Tier II, Levels 4-6: Sworn Blades

Scope: the home region and the routes out of it. Goal: turn three local clues into proof of a regional conspiracy, and put a name and a face to one of its agents. The map opens: rivers, passes, and the nearer dominions.

Adventure seeds

1. The Spy-Lord’s Shadow. The fleeing face from Tier I runs to a dominion whose baron is one of the hidden Thyatian agents, Longtooth of Latela or Alak Dool [Neri-RBP]. The party, still too low to confront a 15th-level lord, must gather proof: intercept a courier, turn a servant, survive a hunt through his lands. Reveals: the outside hand is Thyatis.
2. The River Road. Escort or investigation along the Vinisk-Ransarn-White Bear artery, among the Vatski boyars of the Ransarn and the Viaskoda of the plains [Neri-TG] [Neri-Viask] [MMB-Region]. The party needs the northern peoples as allies, and the conspiracy is turning those same peoples against the dominions.
3. The Volek Leiho. The party attends the Viaskoda summer gathering as envoys for their patron [Neri-Viask]. Someone is there to provoke the Banners to war, a staged insult, a murdered chief, Thyatian gold in a Red Banner captain’s tent. Stop it, and win a Banner’s friendship for later.
4. Dawn Rising Besieged. A down-scaled, early echo of M2: the renegade cleric Coiger de Mory’s giants raid the frontier town of Dawn Rising [M2] [Neri-RBP]. The party cannot break the raiders, but can save the town, learn that Coiger is being fed intelligence, and take a prisoner who knows the cipher.
5. Into the Catbergs / the Final Range. A wilderness tier-crawl into humanoid-held hills to destroy an arming-depot, the source of the good weapons from Tier I [Neri-TG] [Alm-Oceansend]. A dungeon with a paymaster at the bottom.
6. The Cold Errand. Following the smuggled relics, the party reaches a shrine or cairn of the Ice Witches and disturbs something half-woken [Neri-TG] [LoZ-R2R]. First real contact with the native-evil arm of the spine.

Set-piece: the Paymaster

Mid-tier, stage a confrontation with a field agent of the conspiracy, a quartermaster, a spymaster, a corrupted officer, someone the party can actually beat at level 5. His papers lay the conspiracy bare: two signatures, one Thyatian, one in a cold cipher that no living scholar reads. The party now knows there are two hands, working together.

Advancing the spine

The tier ends with the party holding proof that (a) Thyatis is behind the destabilization and (b) it is married to an old ice-power in the north. Their patron believes them. The problem is now too big for a patron: it needs the crown.

The gate to Tier III

Word of the party’s work reaches Alpha (or a great lord with the king’s ear). They are summoned, no longer sworn blades but agents of consequence, and sent to do what an army cannot do quietly.