Events · Waypoints

A wrecked freighter teeters on a high cliff ledge, her stern hanging over the drop. Every gust tips her further toward the edge, though her cargo hatches stand open with crates still lashed inside.

A mail courier ship lies broken-backed in a pine forest. As your boarding party crosses her buckled deck, someone trapped below knocks a distress signal against the hull planks.

A noble household yacht has crashed into the canopy of a hanging forest. Gold-leaf heraldry gleams on her stern, and expensive silver tableware is scattered across the branches.

An Excise cutter lies split open on a rockslide slope, her blue hull scorched black. Her evidence locker has burst open, scattering confiscated contraband down the hillside.

A derelict hull hangs in the air, stripped to her ribs with the tar gnawed out of every seam. Inside the dark hold, thousands of gloomwings shift and rustle in their roost.

Twenty years ago, the Crown and the Free Captains fought a pitched battle through this pass. Dozens of moss-covered shipwrecks still litter the rocks beneath faded battle pennants.

High on a glacier, a ship sits encased in blue ice up to her rails. Through the clear ice, you can see her frozen crew still at their stations and crates of provisions stacked in the galley.

A Guild mail cutter has crash-landed in a grassy meadow. Her mailbags have burst open on impact, scattering letters and parcels across a mile of grass.

This rock is rich with crystal, but the seams are crawling with thumb-sized crystal mites that feed on magical energy. Every mana gauge aboard your ship twitches toward them.

What looked like a rocky outcrop is actually a slumbering crystal leviathan, its massive hide encrusted with raw crystal. Loose crystal scales litter the stone around its flanks.

A Guild claim-post stands on this outcrop, guarded by a grizzled prospector with a pickaxe on her shoulder and a loaded crossbow in reach. "My claim," she warns, "but I'll sell you a share."

A fissure in this floating rock opens into a hollow geode cavern lined with crystal. The entire boulder groans and shifts dangerously as your ship's shadow crosses it.

The crystal vein in this rock hums at a bone-rattling pitch. As you close in, the vibration grows loud enough to make your ship's own crystal stores hum in answer.

Six unlicensed miners are working this outcrop without tools—two of them are wild shapers pulling crystal straight from the rock with their bare hands. They freeze when they spot your ship.

A towering wall of gray cloud blocks your course, roaring with fist-sized hailstones.

Without warning, the crosswind flips into a vertical downdraft, slamming your ship a hundred feet down through the clouds.

The warm updraft inside this storm is filled with juvenile storm-rays gliding on the gusts. High above them, a massive mother ray circles on watch.

An Excise patrol cutter has been shadowing your ship since dawn. Just ahead, a towering gray storm cell rises out of the cloud bank.

At the center of the storm lies a pocket of calm blue air. A light trading skiff floats there with slack sails and a starving crew—the storm wall is too violent for their small hull, trapping them here for nine days.

The cloud bank is below freezing, coating your rigging and spars in thick white rime ice until the ship begins to sink under the weight.

A group of young avians with painted ceremonial feathers are riding the storm gusts in a clan trial. One young flier has injured her wing and is spiraling down toward the abyss.

A canvas-roofed hut, a bean garden, and a goat occupy this small floating island. An old hermit with a mage's channel-scars on his hands invites you to anchor—provided your crew doesn't mind a lecture.

Fresh rainwater has filled a sheltered stone basin beneath an overhang, forming a deep, clear pool. With no enemies in sight, your exhausted crew is eager to wash up and rest.

At a quiet night anchorage, your crew folds paper sky-lanterns out of outdated charts after discovering it is one of their shipmates' birthdays.

A Free Captains' sloop flying a patched black sail is already moored at this anchorage. Her captain raises a bottle in greeting: "Plenty of room for two ships, provided nobody starts a fight!"

You moor at an unmanned Guild anchorage post equipped with a mooring ring, a rain barrel, and a supply chest stenciled TAKE ONE, LEAVE ONE. Passing captains have carved sky warnings into the timber post.

A collapsed magehold library rests at the bottom of a crater lake, only its green copper dome rising above the surface. Through the submerged upper doors, waist-deep water fills the halls.

Cracked glass display cases line the flooded reading room, a few still watertight. Beneath the dark water, sections of the rot-weakened floor have collapsed into the lower vaults.

A spiral stair leads down into the flooded book stacks. Gliding through the dark water is the library's bound guardian—a water elemental endlessly reshelving ruined books—blocking a watertight cabinet of intact tomes.

An ancient Academy golem foundry is carved into the mountainside behind towering furnace doors. Inside, ranks of half-finished, faceless stone golems stand facing the entrance.

The casting hall is lined with stone molds and cold furnaces. As you cross the floor, the faceless stone golems grind their heads around to track your mages' mana.

A towering, fully finished war-golem guards the inner vault door. As you enter, it strides forward to attack, its enchanted stone sealing every crack as fast as it opens.

Inside the vault rests a living golem core—a fist-sized stone heart that beats with warm energy—next to the foundry's locked iron pay-chest.

Beneath a burned-out manor house, a deep wine cellar descends into a pocket of the Hush. By the third landing, your enchanted lanterns dim to tiny blue sparks in the magic-draining gloom.

Rows of dusty wine racks stretch into the gloom, broken by pockets of magic-draining dead air that numb your mages' hands. Gray Hush-rats watch silently from the shelves.

In the round well-chamber at the bottom, a pony-sized Hush-hound lies curled around a black Shard-crystal and an iron lockbox. Its breath snuffs out magical light. As you enter, it raises its head to snarl.

A skywyrm has made its lair in the caves of this floating crag, though the beast is currently away hunting. Crushed bones and a broken Guild lantern litter the entrance ledge, and treasure glitters deeper inside.

The cave passage narrows to a crumbling ledge of shale and old bones above a thousand-foot drop. The rock cracks under the first boot.

The inner cavern is piled with the skywyrm's hoard: silver plate, coins, a ship's bell, and raw crystal. In the center of the nest rest three barrel-sized wyrm eggs, warm to the touch.

A pre-Charter Academy observatory sits cracked open on the mountainside, its giant brass telescope aimed at the earth. Your mana gauges twitch—the ruin is riddled with pockets of magic-draining dead air.

Beneath a painted star-ceiling, stone statues of Academy masters line the lecture hall, their eyes tracking your party. Where the floor has cracked open, pockets of dead air kill any spell.

A massive brass planetary orrery hangs half-collapsed through the rotten floor into the story below. The remaining floorboards tilt perilously toward the ragged hole.

In the highest chamber beneath the cracked dome, a heavy oak desk stands bolted to the floor. Deeply gouged into the wood with a knife point is a familiar symbol: a crossed circle.

Beneath an abandoned refinery town, a maze of stone tunnels branches off in every direction. Fresh smuggler chalk-marks on the walls show the warren is still in active use.

The tunnels split into a dozen branching passages marked with hooked chalk symbols. In a side passage, a skeleton lies crushed beneath a triggered deadfall beam.

In a lamplit underground counting room, four armed smugglers look up from a table piled with coin. Chained to a pipe in the corner is a furious gnome tinker they are holding for ransom.

The lord of this rock sells delving permits at his gate for thirty silver plus a third of any treasure you recover. Beneath his tower, the ancient vault is guarded by bound elementals.

The first vault doorway is sealed by a curtain of living fire bound within an iron ring. Through the scorching blaze, you spot crates of raw crystal stacked in the antechamber.

A bound air elemental howls in a circular gale through the second hall, hurling anything loose against the stone walls. Silver coins lie scattered in the corners.

The final chamber is sealed by a solid slab of granite carved with the lord's seal. Behind the stone, you can hear the ticking of the vault's clockwork mechanisms.

The tunnels of this abandoned crystal mine are overgrown with pale, man-sized fungi. Warm, damp air drifts from the entrance, thick with the scent of yeast and spores.

The main tunnel is a dense forest of giant pale mushrooms. Every footstep releases golden clouds of hallucinogenic spores that make your crewmates dizzy and giggly.

The deepest shaft ends in a fresh rockfall. Faintly from behind the rubble, trapped miners tap a distress signal with a pickaxe—while a thick vein of crystal gleams across the unstable ceiling above.

A stone chapel is carved into the underside of this floating rock, its oil lamps still burning. Hundreds of dead miners' names cover the walls—a few citizen-born, and scores marked Lowborn.

Every name on the wall is dated to the same week forty years ago, when a mine flood drowned the lower shafts. As you read, a disembodied whisper recites the names of the dead aloud.

Behind the altar, steps descend to a small crypt where a single pale wisp hovers over a reliquary chest bearing the old mine lord's crest. For forty years, the lone spirit has recited the names of the drowned.

A gnome burial vault is built into the cliff face behind a heavy brass door fitted with forty interlocking tumblers. The Compact buries its master tinkers alongside their finest inventions—and guards them with deadly clockwork.

The corridor beyond echoes with clockwork ticking. Scythe-like pendulum blades sweep down from the dark ceiling, triggered by spring-loaded floor tiles.

Two towering brass clockwork sentinels flank the inner tomb door, their ratcheting heads swiveling to lock onto your party. Behind the wall panelling, a central drive-wheel hums.

The burial chamber is laid out as a master workshop. The deceased tinker rests on her workbench surrounded by her finest tools, with shelves of unsold clockwork inventions lining the walls.