Wanderer Update — The Grimhaul, an Orc War-Fortress Dungeon

Out on the Crownwatch March there's a line of wrecked wagons a mile long called the Broken Mile. It has been there, unexplained, since the world was built — the remains of the first frontier road, which was started and never finished.

As of today the road has an explanation, and you can walk into it.

The Grimhaul

The Grimhaul is the royal haul-works: the deep cutting, winch shafts, spoil galleries and supply vaults driven under the March to build that road. Four generations abandoned. Now a fortress.

It belongs to the Skarn-Vok — the Iron-Sworn. They were not invaders. They were the labour: orc captives taken in the border wars and set to dig the cutting. When the works collapsed a gallery, the overseers sealed the shaft with the gangs still inside rather than lose a season. The survivors dug sideways, came up behind the camp, and took it.

The road was never finished. The Broken Mile is the wagons they left where they stood.

Their founding rite is the reason every orc in the place is wearing hardware: every oath kept is a nail driven into your own armour. A young warrior's plate is bare. A veteran's rings when he walks. The warlord is nailbound.

Sixteen sections, and two kinds of building

The Grimhaul is bigger than the Emberthroat — roughly 23,000 tiles across 16 sections — and it's built out of two different generators on purpose, because the fortress was not all made by the same hands.

Eleven built sections are fortress: rectilinear rooms, dressed masonry, gatehouse and muster yard and barracks and forge.
Five dug sections are mine: winding haul galleries floored in spoil, with squared-off orc-cut chambers let into their sides in dressed stone.

The difference is visible as you walk it. You can see exactly where somebody else's tunnel was squared off and reinforced by people whose creed is we do not build new.

Built like the dungeons I grew up with

I asked for this one to be unapologetically classical, and it is. The Grimhaul is a lock-and-key dungeon in the old grammar:

Three Iron Warkeys, each opening one specific barred door. They're named rather than generic, so you can never lock yourself out and there's no key-counting to exploit.
The Warlord's Nail — the boss key, behind the Twin Champions, for the Nailed Gate.
The Haulmaster's Plat — the dungeon map. Find it and every room on every floor gets its name and its bounds in your HUD.
The Iron Needle — the compass. Chests and mini-bosses across the whole floor, marked. Without it you only see what's near you.
The Warchain Hook — the dungeon's item. A winch-hook from the Siege Yard that works the fortress's chain-lifts: two shortcuts, the Trophy Hall lift, and the counterweight on the Nailed Gate itself. Get it halfway down and the second half of the fortress opens up.

The Muster Yard is the hub: four doors, three of them barred and opened in sequence, and every wing comes back to it. Each wing ends in a named champion in a bespoke arena — Kennelmaster Vhorn in the pens, Malgra Emberhand in the forge, Ozzik Bonecall at the drums, the twins Skarr and Torvag before the Nailed Gate — and each is holding a key or the Hook.

There are levers (winch drums, brazier chains, portcullis cranks), some of which open doors and some of which silence alarms — because if you trip one, the section wakes up around you. When the Warlord falls, the Oathvault chain-lift lights up and drops you back at the surface gate.

Warlord Ugrath, the Nailbound

Level 128, and four times the health of a zone boss. He is the hardest thing in Wanderer.

The fortress around him runs from about level 95 at the Spoil Gate to 128 in the hold — which is to say it starts a step under the local road and ends harder than anything for miles around it.

Getting in

Talk to Warden-Sergeant Halva Bren at Crownwatch Gate. The garrison has a standing reason to care: the raids are hitting the supply fields, the trail starts at an abandoned watchtower the Skarn-Vok took as a forward post, and the quest is called the Grimhaul Toll.

The entrance is the Spoil Gate, a colossal timber-and-iron maw driven into the cutting wall of the old haul-road on the south verge, just east of the wreck line.

There's no level gate on the quest. There is a fortress full of level-95-and-up orcs behind the door, which is a more honest gate than a number ever was.

Happy wandering — and mind the alarms.