Treasure Trails

A Treasure Trail starts with a chart you did not go looking for. Charts turn up while you work, and each one sends you somewhere in the region it belongs to. Follow it to the end and you are handed a casket.

You cannot buy a chart, ask for one, or take one from another player. That is the point of them: a trail is something that happens to you while you are busy with something else.

Finding a chart

Any completed action can turn one up, at 1 in 1,000; a kill is 1 in 2,000, because fighting cycles faster. Luck does not touch either number.

A chart only appears from content in its own tier's region. Aldermoor work turns up Faded Charts and nothing else, so a chart you have outgrown will not keep arriving, and one you want can be gone back for.

While you are holding one, another will not drop. Charts kept in a house still count, so tidying them away does not make room for more.

Following it

A chart shows you one step at a time, and never says how many are left, because that is not decided until you get there. A step is one of three things:

• A riddle naming a place obliquely. Work out where, go there, and search.
• A dowsing rod, which tells you only how near you are. It reads freezing, cold, warm, hot, burning as you close on it, and only ever from where you stand, so finding the place means walking until it warms.
• A task at a named place. Do the work, then search. A task may ask for something you cannot do yet, which is a reason to come back rather than a wall.

Searching anywhere but the right place tells you nothing at all. It will not say you are close.

A Faded trail averages 2.35 steps. You may abandon one at any time; you lose the trail and its progress, and the next chart arrives as it always would.

The casket

The last step hands you a Faded Casket. Opening it draws 1 to 3 times on one table. A longer trail is not owed a better prize, and a casket that turns up nothing but supplies is an ordinary result.

Coin pays 40 to 120 gold. Everything a casket holds can be traded, unlike the chart, the casket and the writ themselves.

The curios

Faded trails have 7 of their own. Each matches its ordinary counterpart for speed and outlasts it several times over, so a curio is a tool you keep rather than a tier you skip. They are collected in your Keepsakes.

The writ

A Herald's Writ is occasionally folded into a casket. Read it and it names you something you are not already called: the Wayfarer, Chartwright. Titles are earned this way and no other, and reading one costs no shards.

Once you hold every title a writ can name, a further one is worth 20 to 60 gold instead, so it is never wasted.

Carrying more than one

Completed trails raise how many charts of that tier you may keep. This is earned separately for each tier, and what it really buys is the freedom to leave a chart for later: at one, an unfollowed chart stops any other from arriving.