The Shrine in the East - a Pathfinder 1e Arthurian Adventure

About the adventure

Three centuries ago, a people gathered together on ships and prepared to cross the void between worlds. The land they came from was dying — a slow catastrophe of failing seasons and encroaching darkness that no wisdom could arrest and no faith could reverse. Leading them was King Cuthbert the Redeemer, a man chosen by the Pentad, their chosen gods, to lead them. Holding aloft the Sword of the Redeemer at the bow of the lead ship, he parted the veil between worlds, leading his people to safety. These exiles came to rest on the western peninsula of the land they now call Haven, on a seacoast that would become the site of the city now called Landing. They had survived the crossing. They had nowhere else to go. Cuthbert ruled, and ruled well, reigning for nearly thirty years. In that time, he built the structures that still define Haven: the nine Earldoms, the covenant with the Pentad, the knightly code, the processional road between Landing and Sanction, the castle Tintavel on the western bank of a tranquil lake. He was not a perfect king in the sense of never making mistakes; he was a perfect king in the sense that his errors were the kinds made by a man who cares more about what he is building than about his place in the building of it. Then, after 30 years on the throne, he abdicated, and passed into the wild east, carrying the sword that was a symbol of his kingdom with him on a final quest. Haven has endured, working over the centuries to produce a kingdom with deep roots. The Pentad still governs spiritual life. The Earls still govern the settled regions. The king governs both all without fear or favor. The current king is Harold II, known as the Young King — thirty years old, twelve years on the throne, with a civil war comprising the first ten of them. He was a questing knight before he was a king, and the common people remember it. He settled the rebellion by four of his nine Earls through attrition more than resolution. He has appointed the kingdom's first royal magician, a decision the church opposes with a precision and vigor it reserves for matters it considers dangerous. He is attempting, with the patience of a man who intends to be here in twenty years and wants those twenty years to have mattered, to build the Crown into something more than the name given to the largest armed faction in Haven. The Sword of the Redeemer is still in the east, said to be resting in the shrine where Cuthbert left it. Haven's knights have long undertaken the quest to recover it — the sacred weapon, the covenant's symbol, the one thing the founding story describes as unfinished. The Shrine in the East beckons forth both the brave and the foolhardy to join the line of knights who have attempted the Sword Quest, and many hold out hope that it should be recovered in the kingdom's hour of greatest need.