfoot, and goblin crews cut ore in the far north-west to sell up to Jewall. Lamps hang at every bend, and water drips everywhere.
- Tharsis: the Keep Dungeons
The Tharsinian dungeons under the keep plateau of Tharsis: rows of cells cut into the cliff behind the iron-barred doors around the plateau, the warders' hall and key room under the fountain court, and the sea cells deep in the sea cliff. North of the cells the warders' cutting breaks into older work, the cold forge and ingot vault of the dwarven smiths who brought their craft down the Tunnels of Tyr from Jewall. Past the warders' road grille the tunnels run on north under the mountain toward the Great Forge.
