Expeditions 🌀
The Expeditioners’ Guild, upstairs in the east library.
An expedition is a door into a world that has never existed before and never will again. Your party steps through together, gets twenty minutes, and whatever you carry out is yours forever - because the world itself won’t be there tomorrow.
How it works
- Gather your party (or go alone - see Parties).
- The party leader speaks to Odessa, the Expedition Guide at the guild and pays the passage: 50 gold + 10 per member.
- A 20-second countdown begins while the guild opens the link. Changed your mind? The leader can cancel at Odessa - and if anyone leaves the party before departure, the trip is off and the fee returned.
- The whole party is pulled through, wherever each of you happens to be standing.
The rules of the link
- One way in, one way out. Death,
/spawn,/home, any teleport at all - every exit is final. The link will not reopen for you. - Your inventory always survives, even death. Nothing you find beyond the link can be lost to it.
- Twenty minutes. A bar at the top of your screen counts down. Chimes mark the time - and grow hurried, then urgent, as the collapse nears. When it hits zero the guild pulls everyone out. No exceptions, no extensions.
- Double XP the whole time you’re inside.
- Richer drops. Kill loot beyond the link is better than the wilderness, and mythical finds can fall here (they never do on the open road).
- Log out mid-expedition and come back quickly? You’ll resume where you stood - if the link still holds. Come back later and you’ll find only the village.
- Every traveller rests 30 minutes between expeditions.
No two links alike
Each expedition is named for its temperament and its terrain - but the guild keeps its secret until the moment you land. You’ll learn what world you drew as the sky changes around you.
Temperament and terrain are rolled separately. Both lean on your party’s average level: green travellers mostly draw Calm Wilderness; seasoned parties meet Chaotic and Erratic links - and stranger shores - more often.
Temperament - how the world receives you:
| Early parties | Seasoned parties | What it means | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🟩 Peaceful | Often at first (~30%) | Almost never (~3%) | An island, and nothing on it that wants anything from you. Hostiles are a thin scatter under a sun that never sets. You will find plenty of small things and never a great one - no mythic ever falls here, and the finest gear is far rarer |
| 🟦 Calm | Most trips (~53%) | Most trips (~58%) | Gentle world; monsters few and soft |
| 🟥 Chaotic | Sometimes (~10%) | More often (~21%) | Hostile world; monsters mean it |
| 🟪 Erratic | Rare (~7%) | More often (~18%) | Every blow lands harder than it should, and things with wings find you. Loot is richest here |
Peaceful is drawn before the other three and takes its share off the top, so the more of it you see, the less of everything else. It fades as you level: common while you are finding your feet, and by level 50 something you will only meet on purpose.
Terrain - what’s on the other side. Not every terrain opens under every temperament: the gentle places refuse a hostile sky, and the strange places refuse a gentle one.
| Terrain | 🟩 Peaceful | 🟦 Calm | 🟥 Chaotic | 🟪 Erratic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🌲 Wilderness | - | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| 🏜️ Wasteland | - | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| 🧊 Caverns of Ice | - | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| ⌛ Temporal Rift | - | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| 🏰 Dungeon | - | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| 🏺 Ancient Relics | ✅ | ✅ | - | - |
| 🌳 Paradise | ✅ | - | - | - |
| 🏛️ Ruins | ✅ | - | - | - |
So there is no chaotic Ancient Relics - the dig sites are the challenge there, and live charges under a hostile sky would be unfair rather than hard - and no peaceful Temporal Rift, because that shore is never gentle.
Chaotic and Erratic links draw from the five combat terrains:
| Early parties | Seasoned parties | |
|---|---|---|
| 🌲 Wilderness | ~38% | ~23% |
| 🏰 Dungeon | ~25% | ~31% |
| 🏜️ Wasteland | ~13% | ~15% |
| 🧊 Caverns of Ice | ~13% | ~15% |
| ⌛ Temporal Rift | ~13% | ~15% |
Calm links add Ancient Relics to that pool:
| Early parties | Seasoned parties | |
|---|---|---|
| 🌲 Wilderness | ~29% | ~18% |
| 🏺 Ancient Relics | ~23% | ~21% |
| 🏰 Dungeon | ~19% | ~24% |
| 🏜️ Wasteland | ~10% | ~12% |
| 🧊 Caverns of Ice | ~10% | ~12% |
| ⌛ Temporal Rift | ~10% | ~12% |
Wilderness is the trip you’ll draw most while you’re finding your feet; the stranger shores creep up on you as you level, and the dungeon is twice as likely as any other exotic link at every level.
🌲 Wilderness
Green, endless, familiar - an ordinary world on a seed nobody has ever used and nobody will use again. Nothing is buried here that the overworld wouldn’t bury, and no caches or relics wait for you. What it offers is twenty minutes of double XP and a forest that nobody will mind you felling. Take an axe; take seeds if you’re sentimental.
🏜️ Wasteland
Dead sand over ancient stone, with jungle pockets huddled around water. The one terrain that rewards a shovel: relics shake loose as you dig the sand, and half-buried guild caches hold gold, gear, and very occasionally a blade of legend. The stone beneath carries coal, iron, copper and gold.
🧊 Caverns of Ice
An enclosed world of ice and stone with no sky at all - you land in a carved chamber and everything is lamplight and ice-glow from there. Ice temples, walled enclaves with their guards, and quiet glades hollowed out of the deep rock. Fish move in the open water; something else moves in the dark.
Calm links are a cold, beautiful walk. Chaotic and Erratic wake the hostiles in the deeps, pack the temples closer together, and are the only way laurionite ever reaches a pickaxe.
⌛ Temporal Rift
Aeons in the past: perpetual night, dead coral hills, crystal floating where the world hasn’t finished deciding on gravity. Nothing spawns here naturally - everything you meet was already standing when you arrived, including the Primordial Colossus, which throws volleys further than you’d like and pays out like nothing else in the link.
Buried artefacts for the Timeworn Collector sit under oxidised lanterns. Some chests are trapped, and a trap here doesn’t hurt you - it takes two minutes off the link, for everyone. On Chaotic and Erratic links, ghasts drift in a few at a time. Once or twice a run the whole party hears the same thing at the same moment. It isn’t a warning.
🏰 Dungeon
Floors of rooms that do not exist until you walk into them. Every floor hides a key room, and something in it holds the key - kill it, wake the transporter, and the floor gives way beneath the whole party at once. Nobody descends alone.
See Dungeon bosses for what’s holding the keys and Dungeoneer gear for what to bring back up.
Peaceful terrain is its own set
A peaceful link never opens onto any of the five combat terrains. It is an equal-thirds draw at every level: Paradise, Ruins, or Ancient Relics - and of those three, only Ancient Relics ever opens any other way (calm).
🌳 Paradise
An island ringed by ocean under one enormous tree, grown fresh every time - not drawn from a template, so no two crowns are the same. Comes as Forest, Jungle or Blossom: a broad oak crown, a tall vine-hung jungle column, or a wide flat disc of cherry.
The trunk is hollow and climbable - rooms stacked up its inside, a short ladder from each to the next, and something worth the climb at the top. Below and around: ponds and the streams between them, lamp posts along the ways, flowers, small trees, animals that have never been hunted, and supply caches that often hold a relic.
Buildings, too - up to nine of them scattered across the island, and up to two of those are wonders: a torii, a pagoda, things the island is arranged around rather than one more house on the list. All of it stands over caves worth a torch (see below).
And threading through the forest at canopy height: a trellis walk - a raised timber path in the island’s own wood (cherry under the blossom, jungle wood under the vines, oak under the oaks) that climbs and twists on posts and arches, hung with leaves and light. Along it, little hanging rooms suspended beside the bigger trees, and every one keeps a chest with a piece of the cosmetic decor line - the fountains, potted plants and museum props that drop almost nowhere else.
🏛️ Ruins
The same island, inherited by somebody who is no longer there. A lower, flatter, lived-on plain instead of rolling hills, thick with animals.
Three to five settlements stand on raised, ditched platforms across it, each a hard walk from where you land. Inside every one: a church or a great hall at the middle, and a handful of houses and halls around it - real buildings you can walk into, in every state from lived-in to half-collapsed. Most of their chests are empty. The ones that aren’t are worth crossing a room for.
At the heart of each site sits a single cache, and it is the only place in the whole game the ruins regalia and gemstones turn up - along with, rarely, one of the two quest stones. One per settlement, and always the same one for that settlement, so there’s no reopening it.
Under both islands
Paradise and Ruins share what’s beneath them: caves that wind rather than pocket, ore in the rock, and around ten to twelve buried chambers - dungeon rooms sealed into the stone, reachable only by finding the tunnel that runs into one. Nothing on the surface points to them. Bring a torch and go down.
🏺 Ancient Relics
A desert where somebody dug before you, and lived while they dug. Around the excavation camp: staked dig sites holding fossils and live charges - a Detector to find the one, a Knocker to survive the other. Nearer in, the farmbeds and mudhif hamlets of the people who worked here; farther out, the ziggurat, a sealed pyramid tomb, the Descent Stronghold, and a hut with a ladder that goes down into the buried labyrinth. See Archaeology for the digging, the Curator, and everything the sand is hiding.
Field guides
The Guild Bookbinder sells books that steer the roll if you hold them while queuing. A successful bias picks that outcome; otherwise the usual weights apply.
| Book | Bias |
|---|---|
| Wilderness Expeditioning | ~85% Wilderness |
| Wasteland Expeditioning | ~85% Wasteland |
| Dungeoneering | ~85% Dungeon - and if the link does open below, the whole party lands under Resistance and Speed for three minutes |
| The Quiet Passage | ~98% Peaceful - the only reliable way to see the world tree once you have levelled |
| A Treatise on Calm | ~90% Calm |
| Courting Chaos | ~75% Chaotic |
| Erratic Meditations | ~60% Erratic |
You can hold one kind guide and one temperament guide together - they roll independently.
Expeditioner’s gear
Some gear drops only beyond the link - diamond-class, guild-marked, and impossible to repair. Each piece bends the rules of expeditions themselves:
| Piece | While worn |
|---|---|
| Helm | -20% expedition fee (wear it to the queue) |
| Cuirass (rarest) | +30% gold from expedition monsters |
| Greaves | -20% rest time between expeditions |
| Boots | +20% XP inside expeditions |
| Shield | The link holds 22 minutes if any member carries it through |
A full kit turns expeditions from an adventure into a profession.
Profiteering
The guild sells a licence - the book Profiteering, 500 gold at the Guild Bookbinder. Hold it while queuing and the guild tethers a trade chest into the link itself: it appears at your landing site, indestructible while the link holds.
Fill it with anything you like. When the link collapses, the guild appraises the contents at honest vendor-pay rates, keeps a loyalty tax, and splits the rest equally among every member of the expedition - even the fallen and the already-departed get their share.
Your cut depends on how much you’ve already earned through the tether (Odessa keeps the ledger). The rate is personal - party-mates can owe different taxes on the same chest:
| Lifetime earnings | Guild tax |
|---|---|
| Starting out | 40% |
| 2,000+ gold | 30% - “Thanks for your consistent efforts.” |
| 5,000+ gold | 20% - “Pleasure as always.” |
| 10,000+ gold | 15% - “You are a blessing to the guild.” |
| 20,000+ gold | 10% - “The ledger knows your hand by now.” |
| 30,000+ gold | 8% - “I stopped checking your figures some time ago.” |
| 40,000+ gold | 6% - “You have kept this office in lamp oil for a year.” |
| 50,000+ gold | 4% - “There is no lower rate. I did look.” - the floor |
Groups get a rebate: each member’s after-tax share grows with party size - +10% each for a duo, +15% for a trio, +20% for four, +25% for a full party. The guild would rather fund caravans than loners.
- The guild won’t pay for worthless goods, and whatever’s in the chest dies with the world - it never comes home. Cargo, not luggage.
- Ask Odessa to consult your profiteering ledger any time.
Worth knowing
- Dig freely: wasteland stone carries coal, iron, copper and gold; ice caverns hide lapis and gold (and richer ores when the link turns dark); the peaceful islands have ore in their caves too. Nobody cares what you do to a world that’s about to stop existing.
- Relics and artefacts sell at the Relic Hunters’ Guild and to the Timeworn Collector.
- The fee is the leader’s burden - settle up with
/money give.
Twenty minutes. One door. Make them count.