Adventure Sites in Vharmas#
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 smugglers’ tunnels under Blithe, and below them the mortarless stonework of the builders who gave the place its name and vanished. 13 sites, levels 1 to 19.
- Ancient Tunnels
Ancient mining tunnels beneath Blithe that have been forgotten by most. A hermit named Barnaby has made his home here, and the passages connect the Ruins of Vharmas to the smuggler routes leading to the city above.
- Ruins of Vharmas
Ancient ruins where adventurers first arrive via the Nexus. A crumbling settlement overrun by undead and vermin, with a safe haven at its entrance.
- Smuggler's Passage
An old smuggling route beneath the streets of Blithe. Long abandoned by its original users, the passage still climbs by ladder to a trapdoor under the clerks' offices on the market square. The ghosts of smugglers past linger in the shadows. Its north end, under the Blithe slum, has been walled off for a century as the tenements' shared cellar, until giant beetles bored up out of the passage through the rubble wall.
- The Flooded Catacombs
Below the Ruins of Vharmas the bedrock was cut into burial galleries, and the water table has since claimed them. Black flood fills the lower halls, drowning the niches of the Vharmas dead; a branching maze of causeways and crypts that descends toward the ossuaries and the drowned vault beneath.
- The Ossuary Galleries
The burial heart of the catacombs east of the flooded halls: galleries of bone-lined niches, collapsed vaults, and a great ossuary where the Vharmas dead were stacked in their thousands. The dead do not rest, and they walk the looping galleries among the dust and standing water.
- The Drowned Vault
The deepest cut of the Vharmas builders, sunk beneath the water table at the bottom of the flooded catacombs. The black flood is at its deepest here, drowning the last reliquaries; something old and strong keeps the vault, and will not suffer the living to leave with what it guards.
- The Sunken Reliquary
Below the ossuary and east of the drowned vault, the keepers sank their last reliquary beneath the water table, trusting the flood to guard their relics. The flood obliged: the halls are drowned to the waist, the dead walk the standing water, and a breach in the east wall opens onto the cistern where the guardian keeps.
- The Tidal Galleries
East of the great ossuary the catacombs give way to drowned galleries, where the water table breathes in and out like a slow tide and the old burial halls are never wholly above the flood. Water-leapers haunt the brimming pools, and a long stair drops south toward the cistern where something older keeps its watch.
- The Hydra Cistern
The bottom of the whole drowned warren: a vast cistern the Vharmas builders cut to hold the deep water, and the thing they set to keep it. The hydra of the old stories is no story here: the black water at the heart of the hall is its lair, and the keepers meant it to let nothing living leave with what they gave the deep.
- The Sluice House
Under the Crecian prairie north of old Tilton, the Wet Era built a sluice house over its conduit: a vaulted hall of gates and winding gear that shared the water out between the fields, the well at Tilton and a town far to the south that the Sands of Bone later buried. The water still stands black behind the great gate, which someone chained and sealed shut. South of the gate the conduit is dry, and its adders and the shades of its keepers have it now.
- The Lantern Mile
The west end of the Drystone Road, where the road the Vharmic builders laid leaves the drowned deeps under Blithe and runs east under the Plains of Sedia. The builders fitted every block so true that no mortar was needed, and only one stretch of it has ever fallen. The Serpent's Coin hung its lanterns in their waymark niches and ran Blithe's contraband east along the road for a generation, paying toll at the Blind Toll and the relay. Most of the lanterns are out now, and the runners who are left rob whoever comes.
- The Keystone Hall
The middle of the Drystone Road and the builders' masterwork: a single vault over the road and the fracture it crosses, held up by one keystone of warm black stone at the crown of the Span. The Serpent's Coin counted its takings on the west bank and prised blocks out of the vault to sell, and the road's stone wardens stepped out of their niches to stop them. Down a stair inside the east pier lies the Undercroft on the chasm floor, where the builders laid down their tools and were never seen again.
- The Under-Gate
The east end of the Drystone Road, under the hill of the Yellow Dragon. The first order of the monastery found the builders' road running toward the thing they had come to keep sealed, closed it with the Under-Gate and kept a watch on it for generations; their watchers still lie on their biers along the road, and the cold that comes down from under the hill has kept them. The new order sold the gate to the Serpent's Coin, which cut its own tunnel from the road into the monastery's ossuary. Since the Guard broke the Coin there, its last cutthroats hold the road behind a barricade of crates.
