Act II · The Alliance Campaign
The Corrupted Road
The trail leads off the island. Into the rain. Into the dark. Into a forest where even the trees have given up.
You are a 2nd-level night elf carrying knowledge the official druids of Darnassus either can’t or won’t act on. Someone inside — or connected to — the Kaldorei power structure has been working with agents in Felwood. Conduit stones were placed in Teldrassil’s root system to drain the World Tree’s nascent life force. You destroyed one, or stole one, or let the others sail away on a goblin’s boat.
You have a receipt. It names a place: Felwood office. You have a name, or a lead, or a boat to follow. Act II is the journey overland from Teldrassil’s base through Darkshore and down the long, increasingly dangerous road through Ashenvale — toward the corrupted forest that waits at the end of it.
Vaelithar Duskweave travels with you as far as Auberdine. He has family there. He cannot go further — his injuries are worse than he let on. But before he leaves, he gives you something.
Vaelithar departs at Auberdine. He is genuinely trying to protect the player from the full weight of what’s coming. He survives this act. Whether he survives the campaign is determined by choices in Act III, which the player doesn’t know yet. Don’t telegraph it. Let the farewell be warm.
Terrain — Darkshore: Rocky coast, persistent wind off the ocean, intermittent rain. The road is a mix of old night elf stonework and muddy dirt. Cliffs to the west drop to the sea. Ancient night elf ruins stand crumbling on the bluffs. Murlocs den in the coastal shallows. Visibility: 60 feet in clear weather, 30 feet in rain (apply –2 to Spot checks). Movement through off-road terrain costs double.
A Survival check (DC 13) tells the player the tracks are murloc — but the pattern is wrong. Murlocs hunt in rushing, noisy groups. These circled the camp twice before attacking, moving in silence, which murlocs do not do. A second Survival check (DC 17) reveals a second set of prints beneath the murloc tracks: humanoid, barefoot, moving between the murloc positions. Someone directed them.
The surveyors were traveling south for a reason — their surviving satchel contains partial maps of Ashenvale’s northern approach and a note in Common: “Report any unusual structure or carved stonework to the Sentinel outpost at the border. Do not approach. Do not touch. Mark the location and come back.” Someone Alliance-side already knows something. They just don’t know what.
Difficulty: Moderate
Four murlocs emerge from the coastal rocks — they were waiting. They attack in coordinated waves, two in front, two flanking wide, a tactic no murloc has invented on its own. The thing that directed them — you catch a glimpse when one of the murlocs hesitates and looks to its left — is crouched on a rock fifteen feet above the beach. A figure in a dark cloak, barely visible in the rain. It does not come down. It watches.
Murlocs (×4):
The Watcher: If the player pursues it, make an Athletics check (DC 15) to climb the cliff in the rain. Success: the watcher is gone, but left behind a scrap of cloth — dark wool, expensive, embroidered with a symbol the player doesn’t immediately recognize. A Knowledge (arcana) check DC 16, or a Knowledge (local) check DC 18, identifies it later: it’s a notation mark used by the Kirin Tor of Dalaran to denote sensitive research files.
Someone from Dalaran is watching the Darkshore road and directing creatures to kill travelers on it.
50 XP — Identified the directed tactics
✦ Surveyor’s maps of north Ashenvale
✦ Kirin Tor cloth fragment
Terrain — Ashenvale: Ancient forest, trees so large their canopy blocks most daylight. The road is narrow and overgrown at the edges. This is night elf territory but increasingly patrolled by Horde scouts from the east. Visibility in the forest interior: 30 feet. The forest has a sound — a low, constant creak of enormous branches. Animals here are not afraid of humanoids. Neither are the ancients.
The road runs east-west through northern Ashenvale. The player needs to travel south through the forest interior — off-road — to reach Felwood’s northern edge without going through the main road junction where a Horde outpost has been established. This is a navigation and survival challenge.
The journey through the forest interior takes one full day. Every four hours, roll on the following table (or choose based on pacing):
| d6 | Encounter | Skill Check |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Ancient guardian — a living tree, 20 feet tall, is blocking the path. Not hostile unless threatened. Can be communicated with via Druid spells or a DC 16 Diplomacy check with nature knowledge. | DC 16 Diplomacy or detour (+2 hours) |
| 3 | Horde patrol — 2 orc warriors and a tauren tracker, heading west. They are not looking for you specifically, but they will challenge anyone on sight. | DC 14 Stealth to avoid, or combat |
| 4 | Injured nightsaber — large cat, front leg trapped under a fallen branch. It is in pain. Not safe to approach. But it watches you. | DC 12 Handle Animal to free it safely (gain a one-time scout companion for 24 hours) |
| 5 | A moonwell — small, fed by underground springs, its water slightly dimmer than normal. Not corrupted, but stressed. Drinking heals 1d8+2 HP. Night elves may meditate here for 10 minutes to fully restore one expended spell slot. | No check — reward |
| 6 | Signs of something recent — trees scorched from below, in a 30-foot circle. No natural fire reaches this deep into the canopy. The ground in the center is hardened, glassy, as if superheated. At the center: the burned remains of a conduit stone. Someone destroyed it. But how long ago? | DC 14 Survival to determine: 2 days ago. The player is not the only one on this trail. |
The player encounters her in the late afternoon, sitting in the branches thirty feet up, perfectly still, watching the road. She drops down when she decides they’re not a threat — which takes a while. She’s been in Ashenvale for two weeks, assigned to “environmental monitoring” by the Sentinels but clearly doing something more than that. She has been tracking the conduit stone network. She is several steps ahead of the player and several steps behind whoever made the stones. She is precise, cold and competent, and she is extremely unhappy that a civilian is now on her trail because it means her quarry knows someone is coming.
“You’ve been leaving tracks since Darkshore. Whoever is watching the road has already seen you. The only advantage you have now is that they think you’re working alone.”
Lyrendis joins as a temporary companion for this act. She provides:
- Pathfinding Party does not get lost in Ashenvale. Travel time reduced by 2 hours.
- Tactical knowledge Provides +2 to initiative rolls while she is present.
- Hard limit She will not cross into Felwood. Her orders are explicitly to observe and report, not engage. She will tell you this plainly. She is not lying.
✦ Lyrendis joins (temporary)
✦ Evidence of a prior investigator
Lyrendis stops at the border. She has walked this line a dozen times, she says. She’s never crossed it. She makes no judgment about whether you should. She gives you everything she has gathered in two weeks: a rough map of the corrupted zone, three marked locations that correspond to the “Felwood office” designation from the receipt, and the warning that the satyrs in Felwood are not like normal satyrs — they have a hierarchy and something that functions like purpose.
She holds your arm for a moment before you go — a formal Kaldorei gesture of respect between warriors, given to those who may not return from where they’re going.
Then you cross the line alone.
While in Felwood, the player must make a DC 12 Fortitude save at the start of each hour or take 1 point of Stamina damage from environmental corruption. This damage recovers normally on leaving Felwood. Druids use Spirit saves instead and at DC 10. A moonwell (if found — see Scene 4) resets the timer and heals all corruption damage. This is not a gotcha — telegraph it clearly. The corruption is something the character senses and must manage. Felwood respects no one, not even Kaldorei.
Difficulty: Hard — Stealth Strongly Advised
The two satyrs move in deliberate patrol arcs. They speak to each other — in a language that sounds like Eredun, the demon tongue, spoken badly, as if learned by creatures who were not built for it. The furbolg trudges between them: once a great bear-like forest guardian, now with the same grey-bark corruption you saw in Teldrassil’s dead zones coating its shoulders and face. It is not a pet. It is a victim, still functional, repurposed.
Stealth approach: DC 15 Move Silently to bypass. The corrupted forest muffles some sound but the satyr’s senses are enhanced. If the player has the violet-tinted vision from Act I (failed poison save), they can see the satyrs’ awareness “threads” — a supernatural advantage granting +3 to the Stealth check.
Satyrs (×2):
Fel Flame: Each satyr can once per encounter release a burst of green fel fire — 15-foot cone, 3d6 fire damage, DC 14 Reflex for half.
Corrupted Furbolg (×1):
If the furbolg is separated from the satyrs and takes more than 15 damage without them present, it makes a Will save DC 14. On a success, the corruption partially lifts — it hesitates, growls in confusion, and stops attacking. It will not be an ally, but it will not pursue if the player withdraws. A Druid using Speak with Animals (if available) can communicate with the fragment of its original self that remains. It knows one thing: “The house below the dead pool. The not-kaldorei waits there.”
Bonus 75 XP — Communicated with the furbolg
✦ Lead: “the house below the dead pool”
The structure has two rooms. The first is an abandoned camp — bedrolls, charts, alchemical equipment, all coated in grey dust. Whoever was here left in a hurry. The charts, once cleaned, show the network of conduit stone placements across northwestern Kalimdor: Teldrassil, Darkshore, two in Ashenvale, and one final target in the Moonglade. The Moonglade placement has a red circle around it. Beneath it, in a cramped hand: “Final convergence required. Nordrassil alignment complete upon activation. Target: restore the Blessing without the Aspects.”
Someone — a Kirin Tor researcher, acting alone or with a small group — attempted to force the consecration of Teldrassil using arcane engineering. They believed they could replicate what the dragon Aspects refused to give. They used the conduit stones to route life energy from existing night elf sacred sites into a sympathetic network that would trigger the blessing artificially. It was not malice. It was hubris. And something in Felwood found the network and corrupted it.
Difficulty: Very Hard
He is in the second room when you enter. A human male, middle-aged, wearing the violet and silver robes of the Kirin Tor — but the robes are torn, dirty, and covered in the same grey crystal veins you have seen on everything corrupted in this chain. His eyes are violet. Not metaphorically. Not a trick of the light. His sclera have turned violet, the same color as the conduit stones, and he blinks slowly when you enter, as if not entirely present. He was the researcher. He is also, now, mostly the corruption’s instrument.
He speaks, when he does, in complete sentences. He knows what happened. He knows what he did. Some part of him knows it is wrong. But the corruption has been in him for weeks, and it has thoroughly integrated with his understanding of what he was trying to accomplish, so that from inside his own head it still feels like research.
“The Aspects abandoned you. I was going to fix it. I was so close. Please — I just need the last stone placed. Please. I just — I just need to finish it.”
Spells available: Magic missile (3d4+3), Scorching ray (+5 ranged, 4d6 fire), Slow (DC 16 Will or –1 action/round), Summon swarm (corrupted insects, 2d6/round), Displacement (50% miss chance for 7 rounds).
Crystal Carapace: At 20 HP or below, the corruption fully takes over. His AC increases to 17 (crystal forms over him) but his spellcasting becomes erratic — roll randomly for which spell he casts each round.
This encounter can be resolved without killing Solarvel. A DC 18 Diplomacy check while presenting the charts and the evidence that his network was corrupted — showing him what he cannot see from inside — can reach the part of him that remains. On a success, he sits down. He stops casting. He begins crying. He is not a threat. He is a broken man who made a terrible mistake and will spend the rest of his life knowing it. He gives the player everything: the location of the Moonglade stone, the access codes for the network, and a letter of confession addressed to the Kirin Tor. He asks only that you make sure the Moonglade stone is destroyed before you do anything else.
The conspiracy was not demonic. It was not Horde. It was one well-meaning arcane researcher who thought he could give the night elves back what the Aspects denied them — and whose work was found and corrupted by the Burning Legion remnants hiding in Felwood. The network still has one active stone: the Moonglade. And whoever the Watcher on the Darkshore cliff was — they are still out there, still watching, and they know your face.
Bonus 150 XP — Resolved without combat
Bonus 100 XP — Obtained the confession letter
✦ Network access codes
✦ Location of Moonglade stone
✦ Level Up — Reach 3rd Level
Act III takes the player to Nighthaven — the druid city in the Moonglade — where the final conduit stone waits in the Barrow Dens. But the Watcher from Darkshore has been there longer than you. And Vaelithar’s family in Auberdine sent a message: he never arrived home.