# The Boarwood Covenant
The Boarwood Covenant
Pathfinder Adventure Path • Levels 1–12
Forest, mountain, plain, and the erased Fourth Seat
When spring fog rolls down from the Fog Peaks and every bell in Thornford Crossing rings without hands, a white-tusked boar crowned in ghostly laurel walks from the Boarwood and kneels before six strangers.
Act I: The Forest That Judges
Levels 1–3
The PCs enter the Boarwood as boundary stones move, mercenaries from Zimar menace Thornford, and a masked priest of Norgorber sells maps to ruins that were elsewhere yesterday.
Beneath thorn, stag-horn, and boar track, they uncover a covenant seal: a Taldan oath-stone marked with Azlanti geometry, Arodenite legal script, and a warning that no throne, senate, lodge, or crown may command the land alone.
The Silver-Tusked Guardian
A dryad claimant, a Hellknight armiger, and a Pathfinder chronicler all recognize part of the truth. The first act ends when the guardian is defeated or appeased, revealing three bound powers:
- Boarwood Root
- Fog Peaks Sky
- Tandak Bloodline
A fourth oath has been deliberately erased.
Act II: The Fog Peaks Remember
Levels 4–6
The heroes climb into the Fog Peaks, where mist eats sound and old Taldan watchtowers still fly banners from wars with Qadira. Monks of Irori, Desnan stargazers, Lion Blades, and imperial ghosts all guard pieces of the same broken history.
The fog is not weather. It is memory: Grand Campaign battles, Opparan betrayals, Qadiran raids, and prophecy-fragments from the dead age before Aroden’s fall.
At a cloud observatory of broken signal mirrors and rusted griffon perches, rival agents converge beneath the storm lens. If the PCs align the mirrors correctly, they glimpse the hidden road below Boarwood and Tandak: a root-and-star passage touched by Darklands stone and sealed with prayers to Pharasma.
Act III: Bloodlines and Battlefields
Levels 7–9
On northern Tandak’s plains, cavalry fields, wheat estates, old forts, and hunting preserves stand beside hungry villages and veteran camps. At Starwatch Fort, Marshal Ysold Tandak tries to prevent civil panic while nobles, magistrates, smugglers, Pathfinders, and ballad-makers all reach for the covenant’s authority.
The False Heirs
The Tandak bloodline is only one strand of the oath, and several "legitimate" claimants carry forged genealogies purchased from Aspis Consortium brokers.
The Broken Tusk cult murders claimants not to seize the covenant, but to remove the living locks that keep the Fourth Seat closed.
The act ends in the Greyfields, where a battlefield erased from Taldan maps rises during a moonless night.
Act IV: The Root-and-Star Road
Levels 10–12
The hidden road opens beneath forest, mountain, and plain at once. The PCs travel through a mythic underland of:
- Oath-echoes
- Petrified roots
- Fallen stars
- Taldan funeral masks
- Azlanti measuring stones
- Ancient shrines overwritten by Pharasma's spiral
Finale: Varkesh of the Broken Tusk
Themes: Combat • Oath-Echoes • Covenant Choice
At the Covenant Seat, the PCs confront Varkesh, a war-priest and would-be hierophant who believes the Age of Lost Omens proves prophecy, empire, and divine order are failures fit only to be gored open.
The Final Choice
The campaign's climax is not simply a battle, but a decision.
Restore the Covenant
Taldor gains a powerful ward against ancient threats, but the old hierarchy and injustices remain intact.
Break the Covenant
The Fourth Seat can be destroyed forever, but the region loses protections that have endured for centuries.
Rewrite the Covenant
The PCs create a new oath binding:
- Forest
- Mountain
- Plain
- Commoner
- Noble
- Outsider
- Adventurer
No Grand Prince, Decemvirate, church, lodge, or empire fully controls this new covenant.
Legacy
By the end of the campaign, the heroes are no longer deniable troubleshooters. They become the named founders of a new northern covenant, with enemies in Oppara, admirers in Absalom, and legends spreading across the Inner Sea.