mysticsorcerer said:
i have a group of six men traveling across faerun. they started in amn, and they are on their way to skulk in mulhorand.
Have they left Amn yet? If not maybe merchants in Riatavin (sp?) can hire them to help guard a caravan to the Inner Sea. Sure caravan guarding is generic but there's plenty of ways to make it cool.
For example, I ran a similar adventure once in 2e, starting in Saradush in Tethyr, in which one of the trading costers wanted them to clear a new trading route through the gap in the Snowflakes northeast of Saradush, to the long lake there to the east that flows into the Deepwash, and then by river through the Winterwood and up to the Vilhon reach via Sespech. They wanted to open this route to compete against the main trade route from Riatavin to Hlondeth via the Shining Plains, which was controlled by a consortium of Amnish merchants in league with some yuan-ti merchants of Hlondeth. This was set during the time of the Tethyrian Interegnum (period of leaderless anarchy) and it turned out that some of the robber barons of eastern Tethyr were secretly being sponsored by the yuan-ti, who wanted to keep the Saradush route closed to prevent any competition.
With the major changes to the maps of this region in FR 3e, that probably won't make much sense as everything has moved around and the mountain gap in question doesn't even exist anymore (I think). But I'm sure that you could come up with a variant based on the Riatavin route, especially now that Tethyr is organized again while Amn is in chaos (especially in that area). You'd just need to figure out some new motivation for the yuan-ti, or replace the main enemy.
Once they get to the Inner Sea, a boat trip is the logical way to get them to Mulhorand. That of course opens up the standard options, such as a pirate adventure, or a lost at sea journey like
The Odyssey. The Whamite Islands (if they're still on the map) seem like a good place to use for a bunch of weird encounters in that tradition. The other option is to take the land route and got caught up in some of the conflicts that are always raging across Chondath and between the Chessentan city states, and then there's got to be adventures waiting to happen with the chaos in Unther. It all depends on how long you want to make the journey and how much adventure you hope to have along the way. Otherwise, you can gloss over the overland portion, have them take passage on a ship and be on with it.
As you probably figured from everything I'm saying above, my FR knowledge is a few years behind the times. As far as I know the regions I mentioned are still more or less in the states that I mentioned but if that's no longer the case (or never was in your game), you might have to make adjustments accordingly.
Have fun.
