News: 3-1-19 // Thread is made, its pieces in place to be edited as this takes more shape. Feel free to discuss, share ideas, or critique.

Summary:  You have answered the distress call of a ruinous expedition. Whether it is service to your king, duty to your merchant guild, or a simple desire to escape the boredom of the old world you have departed for a new land. It is a land without civilization. At least none that can be easily found anyway. And those who have survived here tend to be the more violent of their kin. Ancient histories talk of immense treasure, but also of even greater curses. When the ship that brought you here sinks in a storm, marooning you at the ill-fated expedition's holdout, adventure turns to survival. Discovering the lost secrets of this land becomes the only way to ensure that anyone makes it out alive. But, survival becomes a distant nightmare when the battle hardened commander, having his own agenda, drives his men to madness and mutiny through suicidal harship in his quest for something else that can only be found on the Uncharted Continent.

The Uncharted Continent: A playable map for the most adventurous explorers.

Resources: (other threads I may have made that all pertain to featured locations in the Uncharted Continent)

• The Wizard Family Tor (a powerful Tor is leading the expedition) https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/story-lore/34207-the-notorious-wizard-family-tor
• Juk'Thali (The Braids of the Maiden) https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/story-lore/34245-the-jewels-of-the-jukthali-river

Introduction: An urgent call for assistance arrived to the Kingdom, soliciting aid as quickly as could be mustered. An expedition, financed in part, and led by a the neigh infamous family Tor has found its beach head on an uncharted continent to be on the brink of disaster. Their ship planted a fortress in the harbor before being lightened, outfitted and rigged for nimble coastal sailing, and given supplies and a skeleton crew. She then sailed off along the coast never to be heard from again. The call for assistance was received magically and divined to be an authentic message from the Tor'ean leader of the expedition.

The adventurers find themselves awakened by the storm, landfall was expected today and the adventurers were either finding liesure time below deck or trying to sleep when the storm broke the ship apart. After taking action to save the ship then being forced to abandon her, if they do not make it to lifeboats they are washed-up on shore and can hear the howls of Gnolls in the nearby forests. They see lights along the shoreline and hopefully make it there before the Gnolls find them.

They have come across the battered remains of a fortress, evidently hastily built, the ramparts are worn, the walls are embattled, but the fortress is otherwise fully operational. Including a tavern, a blacksmith, a makeshift library and study hall for the wizards and other magical assortment already there, the makings of a small town with all the amenities a big city has to offer.

The adventurers are not allowed to meet the senior officers, though they may catch the visage of the Tor'ean leader high in a tower, pondering his next move.

Several assignments are available to the beleaguered expedition and their new relief force.

The Adventure Begins: (Quest Board).

The Recovery Effort (Level 1) - Join a recovery effort and participate in diving the harbor to retrieve valuable supplies from their wrecked ship which sits at a variable depth of 30 feet and 100 feet of water. The recovery expedition is confronted with basic sea creatures, and if they have the perception, a distant structure is sighted further out in the harbor. Investigation discovers an abandoned Aquatic Elf temple. And the ominous foreshadowing of attacks by Sahuagin.

The Kobold Threat (Level 1) - the Gnolls are a constant terror, but nearby Kobolds seem to be holed-up in a cave complex in a small cliff near the landing site. The fortress's leaders have deemed it a necessary step to root out these Kobolds from their homes and remove the threat.

This post is for editing additions to the map.

Travel:

• Some terrain is impassable and can't be traveled regardless of dice roll.
• Each day is worth 1d4 hexagons of normal overland travel. If terrain is difficult then you roll with disadvantage. If you are encumbered and move half speed then roll with disadvantage. If you roll two 1's then you do not move for the day. "Miles" or other "measurements" are unimportant since all travel is measured against time anyway. The distance can be called "League" which historically is the distance you could travel in a single day.
• A ship with normal speed in fair weather will move 1d10 tiles per day. Adjust all seaworthy (or brown water craft hugging the coast) speed based on how fast they are compared with a normal speed in fair weather. If a raft is half the movement speed of a normal ship, then assume it moves by 1d4tiles per day (half of 1d10 rounded down). If you have difficult seas, roll with disadvantage.
• Special rules rolling for travel.
  • If you need to add disadvantage because the movement speed is encumbered or the movement speed is less than normal and you can't reduce the die (1d4 being the lowest die), then just add another roll to disadvantage for the 1d4.
  • Whenever you roll two 1's you do not move for the day.

Terrains:

• Mountains: Looks more jagged and taller than hills and considered impassible except where marked with a pass (those markings are in red and not all passes cut through the entire mountain range and may be dead ends or lead to mines/dungeons/etc).
• Mountain Passes: Will be marked in red identifying the passable hexagon that an adventurer party can travel with disadvantage. Whenever one hexagon contains a pass, the party must roll with disadvantage for all their day's travel until no hexagons contain any passes.
• Volcanoes: Looks like a volcanic cone.
• Hills: Passable as normal terrain, look "rolling".
• Grasslands: passable as normal terrain. There's an example of grasslands marked in green.
• Rivers: lines with blue. Impassable without rafts, ferries, bridges, etc. The major river added is the "Juk'Thali" which has special considerations, and is heavily forested jungle. Other rivers are marked as well.
• Lakes: Blue enclaves, has wavy lines: depending on conditions the lake may be navigable or swim-able.

Notable Locations:

• At the bottom center of the map is a large harbor (looks like a bay or inlet) which is where the wreck of the ship bringing the Adventurers and where the fortress/beach head is located.
• The colored river system to the east of the island-continent is the "Braids of the maiden" or the "Juk'Thali" river.

This post will be for a summary of all notable locations. The first post also contains "resources" to other threads that detail and go into depth regarding the various locations.

Locations:

• Beach head (fortress/starting location)
  • Sunken ship in harbor
  • Kobold's lair
  • Gnoll warren prowling nearby
• Sea Hag's Lair
• Labyrinth of Qor
• Juk'Thali (Braids of the Maiden)
  • Large river system
  • Maze of water and walls of jungle
• The Dwarven Halls of the Spine of the Dragon
  • The Spine runs from the center of the island-continent, north-east, and runs through the peninsula that juts into the sea called the Horn of the Dragon
    • Many passes are marked through the mountains in red, they don't necessarily pass through the entire mountain range, but they lead to many dwarven halls and mines some of which connect to other halls or mines that connect to other passes. Navigating these can be treacherous but rewarding to travel through the Spine.
    • The Horn of the Dragon is a prominent north-east peninsula jutting into the sea, very mountainous. Passes have to be discovered and followed just to explore this region.
• The Giant's Rift
  • To the west is  the Giant's Rift, a vast canyon complex, huge waterfall breaks in from the ocean dropping thousands of feet to the rift floor mixing in steam and lava flows. It makes a sharp bend to the north and travels many Leagues to the north following the western coast.
  • The rift is its own world, relatively isolated from the rest of the island-continent, except that it connects to the underdark and is an ocean lagoon environment accessible by many cave systems that lead to the continent-wide underdark.
• The Elven Forest
  • Once a home to a proud race of various elves, it now is an overgrown thicket, the forest floor an eternal night infested with giant spiders, rats, undead and drow.
  • But worse than the haunts and would-be denizens. The forest still holds on to powerful magics left behind by the once inhabitant elves.
    • Patches of the forest have a subtle lingering magic that affects time itself. Some areas the time travels slowly, others, swifly. Adventurers may notice this if they are perceptive enough to realize the passage of the sun or moon, hard enough to see from the forest floor, have slowed down or sped up from their perception of time. The power of the magic will make the DC to perceive this easier, if a day should have passed but the sun only moved an hour in the sky, it would be more obvious there's something afoot, than if the sun rose 30 minutes late.
    • Because the sun and sky are hard to see here, adventurers knowlegeable in nature may notice that the habits of creatures which only come out at night, or only come out at day, are taking longer or happening quicker than normal, inferring the time of day through the creature's circadian rhythms.

Adventures: This post is for the level adventures. Each arc (campaign) of the story line would be divided by level content in accordance with Adventure League recommendations. I'll work on this as I develop the setting and story better. Ideally the "milestone" method would apply for the leveling, giving the DM more flexibility in throwing hoards of monsters and challenges at the players to fulfill the story.

I envision this to be a series. Where a normal campaign might take you from 1-11 (like the Storm King's Thunder), the idea here is that each Adventure League tier would have its own campaign that might take a good amount of time to traverse.

Eventually allowing you to explore the entire continent and take you through a sweeping story line.

The reason for this is to create not just a more intricate or challenging setting for would-be-adventurers, but to allow them to fully enjoy being level 1 for a while. Using creativity, cunning, and role-play to outperform their level like has never before been seen. Really pushing the boundaries of challenge ratings and what a low level adventurer can accomplish. Then taking that paradigm of play forward through the entire series.

Your ability to play the game to its maximum, and not overpower the game, is the intent of this series.