Adventure Sites in Esthar#
One province of Adventure Sites, which has the map of every site. Using a site says how to run one.
17 sites, levels 6 to 22. What Esthar is like.
- Smuggler's Landing
The last map of the Sunken Vault, and the first quiet ground in a very long time. Smuggler’s Landing is a secluded beach of dark sand inside a great sea cave on the Lutanian shore, at the foot of the sea cliffs below the Dhjarian Pines - a hidden exit from the ocean, away from any Silent Choir patrol on the open coast. The surf rolls in grey at the cave mouth, where you crawl ashore with the Eye of the Gods cold in your pack; above the high-tide line the cliffs break into dry hollows and freshwater seeps under dark pine and fern. East of the cave, past the Gates of Dhjar, the old royal hunting woods of Arbrest rise inland: the face-trees of the Verdant Oracle keep watch there, and a royal caravan went in generations ago and never came out. The cliffs above the cave hold only pines, outliers of the Dhjarian Pines. The chapter ends here: a fox in the ferns, the scribe’s map unfolded, and the long grey ocean turning over the way down to a drowned city while you reckon at last that your enemy is a god.
- The Arbrest Woods
The Arbrest woods, inland on the headland east of the Gates of Dhjar: royal hunting grounds of the Esthar kings once, and much older than that. An overgrown ride runs in from the King’s March-Stone to a fork. East of the fork stands the roofless hunting lodge with its kennels and mews. North, three oaks with faces grown into their bark mark the Verdant Oracle’s path past the hound stones and the Hart’s Well to the Hollow Circle, where the oldest oaks stand in a ring around the Oracle, and beyond it the Undying Heart Tree, green in every season. South, the sunken road and the King’s Road from the Esthar walls meet where the paving ends, and wheel-ruts run off into the trees to the hollow where a royal caravan went over generations ago and never came out: its carriages, its scattered jewels and its unburied dead. Deer graze the old park to the east, and a bear lies up in the brake below the deer leap.
- The Cartographer's Spire
The coastal ruins of old Esthar: a city of the Fallen Kingdom, all collapsed towers and haunted avenues, where the ground slipped after the fall and let the Lutanian sea into its lower streets. The whole open-air graveyard climbs from the spirit-haunted Library Plaza, through the green water of the Flooded District and the bone-quiet ruins of the Great Library, to the broken Cartographer's Spire that leans against the grey sky. At its top waits the map chamber and its brass orrery, the one machine that can wake a living map of drowned Menus, the sunken city, and reveal the secret way in. A rival Choir seeker team is already here, racing you to the same prize.
- The Grand Dig Site
The Silent Choir's great excavation on the western edge of the Plains of Sedia, where the grass dies into the dust of Esthar. A vast open pit has been torn from sacred ground, ringed by tents and earth-moving rigs and worked by gangs of laborers under armed guard. The whole sprawling scar is the loudest thing for miles - which is exactly why a careful eye begins to suspect it is a decoy.
- The Barrow Mouth
A ring of leaning barrow-stones in the haunted hinterland of Esthar, where the earth has slumped to open the throat of a far older grave. The stair beneath drops into the Tombs of Amone, catacombs of the fallen ancients.
- The Choir's Coastal Camp
Where a coastal marsh drowns at last into the grey Estharian sea, the Silent Choir has hidden its real work: a salvage camp of diving rigs, dripping machinery, and quiet, hard-eyed personnel. Cranes lean over black water, divers go down and do not always come up, and the engineer's tent holds the proof the decoy dig was built to conceal - the Choir is dredging something out of the deep off this coast.
- The Sunken City Gate
The black floor of the Lutanian Ocean off the cursed Esthar coast, where the orrery's bearing finally runs out of down. A graveyard of sunken ships sprawls across the seabed in the ghost-blue light of glow-kelp, and beyond it the ground falls away into the Leviathan's trench. At the far end, roaring in a wound in the rock, stands the Vented Gate: the sea intake of the aqueducts of Menus, where the Ancients' mechanisms still draw the ocean in through a column of scalding water that has sealed the drowned city since the flood. The map descends from a Choir staging shelf, out across the Wreckage Field, along the trench's killing lip, through the Divemasters' blockade, and at last to the scalding vent that is the only door left into drowned Menus.
- Menes War College
The prestigious military academy and command center where General Theron Menes holds court. This imposing complex of stone and iron houses both the training of future officers and the planning of current campaigns. Banners bearing the Menes family crest, a black eagle on crimson, hang from every tower. The college stands inside the inner walls, the ones that held when the rest of Menes burned at the end of the War of Souls.
- The Grand Palace
The magnificent seat of Tharsian power, where generations of rulers have held court. Its marble halls and gilded chambers host the Festival of Founding, and tonight a conspiracy that will change history forever. When Menes burned at the end of the War of Souls the Palace held on its hill, and it has never emptied.
- Ruins of Old Tharsis
The shattered remains of the quarter of Menes the Maygonites call Old Tharsis, because the founders of Tharsis came out of it; its oldest stones are millennia older than their city. Crumbling temples, sealed vaults, and forgotten tombs sprawl across the landscape. The Conductor fled here seeking something ancient and powerful, something that could reshape the entire continent. The ruins lie outside the inner walls of Menes, in the part of the city that burned for eleven days at the end of the War of Souls and emptied in the centuries after.
- The Faction Stables
The compound of the four great racing factions, a walled quarter above the Triumphal Way. Around a central cobbled yard stand the barracks of the Blues and Greens and the lesser Reds and Whites, the coursers' stalls, the training paddock, the tack hall and wheelwrights' yard, the shared shrine of the racing gods and the masters' hall from which the factions moved the mob of the whole city.
- The Forum of the Games
The Forum of the Games, the civic plaza that fronts the Coliseum on its southern side. Here the crowds gathered before the shows, the aediles who paid for the games courted the mob, relic-sellers hawked the sand and blood of famous fighters, and the Temple of Nemesis received the prayers of the fearful. From the forum a colonnaded road, the Via, still runs east toward the ruined heart of the Inner City.
- The Great Arena
The Great Arena of the Menes Coliseum, a colossal oval of tiered stone rising from the ruined heart of Esthar. Rank on rank of stands climb from the killing sand to the open sky, pierced by the monumental gates through which crowds, fighters and beasts once poured. Beneath the raked sand the hypogeum still hums with the machinery that lifts the condemned into the light; above it, the sand still drinks blood, for the games never truly stopped.
- The Great Course
The Great Course of the Menes Hippodrome, a vast racing stadium: a long sand track loops around a monument-crowned spina, the carceres stand ready at the north line beneath the Grand Portal, tiered stands climb both long sides to the Kathisma and sweep round the southern sphendone, and beneath it all the undercroft holds the stables, the hysplex and the great lift.
- The Ludus Magnus
The Ludus Magnus, the great gladiator school that fed the Coliseum its fighters. A walled world unto itself, built around a vast sanded training yard: barred cells and barracks along the west, the armoury, smithy and doctore's quarters to the east, the baths, shrine of Nemesis, mess and columbarium to the north, and the muster hall opening south to the passage down to the sand. Behind it all runs the caged walk to the beast vivarium.
- The Triumphal Way
The Triumphal Way, the great ceremonial forum between the Hippodrome and the faction compounds. Winning charioteers were paraded across its paving past the fountain of the coursers, the shrines of the four factions and the monuments of dead champions; the games-market lines its western edge, and from its east side the Via runs on toward the ruined Inner City.
- The Vivarium
The vivarium of the Coliseum, the sprawling menagerie where the beasts of the games were caged, starved and readied for the sand. A ring of cages surrounds the great testing-pit at its heart; the aviary and reptile house lie north, the elephant house and the aquatic tanks east, the butchery and the bestiarii quarters west and south, and caged keepers' aisles thread the whole reeking maze. The empire is fallen, but the pens are not empty.
