Tier I, Levels 1-3: Hired Blades

Scope: the home base and a day or two’s travel. Goal: make the party locally known and trusted, and end the tier with one hard clue that their troubles were lit from outside. Keep the world small; the map opens in Tier II.

Adventure seeds

Each is a session or two. Numbers are deliberately light so a DM can key them to any rules set.

1. The Coordinated Raid. Humanoids out of the hills hit a caravan, a fishing hamlet, or a pasture, and they fight with drilled coordination and carry foreign coin [Neri-RBP]. Tracking them back reveals a cache of good weapons no goblin forged. Plants: someone is arming the wild tribes.
2. Under the Town. The home base’s underside: the Nighthin tunnels of Leeha, the pre-settlement ruins and flooded cellars of Oceansend, the smugglers’ runs beneath Alpha’s docks [Alm-Leeha] [Alm-Oceansend]. A straightforward dungeon crawl that introduces the local guild (Dark Masks, the Landfall Thieves’ Guild’s reach) [Agosta-Northlands].
3. The Wreck and the Case. A salvage or a storm-beached ship yields a locked dispatch case, a cipher, and a corpse in enemy colors (Heldannic or Thyatian). The first physical proof of an outside hand [Alm-Oceansend].
4. Cold Trade. A smuggling ring is moving cold iron and ice-rimed relics north toward Frosthaven, paid in foreign gold, and the winter is arriving too early [Neri-TG]. Plants: the Ice-Witch thread.
5. The Lord’s Errand. A nearby dominion-holder (a patron-to-be, pick a claimant from Realms) hires the party for something beneath his knights’ dignity: clear a haunted mill, recover a strayed heir, settle a border feud [Neri-RBP].
6. Beast at the Edge. A wilderness threat scaled to the base: a wyvern off the Final Range at Oceansend, a Fogvail horror at Leeha, a mountain predator at the Vale [Alm-Oceansend] [Alm-Leeha].

Set-piece: the First Winter Night

Close the tier with a night the party cannot win by force. The bay ices early; a raiding party crosses from the north (frost-giant thralls, humanoids, a thing of cold) and strikes the base’s outskirts [Neri-TG] [Alm-Leeha]. The party holds a building, saves who they can, and in the morning finds the raiders were guided, and paid. That guide, or his token, is the clue that carries into Tier II.

Advancing the spine

By level 3 the party should hold three facts without yet seeing the shape: the hill tribes are armed by someone; foreign gold is changing hands; and something cold is being courted in the north. Name a face for them to chase, a local fixer, a too-smooth merchant, a lord’s disloyal steward, who flees toward the regional stage.

The gate to Tier II

The party earns a patron: a dominion-holder or the town’s council retains them as sworn blades and gives them a reason to range beyond the home base. That service is the frame of Tier II.