Adventures in Garedaron Vale

Scenario seeds for adventures in Garedaron Vale

Roll a die, or simple select an interesting scenario element for motivating a journey into the valley of tombs.

A character:

1 - A houseless, and near penniless, nobleman, seeking to restore an old property.
2 - A seemingly pious cleric with a taste for forbidden magics.
3 - An (apparently) scatter-brained antiquarian with a garbled collection of notes and maps.
4 - A pompous merchant with designs on a derelict noble title.
5-6 Any combination of the above characters and motives.

Seeking:

1- A vile heirloom, such as a blood-stained blade.
2 - A piece of massive jewellery – only a occult scholar can decode the inlaid map.
3 - A key, to another tomb: always the return to the dark.
4 - A casket of mouldering scrolls.
5 - A neglected and inaccessible shrine – did we not mention the sacrifice?
6 - Discourse with one of the dead – try to keep it civil.

Complication:

1 - Respectable tomb-robbers, whose guild rules do not permit interlopers.
2- An archaic order of guardians to a select set of tombs.
3 - Adventurers, like yourselves, led by a character, as above.
4 - Treachery: your patron has no intention of fulfilling the bargain.
5 - Terrors: you couldn't very well not expect to alert some ancient evil, could you?
6 - Vagrants, with no interest in the tombs but lurking nearby to hide or pick up easy loot: brigands, outlaws, or vermin such a gallyjaws.

Garedaron Vale - mini-scenario

No one knows which reign or empire it was began carving tombs out of the Garedaron Vale. The mouth of the vale faces West, and the setting sun strikes the end of the valley once a year, on the eve of High Winter. There's a road, also, faced with black stone, in which the weeds never grow. The hillsides are full of cracks and holes, where the cold rivers flow out from unknown paths in the dark.

Some say the first true tomb conceals a path into the mountains which leads to the realm of the dead, but what of that? Tomb-robbers have journeyed to the vale for many years. Some bring out treasures, and some come back shaken and with a dark tale; some don't come out at all, and some speak of rare finds slipping from their hands at the end of a dark hole.

Off course, there are taemsprits and parson-hawkes lurking in the scattered tombs and barrows, but the worst of it (the old thieves say) is what the vile curses of the sorcerer-priests do to living things that shelter all unknowing in an enchanted crypt. What of a spider and toad and rat all blended together, hungry and foul and half-dead?

Barrows, tombs, monuments, caverns and ossuaries, they're all there to see by daylight, but after dark, what looks down on you from the valley walls?