Adventure Sites in New Saellem#
One province of Adventure Sites, which has the map of every site. Using a site says how to run one.
19 sites, levels 15 to 36. What New Saellem is like.
- Karthage - The Brazier Market
The Brazier Market is Karthage's one real square, ringed by iron braziers the size of cart wheels that burn peat day and night all winter, and the whole market packs in round them for the warmth. Trappers sell furs off poles, fish sellers lay out char from holes in the bay ice, herders sell yak butter and antler, and a letter writer by the great brazier speaks for anyone in a dozen tongues. Alleys of trades run off it: the furriers' arcade and the tannery, the ore hall and the sledmakers, the butchers and the smithy along the street to the East Gate. The long Hold Road climbs away to Kevin's compound.
- Karthage - The Hold
The Hold is Kevin's compound in the north of Karthage, a dense block of halls, yards and stores inside its own wall of grey stone, thicker than the city's. A company of Mandak's Legion keeps it: red plumes at the gate, a drill yard raked every morning, a forge that never goes cold. In the middle stands the great hall, where Kevin hears whoever he chooses to hear. Everything here is warm, ordered and watched. Every visitor is written down at the gate by face and trade, and nothing in the Hold's rolls carries a family name, least of all the name of the man who holds it.
- Karthage - The Rime Wards
The Rime Wards are the old town of Karthage, the streets on the frozen shore that were the whole city before its walls grew. Tall narrow houses of black timber on grey stone lean over lanes that twist up and down the rise, and rime off the bay coats every beam. This is where people come to stop being found: doors with no names, lodgers known only by a habit, a row where everyone looks at the snow. The ice-cutters work the bay from their yard by the shore, the sea wall carries the Bay Lantern, and a warming house keeps a fire for anyone who needs one.
- Karthage - The Strangers' Quarter
Everyone who comes to Karthage enters by the South Gate, and most stop in the Strangers' Quarter. Behind the wall a tangle of lodging houses crowds round the old tower the quarter grew from: a troll bunkhouse with doors three times a man's height, a halfling inn with a door everyone else ducks under, a loft of pixie cubbies, a dwarf hostel cut into the frozen ground. Newcomers put a name on the rolls and nobody asks where it was used before. Caravan yards of yaks and mules, a fur-buyer, a bathhouse kept hot all winter and cookshops serve the traffic. Braziers burn at every corner, a dozen languages are spoken round each, and plenty of doors stay locked.
- The Peak of the Sky-Anchor
The Peak of the Sky-Anchor: the summit of the highest peak of Leah's Belt, the jagged ice-covered mountain wall of the far north, a place the maps name for the Avatar himself, Lythantos's Brow. The thin air howls with freezing gale, and the flat summit plateau is dominated by a single colossal thing: a rune-carved obelisk of indestructible starmetal, placed here by the gods themselves at the creation of the world to serve as the primary physical anchor for all three divine seals, tethering their ethereal binding magic to the material plane. For millennia an ancient silver dragon guarded this peak; now the Silent Choir, twice thwarted, has corrupted that noble guardian with a fragment of Dekkashraen's own dark essence, turning it into a mindless engine of destruction bent on toppling the obelisk and bringing down all three seals at a stroke. The map runs from the precarious frozen stair up onto the wind-scoured Sky-Anchor Plateau, ringed by the frozen ballistae of ancient defenders and overlooked by the dragon's high perch, with the colossal obelisk at its heart. The player must repair the ballistae, ground the corrupted dragon, end its tormented life, and mend the cracked anchor before the last seal fails, all on a freezing summit where even the wind is an enemy and the Avatar's own Silent Watch, it will turn out, has been watching all along.
- The Cliff of the First Rift
The northern border of Menusia, where the silent jungle finally breaks onto the rocky, fog-shrouded coast of the Dark Peninsula, and where the survivors' long march north ends in the arrival of something far worse than the Silence. The sky over nearby New Saellem has torn open: a jagged, bleeding rift of violet and void-black hangs in the heavens, shrieking metallically, and the first Void Seekers are falling out of it like meteors into the taiga, iridescent metal pods crashing down and unfolding into skittering, light-drinking alien scouts that hunt the dead world for the last traces of divine power. The map runs from the treeline where the jungle ends, out across the exposed gray coast beneath the rift, up to a high cliff overlook of the wound in the sky and past the smoking crash-craters of the landing pods, to a narrow defensible pass above an ancient sea cave where the exhausted, defenseless survivors are hidden while the player holds the line. It is a defensive combat map and a first contact: the introduction of the alien enemy, the terrifying scale of the invasion the avatars' absence made possible, and the End of the Beginning of the whole long story.
- The Hanging Fell
The Hanging Fell, the stony fellfield of Fairland east of the cliff of the First Rift, where the pods of the first rain fell inland among the frost-shattered rock. Where they struck the ground forgot its weight: across the middle of the fell the stones hang a hand’s breadth in the air and stutter down and up again, and in the still air by the craters sound and magic die. The Seekers build impossible shapes out of the fell’s own stones and drag what they find to the Great Crater, where a pod stands upright like a standing stone and a Reaver walks a trench round it. The far-seers of Jewall watched the peninsula from a stone hut on the west of the fell until the night the sky opened; their log is still on the bench. Lynxes hunt the scree to the south, and the fell runs on east to the old border cairn of New Saellem.
- Gilden - The Primal Forge
Gilden, once a jewel of magical research on the coastal machair of New Saellem, now a burning wreck under the first full-scale assault of the Void invasion. The fertile grassland is scorched by alien plasma, the beautiful stone college is a fortress under siege, and towering Void Reavers stalk the streets, reducing the city wall by wall. The map runs from the shattered city gates, up through the burning streets and the academy square where the Reavers grind against the failing barriers, into the fortified Burning Academy where Archmage Valerius holds his spent mages together and the reluctant Jorec hides, and then down, through the descent and antechamber, into the vast subterranean chamber of the Primal Forge itself: a pre-avatar machine built by the First Artificer to draw power straight from the world's own body, independent of the silent gods. Off the spine lie the machair fields where the alien army is massing, the founder's plaza and its buried murals, the college library and the docks where the last refugee boat launches, and the sealed archive where a darker secret waits. It is a high-intensity combat and puzzle map, the last stand of the mages: fight to the Forge, protect the one man of the maker's blood while he wakes it, and unleash a surge of the world's own power to throw the invaders back from the heart of the city.
- Port of Doonan - The Customs House
The Customs House is a walled stone compound on the inlet side of the Quays, where every cargo in or out of Doonan is declared, weighed and taxed under the port master's authority. Masters queue at the counters of the Long Room, porters drag bales across to the great beam scale, and graders blow into furs to set the duty. Boarding officers row out from the customs jetty to search ships before they berth. Behind the Long Room lie the bonded warehouses, the seizure store and the cells, and the Counting House keeps the takings behind three locks. It smells of wet wool, tar, ink and seal-oil lamps.
- Port of Doonan - The Fur Market
The Fur Market of the Port of Doonan lies landward of the Quays, up a lane behind Tavern Row. Trappers sledge their furs in off the tundra through the West Gate, and on the square they sell them by the bale, fox and seal and wolf and white bear, to captains who want to be gone on the next tide. Around the square stand furriers, outfitters, pelt-graders and the horse and pony traders, with the trappers' lodge on the sledge road. The tanneries and scraping yards keep to the far side under the town wall, downwind. Everything smells of wet fur, lime and smoke, and the dogs never stop.
- Port of Doonan - The Net Lofts
The Net Lofts are the fishers' quarter of the Port of Doonan, west of the Quays between the shingle and the town wall, and the port's own people live here. Tall timber lofts stand along lanes that twist wherever the ground allowed, with nets hung frozen on poles and gear stacked below. Smoke from the smokehouses and the stink of the rendering shed hang over everything, and hounds bark from every yard. On the shingle the boats lie hauled up for the winter while the families fish through the ice. At the end of a lamp-lit lane in the south stands the agloolik stone, where the catch is shared with the spirit under the ice.
- Port of Doonan - The Quays
The Quays are the waterfront of the Port of Doonan and the heart of it: one long road of planking and stone along the wharf edge, with the harbour basin beside it, iced at its margins, where the cutters saw a channel open for every tide. Two piers run out into the basin, and the old breakwater with its tide bell and harbour office guards the harbour mouth. Behind the road the lanes of Tavern Row hold the captains' taverns, an inn, chandlers and lodgings for crews waiting on the ice. It smells of tar, fish, smoke and seal oil, and the ice grinds on the piles all night.
- Winebridge
Winebridge, a moorland market town a day east of Gilden, built either side of a three-arched bridge over the Wine Beck, which runs off the peat the colour of claret. The old bridge-wardens took their toll in wine, a cup from every cask that crossed, and the town lives on its sheep, its grey cloth and the carters’ trade. In the pod rain after the First Rift two pods came down in the north field among the sheepfolds. They lay quiet all winter; then one opened. The levy of shepherds and weavers held the north barricade with new pikes, the reeve wrote to Virgil Outpost, and the Warden sent a picket of the Rift Watch, who keep their post in the old toll house. The second pod is still sealed, and it is humming louder.
- The Shadow Docks
The Shadow Docks: the fog-drowned tip of the Dark Peninsula, a jagged spit of black rock that juts north into the Azulean Ocean on the cold border of New Saellem and Jewall, where the Silent Choir has rediscovered and reclaimed an ancient naval base the first kings of Crecia built in secret and then buried from memory. A dense, dark taiga of black spruce and frost-rimed fir cloaks the whole peninsula in perpetual gloom and salt-fog, and the Choir has hung the wood with tripwire alarms and set shadow-cloaked marines to prowl it, a perimeter that swallows scouts whole. Below the treeline the land opens onto the Ancient Drydocks, repurposed stone slips where a fleet of shadow-enchanted warships is being outfitted for the invasion of the south, black hulls that drink the light and read as empty water to every far-seer in Jewall. The whole place smells of cold salt and dark magic, and it exists for one purpose: to launch the reinforcement fleet that will bury the defenders of Amone. The player comes in low and quiet off the water to end it before it can sail.
- The Beacon of Shadows
The Beacon of Shadows: the ruined stone tower at the very tip of the Dark Peninsula, raised by the first kings of Crecia to watch the northern seas and now crowned by the Silent Choir with the Shadow Anchor, the great pulsing dark crystal whose magic wraps the whole reinforcement fleet in invisibility. The map climbs from the tower's storm-battered base, where the alarm rings and the shadow-marines make their stand, up a spiralling stair of cracked stone hung with the Admiral's black banners, to the exposed high platform at the summit where the Anchor throbs against a sky of racing cloud and cold sea-light. Here Admiral Vax, the Choir's northern fleet-commander, waits with his elite guard to defend the crystal that is his fleet's whole secret, and here the raid comes to its point: cut down the Admiral, shatter the Anchor, and lift the shadow from the ghost fleet so the allied navies waiting over the horizon can fall on it at last. The Anchor pulses as it works, a beat of dark light every score of seconds that scours the platform with force and blinds the unready, so that the final duel is fought against the crystal's own hostile rhythm.
- Virgil Outpost
Virgil Outpost, the old border fortress on the snowfield east of the Frozen Wastes, where the mountains of Leah’s Belt run down to the plain: a squat keep of grey stone and its yard, garrisoned again by the New Saellem Rift Watch. Nobody remembers who built it or what border it kept; it stood empty under the drift for generations until the Warden walked her company up the Gilden road after the Last Sacrifice and dug it out. The yard runs from the cross-wall gate past the muster bell to the keep steps. Inside the keep are the long hall and the Warden’s high table, the war room where she keeps the ledger of every tear, the stores, barracks and kitchens, and a chapel whose altar the Watch has left bare. South of the yard the smithy keeps a coal from the Primal Forge alive, the sledge dogs sleep in the kennels, the drillmaster works recruits against iron posts in the drill yard, and the south gate opens on the Rimefield and the road down to Gilden. East, through the cross-wall, the outer bailey and the watch wall face the Scar.
- The Watch Wall
The east side of Virgil Outpost, where the fortress faces the Scar: the outer bailey between the cross-wall and the watch wall, the wall itself with its north tower, gate tower and south tower, and the frozen ground outside it. In the bailey the battle-mages keep their ring of ward-stones, the dwarves build bolts for the wall’s engines, the Watch’s dead lie under cairns along the south wall, and a dead Void pod lies chained to a sledge where the mages can study it. From the wall-walk the Watch watches the east day and night, and from the top of the south tower, through the great scope, it watches the point: the small dark light on the horizon over Lythantos’ Shrine where the rift collapsed and did not close. The Watch believes the point is where something on the other side noticed Lythantos reaching out of the world when Menes fell, and that it is still looking in. Outside the gate the Scar road runs east across the snow toward the Rift’s Edge, past the staked ditch, the bolt field and the glacis where the Watch has already turned back more than one probe.
- The Rift's Edge
Lythantos' Shrine, the once-peaceful sanctuary of the Avatar of Magic, and the anchor point of the primary rift. This is where Lythantos first felt the death of Ettephemone and abandoned his duties an age ago, and it is fitting and terrible that here, at the shrine of his first grief, the consequences of the gods' fall were finally faced and, at a last dreadful cost, delayed. The rift's gravity tore the chaparral and tundra of the shrine apart, and the Anchor, a colossal pillar of void-energy, bound the buckling ground to the wound in the sky until the feedback overload consumed it. When the rift collapsed it shrank to a single small dark point that has never closed, and the ground beneath it is scarred, fused and silvered. The map runs from the safe hillside at the foot of the shrine's rise, where the road from Gilden arrives, up through the warped and transmuting earth to the arena where Void Overlord Xar came down to guard the Anchor, past the fused base of the Anchor to the ancient Sacrifice Plinth at the shrine's heart; the Scar road from Virgil Outpost comes in over the western ridge. It is the final boss arena and the ritual site of the whole ten-chapter saga: the place where one war ended and a greater one began.
- The Rimefield
The Rimefield, the frost-bound ground under the south wall of Virgil Outpost, where the old Gilden road comes up out of the south. The Allied column that marched north after the Last Sacrifice made its last camp here in the first blizzard of that winter, and not all of it marched on: its wagons and tents are still under the snow. Long white wolves run the pressure ridges to the west, where the great white bear the Watch calls the Rimeback has its den. The caribou that graze the lichen east of the road have gone strange since a Void pod came down in the pod rain and sank into the ice to the south, where the lichen glows violet and the Seekers come to look at what the pod left behind. The Watch keeps a picket on the road and patrols the rest.
