The Shadowfell Road ends in Thay.

This is where the book technically breaks its promises. While every other place so far has been presented as somewhere the party could go, the text here sounds almost scared when it talks about the Thayan heartland because that’s where Szass Tam and all his epic-level wizard buddies live. It makes it very clear that the PCs should not go there.

Fortunately, the bulk of this section is not actually talking about the massive plateau that makes up the Thayan heartland, but about the peripheral areas surrounding that plateau. Special attention is given to Surcross and Veil, a pair of fortified towns at its base, as well as to the Netherese flying fortress that’s currently besieging them.

Veil is where the Shadowfell Road ends. Surcross is a short distance away and is where all of Valindra’s supplies come from. The main reason the PCs would want to come here is to disrupt that supply network in order to defeat her back in Neverwinter. Depending on how the GM sets things up, it’s also possible her soul vessel is hidden somewhere in Surcross.

The area around these two cities is a horrifying wasteland of destroyed nature and abandoned villages whose ground is coated in bits of bone and flesh that were too broken up to animate. We’ll take a look at the general area here, and then zoom into the cities and fortress in future posts.

Overview of Thay

In editions past, Thay used to be a slave-holding nation of evil wizards whose schtick was over-specializing in one of D&D’s schools of magic. Their ideology was very similar to fascism with wizards at the top of the heap, but they tried to present a more “friendly” face to the outside world, setting up trade enclaves while keeping their dastardly schemes secret.

I believe the lich Szass Tam used to be a member of Thay’s ruling council, but now he’s taken over completely and became its supreme leader. He turned Thay into a “nation of undeath”, equally devoted to necromancy and conquest. Why pretend to be friendly to other nations when you can just invade them and take their stuff? The only deity whose worship Tam permits is Bane, the evil god of conquest, and he’s suspicious of even that. Yes, worship of Vecna is completely forbidden - I think Tam sees him as the competition.

Thay remains in this state when we switch to 5th Edition, by the way - it’s one of the things they didn’t change back.

Climbing to the top of the Thayan plateau is discouraged not only by the book’s scared tone, but by the many defenses placed around it. Its walls are almost vertical and the only ways up are a set of narrow switchbacks that leave characters exposed to artillery fire from both sides of the ongoing war.

Both Surcross and the Netherese fortress of Kolthunral have amazingly powerful weapons and defenses at their disposal. Kolthunral’s mission is to cut Valindra’s supply line by destroying Surcross and/or Veil, which is why it hasn’t moved away. The PCs arrive to find them locked in a prolonged siege, as neither is able to fully overcome the others’ defenses.

A significant portion of Thay’s forces are composed of undead, both at the grunt and officer levels. Their living soldiers are mostly humans, orcs, and gnolls, with plenty of spellcasters.

A character like the Renegade Red Wizard could be very helpful here if they still have friends in the region, but they’re also coming back to the lion’s den and if the Thayans realize the renegade is here they will be relentless in their pursuit.

In addition to any friends of the Red Wizard PC that might be here, the area also contains a bunch of spies and infiltrators sent by Dempharis Sibront, an elderly Red Wizard who escaped Tam’s conquest of the nation. Sibront considers himself nobility in exile and his network of infiltrated rebels is looking for any way to weaken’s Tam’s hold on the country. The PCs can form an alliance of convenience with him to fulfill their own goals, since they align, and his forces will be genuinely helpful in that situation.

However he is likely to interpret this situation as the PCs agreeing to serve him indefinitely, and could become an enemy in future adventures when he realizes that wasn’t the case. That seems like an interesting opportunity for continuing the campaign past the material in the book.

The Charnel Fields

The horrifying plains of death in the area surrounding the two Thayan towns are a product not just of the war, but also of Thayan fuckery. Since right after the first battles, the Thayans started hauling corpses from the battlefield for animation. But since some of those battles happened far away, they decided to enact a “little” ritual to make things more convenient, using the blood of the fallen as a focus.

Any corpse left on or under the earth within a hundred miles of Surcross will be sucked by the enchanted soil and transported to an area near the city, where it will be extruded to the surface. This makes it easy for Thayan necromancers to haul them back for reanimation, and it also attracts all sorts of natural and supernatural predators who want to feast on the remaining bits. The Netherese have also started hauling corpses away from the charnel fields, to deny the “raw material” to their enemies and maybe animate some of it themselves.

Relsforin

The desperate inhabitants of this small village survived by making themselves useful to Thay. They make up the bulk of the labor force that hauls corpses from the Charnel Fields to Surcross, and in exchange receive some protection from Netherese attacks. They fear the Netherese more than they resent the Thayans, and if they think a group of strangers (such as the PCs) are likely to be enemies of their masters, they will turn them in.

Echo Village

This village belonged to the neighboring nation of Thesk until a short while ago. The mercantile Theskans built it as a trade post near the Thayan border, to facilitate commerce with the wizard nation.

Shortly after the war started the Thayans invaded the village and slaughtered all of its inhabitants to turn them into more undead soldiers. They left the village behind as an empty husk, but the angry ghosts of the inhabitants soon appeared to haunt the place and wail about the hatred they felt for their murderers. This attracted the spirits of other Thayan victims, turning Echo Village into a sort of gathering point for ghosts with a grudge against Thay.

The ghosts’ default reaction to any living people approaching their village is violence - they’ll attack while shouting rants against Thay. PC groups who are perceptive and diplomatic enough might be able to figure things out from these rants and convince the ghosts that they too are enemies of Thay.

This would ironically make Echo Village the safest refuge for the PCs in the entire region, as the ghosts would allow them to stay while still attacking any intruders. It’s an interesting contrast with Relsforin, which seems safe but is not.

If the PCs then manage to lure the Thayan legion that contains the villagers’ original bodies back to Echo, the ghosts will be able to “repossess” their bodies and turn against their commanders, potentially slaughtering the whole legion. This will finally let them rest, and they will inform the PCs of any sensitive information their bodies learned before moving on from the world.

Impressions

Yikes! War crimes as far as the eye can see. It does put the events happening in Neverwinter into context. GMs and players might be used to thinking of heroic-tier campaigns as being “no big deal” in the grand scheme of things, but everything that’s happening here in Thay is a B plot for the events in Neverwinter.