Adventure Sites in Tharsis#
One province of Adventure Sites, which has the map of every site. Using a site says how to run one.
19 sites, levels 1 to 22. What Tharsis is like.
- Bartle Trading Post - Central Yard
The central hub of Bartle Trading Post. The air is thick with paranoia and patriotic fervor as Tharsian soldiers patrol between the tavern, infirmary, and commander's office.
- Mellowdeep Marsh Border
The murky edge of Mellowdeep Marsh, where the solid ground of the trading post gives way to treacherous wetlands. Fog rolls in from the west, obscuring whatever dangers lurk within.
- The Sealed Gate of Jewall
The threshold of Jewall, and the threshold of everything that comes next. The road climbs out of the dry country into the windswept foothills of the Northern Reach, the last Tharsian ground below the dwarven mountains, where the air runs thin and cold and the snowpeaks wall off the sky. Carved into the living rock stand the Great Gates of the Dwarves - vast slabs of granite sealed shut for two generations, flanked by the worn statues of a king and queen who no longer welcome anyone. Eastward, a thread of woodsmoke marks the last living soul in the Reach: Old Man Hargin and his battered camp. Downslope, the ruined trading post moulders where dwarven iron once met southern wheat, before the betrayal soured it all. And high on the western granite, half-buried in a rockfall, gapes the only road left open into the mountain kingdom - the Tunnels of Tyr.
- The Murkvale Sinkhole
A reed-choked hollow at the heart of the Murkvale fen, where the peat has slumped away to expose a black sinkhole. Frontier folk give it a wide berth: the cold that rises from the shaft does not belong to the marsh, and those who climb down into the Outer Reach do not always climb back out.
- Kinforge
A palisaded smelting and wagon town on the Western Plains Road, the first stage west of Blithe. Kinforge was raised as the plains market of Jewall in the years when the dwarves still traded, and it took its name from the great forge under the mountain whose steel was sold here. When the Great Gate was sealed the Council's factors went home and the Factor's House was shuttered, but the town stayed: it smelts the ore hauled in from Kinforge Mine at the foot of the Elderfall, burns Darkwood charcoal, builds the wains that carry the bar iron east to Blithe, and still strikes the old anvil-mark into every honest ingot.
- The Whispering Maw
A forgotten cave on the Tharsian marsh-border that local legend names the Whispering Maw - once a hidden passage used by ancient kings' spies to slip unseen into the subterranean province of Narsis, abandoned for centuries, and now quietly reopened by the Silent Choir as a discreet door into the underworld. Past its dripping mouth the tunnels descend through echoing passages and phosphorescent fungal grottos toward the Smuggler's Drop and the vast dark of the Outer Reach below.
- Darkwood Trading Post
A stockaded timber depot where the Western Plains Road bends south around the eastern edge of the Darkwood. Cutters fell the outer fringe of the forest and drag the logs out by ox team; the post saws them, burns the offcuts to charcoal for the Kinforge smelters, and sends wagons east to Kinforge and south-west to Hatchet. The deep wood is shunned and its paths are said to shift, so the post keeps one rule above all others: no log is bought, and no cutter goes, past the marker posts.
- The Phony Skirmish Site
A small, remote clearing deep within Mellowdeep Marsh. Bodies lie scattered among the mangrove roots, the aftermath of what the official reports call a Narsian ambush. But something about the scene feels wrong: too clean, too staged.
- The Sunken Causeway
An ancient stone causeway, half-submerged in the murky waters of Mellowdeep Marsh. The weathered stones bear carvings from a civilization that predates Tharsis, the Vaelari, whose kingdom was swallowed by the swamp centuries ago. The marsh was farmland until the War of Souls was fought across it: the old arts used here sank the ground, their magic is still in the water, and some of the dead still walk the causeway looking for their companies.
- Darnam Hill
Darnam Hill is the human name for a hill of giant trees on the road north from Bartle to Tharsis. Darnam was the explorer said to be the first of his kind to find the elves who live in its boughs; the elves themselves have no name for their home, and sleep in a different tree each night. At the hill's foot the road passes a travellers' inn and Darnam's cairn, and runs on through the trunk of a fallen giant toward the Temple of Goad. Above, rope bridges and platforms link the great trees, and the elves watch the road. Lately they have been watching charcoal burners from the city, who have started cutting toward the hill.
- Temple of Goad
Just south of the walls of Tharsis, where the Bartle road climbs out of the forest toward the South Gate, stands the Temple of Goad: the one house of the one saint the gnomes favour over the three gods. It was meant to stand inside the city, but Queen Quillilia and the dwarven smiths of Stoneward would not allow it, so the gnomes built it here among the great trees. The family who keep it were slaves of a dwarven mining clan until Julius Mandak and his Legion freed them, and the gnomish priest Jonathan tends the temple, its pilgrims and the village of freed gnomes that has grown up around it. The dwarves of the city still mock it. The gnomes ring their bells anyway.
- Tharsis: the Commons
The Commons is the low town of Tharsis, the southwestern quarter below the terrace wall, where the poorer half of the city lives in long rows of thatched houses. The Terrace gate in the wall leads north up to the terrace walk and the high town, and below it spreads the Commons, the green under the great tree where the first generation swore the province into being. South of the green, Rag Lane and Thatchers' Lane, with their two wells, and the garden strips of Cabbage Walk and Bean Walk run between the rowhouses down to Cottage Lane, a paved lane among the cottages that crosses east into the barracks yard by the South Gate. The sheer sea cliff over the Lutanian Ocean closes the west side, and the curtain wall along the southern brink looks down the wooded drop to Darkwood.
- Tharsis: the Grace Quarter
The northeast corner of Tharsis, where the city ends against rising mountain rock to the north and east. The east end of the north shop row (R&R Jerky, Waterkeep Headquarters, the Ice Cream Shoppe and the Scribes Centre) faces a second row of small shops across the paving, with the Thieves' Knackery and Dark Works tucked up under the cliff. The bank garden and the park with the great tree run in from the Spire Quarter to the west, and below the park stand Hospital Grace, Stonecleaver's School for Children and the house of Headmaster Thomas, with a green strip along the foot of the mountain. From the green a stair cut in the cliff climbs to the Terraces, the houses quarried out of the mountain's shoulder on the quarter's east side, where the Lower and Upper Terraces are joined by the Steps. Grace Lane runs south past the Mage Stables to the upper boulevard, and at the quarter's south end the Armorsmith and the Weaponsmith face each other at the head of Stoneward, the smiths' lane that runs on south.
- Tharsis: the South Gate
The south center of Tharsis runs from the Mage Spire's forecourt down to the curtain wall on the southern brink, where the South Gate, the city's only gate, lets the road drop down a steep wooded hillside into Darkwood. The hillside is the edge of the shelf the fallen Sister made, high above Darkwood and the lowlands to the south. Mandak's Soldier and Officer Barracks stand just inside it around a long barracks yard, so the Legion's garrison guards the one way in. North of them rise Quillilia's School for Higher Education and its garden of dead trees, the stairs below the spire's door and the upper boulevard, while to the east the Art Colony, the Herbary, the Market Plaza, the Rows, a gallery of shops for sale over Market St., the Dancing Turtle and Step Stone Blvd. with the Blackhand Theatre and the Tharsinian Herald lead down to Janet's Corner Park. The boulevard and the open paving climb north into the spire quarter, the road by the barracks yard runs west into the Commons, and Plaza Drive, the Market Plaza and Market St. join the smiths' streets of Stoneward to the east.
- Hatchet
A woodcutters' and marsh guides' town on the last dry ground before the Mellowdeep Marsh, where the Western Plains Road leaves the prairie and takes to boardwalks along the marsh's north rim toward the dark edge of the Darkwood. Its cutters work Hatchet Forest to the south-east, and its guides take caravans along the rim for a fair price and into the deep marsh for none. A Tharsian roadwardens' post watches the causeway head, and the fog bell at the west end of the street has called more than one lost party home.
- Tharsis: the Spire Quarter
The middle of the high town is its quarter of learning and money. The gray towers of the Mage Spire, the Maginaerum Arcanum, fill its west half, with the eastern end of the upper plaza (its willow, fountain and cafe tables) at their north foot and Viores Merchant Inn, the Royal Library and the Observatory along Library avenue beside them. East of the spire the market stalls and the fenced square fill a big paved square below the City Bank, whose cypress avenue runs south past the Mage Stables, while a row of shops from Olaf's Public Library to the Engineering Post backs onto the mountain rock along the north edge. Lanes cross west to the West road and the Terrace walk, the shop row, bank garden and park run on east toward Hospital Grace, and the whole south side opens onto the Upper boulevard and the spire forecourt.
- Tharsis: Stoneward
Stoneward is the southeast corner of Tharsis, closed in by the tall natural mountain walls of the shelf, and its spine is Stoneward itself, the smiths' lane that runs north to south under the rock. Mykil Ironfist's great forge, Blacksmith Kitsh and the dwarf smiths, the cutlers, the bowyer and the leatherworkers line it, and the Bloody Crane opens both onto the lane and onto the east end of the Market Plaza. Plaza Drive, the Market Plaza and the doors of the Waterdeep Theatre lead west into the South Gate quarter, while Stoneward and the upper boulevard run north into the Grace quarter. To the south, Sunshine Ave. passes Alivander's Tavern, Matt's Grill and the Library of Runing, and Williams Corner Park lies behind the grill under the mountain wall.
- Tharsis: the Keep Heights
The north-west of Tharsis is the crown of the high town: the royal keep of House Stonecleaver on its green plateau, where Queen-Regent Quillilia holds court and King Mishnal lies sick in the rooms above. The keep road and the keep stairs climb to it past the townhouses of the great families and the west end of the upper plaza, and doors of iron bars into the Tharsinian dungeons stand in the cliffs around the plateau. Below lie the statue hall of the first generation, the fountain court and its monument, the great thatched hall of the keep household and the walled thatched houses, with the sheer sea cliff over the Lutanian Ocean closing the west. The terrace walk runs along the top of the terrace wall to the Terrace gate down to the Commons, and the west road and the walk both cross east toward the Mage Spire. The keep holds the highest ground of the shelf, the fallen peak of the Sister that the mages of Menes brought down on Narsis, and Narsis lies buried under it.
- The Composers' Grove
The heart of Darkwood, where ancient trees form a natural cathedral and the Order of Composers has practiced their dark arts for centuries. Here, reality bends to the will of music, and shadows dance to unheard melodies. The Conductor was merely their greatest student.
