Adventure Sites in Jewall#
One province of Adventure Sites, which has the map of every site. Using a site says how to run one.
14 sites, levels 1 to 30. What Jewall is like.
- Gnomish Refuge Camp
A small, cheerful camp tucked into a sheltered fold of the lower Jewall mountains, where a community of gnomish prospectors and inventors live out their asylum under the dwarves' protection. It is less a settlement than one enormous half-finished machine: tents of patched canvas crowd between whirring contraptions, woodsmoke and steam tangle on the cold air, and a mirror-and-lens tower called the Farsight leans out over the rim to watch the distant plains. After the killing austerity of the Seer's peak, the clatter and warmth of the place is the most welcome sound in days - and the last quiet hours before a soot-grey messenger climbs out of the south with the war at his back.
- Ironholde - The Deep Well
Ironholde Prison, a deep-level dwarven tomb carved into the rock beneath Urkin Valley and sealed for a century after a bloody revolt. The great iron gate opens onto the Upper Cellblocks, a slime-furred maze of crumbling cells and black corridors where the swarm boils up out of the cracks; off it lies the ruined Warden's Hall and his collapsed records. At the heart of the prison the Deep Well bores down through the stone to the lowest cells, and at the bottom of that shaft waits the source of it all: Broodmother Shra, coiled in a nest of egg sacs and humming slime. Behind her, a tunnel that no dwarf dug has torn the ancient stone open from below - the proof that the Silent Choir is already inside the mountain.
- The Frost-Riven Adit
A frost-blackened mine mouth high on Bitterpeak's shoulder. The old dwarven adit was abandoned when the delving broke too deep and woke the cold; now a stair of blue ice drops from it into the Frostvein Delve below.
- Urkin Valley Garrison
Urkin Valley: a hidden green bowl cradled among the jagged peaks of Jewall, drowned in a perpetual cold mist and studded with ancient rune-carved monoliths that loom from the fog like sleeping giants. This map runs from the mouth of the Tunnels of Tyr, out across the emerald monolith field where a Dwarven patrol closes in, and into the Urkin Valley Garrison itself - a fortified barracks and watchtower carved into the valley wall, with a muster yard, a guardroom, cold holding cells hewn from living rock, and the interrogation chamber where Captain Borin will weigh an outsider and name his price. It is the first, most heavily guarded threshold of a sealed people, and every dwarf in it is watching you.
- Jewall - The Gate Ward
The Gate Ward is the part of Jewall where outsiders are allowed to be. The road from the plains comes up the mountain to the east gate of the Stone Rampart, where wardens chalk every newcomer's name, and climbs through the traders' yards, where buyers wait a season for steel, to the Hammer Stair and the Hammerhalls above. Between lie the goat market, the shambles and the tannery, the lanes of the Tharsian hauling-houses and the Long Wait, the guest inn. Dwarves live in the lower houses under the cliff rampart, and in the far corner, round the Wheel's Well, live the pilgrims who came for it and stayed.
- Jewall - The Hammerhalls
The Hammerhalls are the middle city of Jewall, cut in terraces up the mountain between the Gate Ward and the Rune Hold. The great houses keep their halls here. Pafby Hold and Highcoat Hold face each other across the square at the foot of the Hold Stair, their feud over but not forgotten. Greysword Hall is too big for the seven Greyswords left, and Balley Court stands empty on the cliff edge where the gnomes left it in 1413. Between them are family forge-houses, warm ale-halls, the coal yard on the cart road to the Pits, and the Hall of the Spark. Hammers ring from dawn, and a family is judged by what it has built.
- Jewall - The Pits
The Pits are Jewall's mining quarter on the city's west flank, a maze of open cuts and rock galleries around the headframe of the Hammerdeep, the great mine dug under the city between 15 and 41 AWS. Ore comes up in the cage, rides the rails to the sorting floor and leaves by the cart road for the Hammerhalls. The worked-out cuts of the Mother Lode and the Hammer Vein are now goat ledges and the fighting pit where Jewall's soldiers earn their first titles. The nine gnomes still under contract live here, a door under the Council's seal waits in the lowest working, and an old adit runs into the Tunnels of Tyr.
- Jewall - The Rune Hold
The Rune Hold is the walled citadel at the top of Jewall, built against the foot of the mountain from the oldest stone in the city. Its walls are so thick that every door opens on a short tunnel before it reaches a room, and its halls are narrow, cold and lamp-lit. One main hall climbs from the gate to the Deepspine Shrine, where the rune-singers teach the rune-songs, and the Sealed Hall keeps its door to the Ending along the mountain's foot. The Council of Forges keeps its contract rolls here, and the Hold Guard keeps its barracks, its stables and the two posterns. Outsiders are watched from the moment they pass the gate.
- The Great Forge of Jewall
The Fireforge Chasm, beating industrial heart of Jewall: a colossal vaulted cavern lit not by sun but by the sullen orange breath of molten rock, where the legendary Kinforge roars over a lake of lava and a hundred hammers ring against a hundred anvils until the stone itself seems to hum. Guild halls and ore-carts line the smithy district along the chasm floor; the great basalt colossus of King Gorash looms over all; and at the molten heart, raised on a platform of black obsidian, stands the Council Dais where the divided leadership of the dwarves sits in judgment. The air is hot enough to blister, loud enough to drown a shout, and heavy with two centuries of grief and pride. An outsider stands here on sufferance, and every soot-stained eye in the hall is watching.
- The Springs of Mienous
In a high basin of the Northern Reach east of Jewall, on the pilgrims’ road to the Blind Seer of Mt. Tyr, the freezing rock gives way to a thing the dwarves hold sacred: the hot springs of Mienous’ Tears, where geysers and steaming pools breathe a perpetual warm fog into the killing alpine cold. Legend names the waters the literal tears of a sorrowing god, wept over a loss at the dawn of the world, and says they grant true sight to those with an empathetic heart. A shimmering Barrier of Sorrow seals the road on to the Blind Seer, and it will not open to strength, only to grief honestly felt. The map runs from the barrier and the wordless spirit-guide, out across a deadly field of erupting geysers, to the altar and the great Main Spring where the vision-ritual must be made.
- The Tomb of King Gorash
The deepest dark of Jewall, where the Tunnels of Tyr fold inward toward the sealed Tomb of King Gorash. The air is cold and stale and older than the kingdom, and the way down runs in one long descent: through the Whispering Labyrinth, where the stone throws every footstep back as a lie, across the Great Chasm by a retracting gear-bridge of founding-era craft, up a guarded approach of carved stone faces to the runic seal, and into the vaulted mausoleum itself, where the founder's Hammer rests on a black altar ringed by the sarcophagi of the retainers who chose to be sealed in beside their fallen king. Nothing living has walked it in a hundred years - nothing but the stone creepers that hunt the ceilings, and the guardian the tomb-builders set beside the altar.
- The Seer's Sanctum
The very summit of Mt. Tyr, and the stillest place in all of Sedia. Here the perpetual blizzards simply stop, held off in a perfect circle by an ancient invisible ward, and inside their absence the air is calm and cold and thin as glass. A small cave is cut into the final rock, its mouth hung with stone bells that chime in a wind no one can feel, its walls a palimpsest of prophecies carved over and over by Jewall’s Blind Seers across the millennia. A sheltered antechamber holds an eternal flame that has never once gone out; beyond it, in the cave’s heart, the current Seer sits cross-legged and sightless, having waited a lifetime for a coming they could not date. The whole map is an audience: a serene mountain sanctum where empathy is tested and a cryptic prophecy is given, with the cloud-sea spread below to every horizon.
- The Wyvern's Ledge
The high reaches of Mt. Tyr, the pinnacle of all Sedia and the most sacred ground the dwarves possess. The map climbs as one long, killing ascent: from the last sheltered camp at the foot of the cloud, out across the knife-edge of the Ice-Gale Pass where the wind comes in shrieking gusts strong enough to fling a climber into the white nothing below, up a sheer face of blue glacier-ice, and across the Wyvern's Ledge, the nesting shelves of the frost wyverns who own the high air. Above them the trail bends through frozen stone sentinels and the mountain's permanent shroud of cloud before breaking out into the still, blazing silence at the roof of the world, where the antechamber of the Blind Seer stands cut into the living rock. There is almost nowhere safe and a long fall waiting off every ledge.
- The Coldfall
The Coldfall, the open tundra west of the Whispering Forest on the Dark Peninsula, where a line of pods from the first rain came down short of the cliff and struck the ground in a chain of craters. The cold went out of them into the earth in rings and froze it until it heaved; the light of the rift bleached the lichen dead. The cairn road of the first kings of Crecia runs straight across the field from the forest, and the crater-pickers from the Jewall side camp at its biggest cairn to cut cold metal out of the craters. Two Choir marines still hold the western picket hut in the trees, Seekers come at dusk to stake out the craters and look at the pod sunk under the black tarn, and burrowers have come up from the frozen vaults under the peninsula through shafts in the deepest crater.
