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HERE BE JAGEX
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Those brave adventurers who recently helped out the Myreque in the Darkness of Hallowvale quest will find out that loot-minded mercenaries are waiting at Paterdomus looking for guides down to Burgh de Rott.

The ability of these so-called “mercenaries” ranges from experienced down to vampyre-fodder, but they can all lend their support to the cause of the Myreque. As an experienced member of the Myreque, you know Mort Myre like the back of your hand, so who better to guide them to Burgh de Rott?

Any of these mercenaries would be well-disposed to reward those that successfully guide them to their destination, no doubt with useful skill-related items. This new journey means that players can now lead villagers to safety from Burgh de Rott and bring back a fresh recruit on the return, meaning every trek can have purpose and reward.

With the recently repaired bank in Burgh de Rott being so handy, it couldn’t be easier to prepare for plying those Morytanian swamp routes for some useful experience rewards.

With the growing number of visitors to Mort Myre recently, it’s hardly surprising to find that more predatory creatures are carving themselves a niche in this forbidding swamp, so even those of you already familiar with the swamp-dwelling residents from Temple Trekking will be in for more surprises. Strange stories of dark nail beasts, humans turning into ghasts and zombie lumberjacks have all been reported to the authorities at Paterdomus – let’s just hope you don’t run into them when doing the Burgh de Rott Ramble.

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HERE BE ALEX 43
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Typical Jagex, leaving out all the details in exchange for making it sound like your life finally has purpose.

A while ago, they made the Temple Trekking mini-game as a quick way for barrowsers and questeers to get back to Canifis quickly and almost painlessly, with a little reward at the end.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t as popular as Jagex thought it would be, so they now put out the second part to it – the Burgh de Rott ramble, which allowed players to get TO the barrows quickly and almost painlessly. They also introduced the lumberjack armor for eager woodcutters to try their hand at this game.

Though it sounds easy enough, it is actually harder then it looks. It is dangerous, and very easy to die if you’re not paying attention. Fortunately, I’m here to give you advice on what Jagex failed, or rather forgot to warn you about.

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SUMMARY
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You start off by talking to one of the six characters at the entrance to either the Paterdomus or Burgh de Rott. Usually, one would start at the Paterdomus temple since it’s closer to the nearest teleport point.

Once you pick a level of character, ranging from weak, moderate, and strong, and talk to them, choosing the fourth option that comes up, you will be presented with a choice of three paths.

In each path, there are 10 “steps” – chances of events. The enemies’ combat levels and difficulty of events that you encounter vary between the levels of paths, but they are all technically the same distance.

With the level 1 path, it is a walk in the park for the well-equipped. Bring some food, mainly for your partner, and you will be fine. With the level 2 path, you might encounter some more dangerous enemies, but with some quick prayer and eating, you will now have any problems.

However, I can guarantee that you WILL need prayer and at least a prayer potion for the level 3 events. They are deadly and dangerous, but if you want the full lumberjack and some really nice rewards, you will have to brave it.

Same with your companion. They are all weak and can easily die if you are not watching. The weaker ones MUST be protected at all times, while the stronger ones can take and give a few hits.

Unfortunately, if they’re under attack, they will stand and lock themselves in combat rather then run and let you take them on, so timing and precision are important factors. Only when they have a small amount of health left and no food remaining will they attempt to evade and allow you to finish it, but it is next to impossible to rely on that moment, seeing as the next hit they take is almost guaranteed the finisher.

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ITEMS REQUIRED
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You will need to be properly prepared to take on this dangerous mini-game. Here is a list of required items you WILL need, especially if you decide to take on the level 3 paths:

– Rod of Ivandis OR blessed axe

(The blessed axe, gotten from the animal magnetism quest, DOES in fact work on vampyres, and it carries a greater attack and strength bonus The only problem is that it doesn’t have the Guthix Balance special, so you have to take them all the way down.)

– Silver sickle
– Food
– Good weapon (A whip or dragon scimitar)
– Armor (I prefer proselyte for the prayer bonuses)
– Prayer Potions
– Pre-filled druid pouches
– Knife

The following items are optional, but help for various reasons:

– Dragon Spear

(You heard right. Dragon spear. A good use at last! If your comrade is under attack by a shade or vampyre, use the spear’s special to revert their aggression onto yourself. Very handy tool.)

– Hatchet
– Hammer
– Tinderbox

(These are essentials for some events, but they usually supply them somewhere in the map.)

– Halberd or ranged stuff

(Some monsters, like the giant snakes and ghasts, can get stuck behind water and reeds, and nearly everything in the map area can be attacked over. Simply take them out from afar and save yourself some food and prayer.)

– Holy wrench

(Obtained from the Rum Deal quest – it gives you a few extra prayer points per swig of prayer potion.)

– A house with a Kharyrll teleport and altar (Level 48 construction)

(When you get back to Paterdomus, you can teleport to your house to heal and recharge prayer, then head right back to another Trek.)

– Level 65 agility

(Recharge prayer in the Paterdomus temple by the shortcut.)

– Dragon battle axe

(Strength boost. Comes in handy against the Vampyres.)

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EVENTS
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Jagex, in their manual, gives a pretty good summary about their events and how to tackle them. However, you are about to read the tips and advice from someone who suffered them properly. Aside from the river monster event, you can get any of these from any level trail with corresponding difficulties. Usually that means that the enemy NPCs are higher levels and are harder to kill in the harder trails. Not just that, but they hit harder as well.

Choosing your companion only effects the number of NPCs in the event (3, 4, or 5) and how much of it they can take. If you want my advice, take the level 1 guy through the level 3 events, because not only will you be able to handle only 3 really tough enemies instead of 5, but so will your companion and the rewards hardly differ between them.

Now for the events:

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DANGEROUS EVENTS
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SHADES

You will always and only get the shades event if your character marker lands on a Mort’ton event. Depending on the trail level and companion, you will get three to five (sometimes 6!) riyl, asyn, or fiyr shades that you must defeat in order to proceed. Like the ghasts, they are mincemeat once you put on that salve amulet and whip like mad. However, once they attack your companion, they lock in combat and you must destroy that shade before it\’s too late.

Strategy: The shades always like to get in a line, so get yourself between the shades and your companion. If you\’re surrounded, run around attacking them all. They are small, so you can use the dragon spear special to revert their attention to you.

Reward: When you kill them, they drop their remains. They can be cremated in Mort’ton when you’re out of the event and you can get some fantastic rewards indeed from this. Even though not very many people do that now, I suggest saving them so you’ll be ready if we ever unleash an Rsbandb Shades of Mort’ton event. Otherwise, I myself just might buy them off you should you collect a bunch.

GIANT SNAKES

Giant snakes are annoying because not only do they hit hard, but you\’re going to have to kill them to get them to stop attacking your companion and wasting all his food. They don\’t poison, but they still hit very hard and often and I advise you to turn on protect from melee prayers against these.

Strategy: When you enter the event, run and hug the right side of the water as far as you can go and try to divert them to the right. There’s a high chance that one of them won’t be fooled and attack you, but if you’re fast enough, you can get them trapped on the right side and deal with them easily by halberd or ranged. Otherwise, stay between your companion and the snakes at all times and don’t move when they are in range.

Reward: When they die, they don’t vanish. Instead, they convert to dead snakes that you can use a knife on and extract a number of free snakeskins from their bodies. Only collect them if you really want to go for a full set of snakeskin armor, as each piece takes a lot of snakeskin to make (I’d average about 50 snakeskins per set).

GIANT SNAILS

Perhaps the most dangerous and deadliest of all the events. I turned my back on Runescape for 1 minute and the next thing I knew, I was in the snail event, and I was dead. Have protect from ranged on at all times when you’re fighting them, because even the level 1 trail ones can be dangerous. They hit 95% of the time, regardless of whether or not you’re wearing armor.

Fortunately with the snails, if they attack your comrade, just score a hit on them and they’ll immediately revert their attention to you, regardless of whether or not your comrade is locked in combat with it.

Strategy: Again, protect from ranged at all times and make sure they are all attacking you. Even the ones in the back, and there are a lot of obstacles they can hide behind. This is what it’s like to be the target.

Reward: Giant snails drop their abnormally large shells. I have no idea what you do with them, but I’m collecting them just in case Jagex makes an interesting update. Shells that big, they HAVE to be something good. Better to be safe then sorry, right?

NAIL BEASTS

Word of warning: Nail beasts are LOUD. Make sure your speakers are turned down before attacking them, because SOMEBODY in Jagex wasn’t paying attention to the volume meter when they made their sounds.

Nail Beasts aren’t very powerful, but they attack in bursts of 3 similar to the dragon dagger special. However, regardless of the trail you take, you can almost always take these guys out without prayer because unlike the snails and snakes, they have a comparatively low amount of hitpoints. Around a third their combat level. I can easily 3-hit the level 3 ones.

Strategy: Similar to the snakes, try to get the nail beasts trapped behind obstacles and away from your ally. Like the snakes, they’ll just keep on attacking your comrade if locked in combat, and though their attacks are weak, they do add up against your weak buddy. If you can trap them, you can take them out with a couple of lucky dragon halberd specials.

Reward: Nail beasts drop big bones and nails, a reward best suited for prayer and herblore masters alike. Using it with a few other secondary ingredients, you can improve super restore potions and get a bonus amount of exp per potion. You can also just bury the bones for prayer exp.

GHASTS

Hope you got those druid pouches handy. Ghasts start off invisible (only partially) and once they become visible, they attack you. Your comrade is perfectly safe from these unless you decide to run away to the other end of the map or if they start attacking your ally while still invisible, in which case you directly use your druid pouch on it to divert it.

Ghasts are excellent to train on because not only can you boost your attack and strength against them by your salve amulet, but killing them yields more than a dragon bone’s worth of exp. 140 exp from each trek level 3 ghast! They are somewhat powerful, but their attacks are slower then a maul, so you won’t have to worry too much about prayer.

Strategy: Ghasts can easily get stuck right from the start. Quickly use the druid pouch on them and walk a step away, and you’ll have an easy time against these guys. Just be sure you don’t have 3 or more attacking you at once, or it can get quite dangerous.

Reward: These ghasts drop the same things as regular ones. Coins, herbs, fishing bait, just newbie stuff. Keep an eye out for the occasional good herb, though.

VAMPYRES

The single most annoying creature in this mini game. Not only can you only attack them by the weak Rod of Ivandis, or if you completed the Animal Magnetism quest, the blessed axe (it DOES work, and a lot better then the staff), but you don’t even get a kill unless you administer the Guthix Balance potion. They also have lots of hitpoints and can take a while to kill.

However, to compensate for their durability, they are actually quite comparatively slow and weak attackers. Maybe a little better then the Ghasts, but still.

Strategy: I suggest you bring at least 4 doses of Guthix balance with you per trip (1 inventory slot), because you will only have to half-kill them before finishing them off. Even if they become mad, they also become vulnerable to any other weapon, so turn on protect from melee and take it out with style. Do NOT let your comrade get close, because they will lock in combat, and you’ll have a tough time taking the vampyre down. Like the ghasts, try to only attack 1 or 2 at a time instead of all at once. Use the lakes and reeds to trap the others, and the dragon spear special to push them away so you can take on 1 at a time.

Reward: If you use a Guthix Balance on them and convert them back to human, you can actually get some very good weapons and armor certificates ranging from black to adamantite. If otherwise, you get NOTHING!

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PUZZLE EVENTS
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These events are, for the most part, friendly. You just have to do a little bit of work to proceed. They can be annoying sometimes, but it’s better then giant snails, isn’t it?

BRIDGE

The bridge is very simple. Chop the 3 nearby trees and use their logs on the 2 beams connecting both halves of the bridge together while wielding a hatchet. If you don’t have a hatchet, kill the nearby zombie for one.

Reward: Nothing but a bronze axe and the satisfaction of a job well done.

LUMBERJACK ZOMBIES

Ah, the event that we all strive for. This is basically a remake of the bridge event, except there are no nearby trees, and you only have to get the hatchet to tap in the free planks you get.

After a few seconds in the event, zombie lumberjacks will start crawling out of the swamp. Despite their level, they have an extremely low hitpoints level and rate of hit, and a high level can easily 1-hit any number of them any day.

Each zombie drops 1 plank and 1 bones. One zombie will drop a piece of lumberjack uniform per event, so if it’s a double, you have a reason to groan.

You might as well fill your inventory with planks while you\’re here, as the zombies will just keep spawning 5 at a time. Just remember to use 3 of them on the bridge with your hatchet equipped or a hammer in inventory in order to cross it.

Reward: Piece of lumberjack uniform (Collect all 4!) and planks, should you decide to keep them.

BOG CROSSING

If you don’t have a knife or anything suitable for using on the nearby bush, you’d better head back.

Clear some inventory spaces, maybe by using food on your comrade, and knife that bush. Then use the sticks on each reachable square of bog you can see. If it says “This ground seems firm”, you can walk on it. However, if it says “Erk, this ground feels quite soft” … well, you CAN step on it, but you’d be going for a swim really soon.

Simply navigate the bog until you get to the other end, and your comrade will follow automatically. Make sure you have lots of sticks, though, because sometimes the bog steals them and you don’t want to be in the middle of it and not have any sticks left.

Reward: Very, very smelly shoes.

STREAM VINE

Sorry, it’s a bad pun, isn’t it?

What you have to do here is use your knife on the small reachable tree with vines on it 3 times and get 3 vines. Use 1 vine on another to get a sort of a rope, then use this long vine on the overhanging branch of the larger tree right next to it. If you don’t have a knife, search for the nearby backpack for one.

Once you have the long vine in place, swing over and your comrade will follow.

Reward: Another reason to scream and make fun of Jagex. Oh, and a knife.

STARVING TRAVELERS

Here’s where things get scary. Depending on the level of comrade you have, you will have to help 3 – 5 starving people who are beginning to turn into Ghasts. If you have some, just give them some food of any kind. You can even give them easter eggs, but thats just stupid.

If you don’t have food, then you’ve got to be quick. Kill all 5 or however many you need of the nearby snails and grab their bodies. Then chop a nearby tree, grab the nearby tinderbox, light a fire, cook them, and heal them. Beware, they don’t take long to transform, so you’ll have to be quick.

There are 4 states they can be in (well, 5 if you count “Ghast”): Sick, very sick, ghostly!, and well. Focus on the very sick and ghostly ones first. If the others are just sick, they can wait a little longer. Once they’ve eaten something, their status changes to well and you don’t need to worry about them anymore.

If one of them manages to die, they will convert to a ghast, just like what you would find at the ghast event, and you will have to kill it to press on.

Reward: Nothing from the starving greedy bums, but you can get yourself some blood snail shells and snail meat from here. Or you can get some coins and herbs from the ghasts if you let them die.

THE TRAVELER

Sometimes you will get a monster event that holds nothing but a single lonely man. Talk to him and he’ll administer what I believe is a partially degraded Saradomin Brew potion on you. It will give you hit points (if you’re at full, boost them), and boost your defense points, plus turn your rotten food obtained unwillingly from ghasts into stews. Same with your comrade. After talking to him, you may go.

Reward: Stews from rotten food, health boost, and defense boost.

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THE TRICK
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Here’s a trick that works especially with the Starving Travelers event. If they die or you don’t get them the food in time, log off and then back on. They will have recovered to the point of sick and the snails will have regenerated. Not just that, but you’ll also have the newly cooked snails to feed them as well.

You can use this trick to stock your comrade chalk-full of nails as well as yourself, so long as you save some for the starving people, for regardless if they die or get well, they become sick again once you log back on.

Another trick is that you can train your prayer here. Get some food and cook it, fight all the ghasts, log out, and log in again to repeat. 5 times 140 exp per round sounds awfully nice, doesn’t it?

NOTE: Until Jagex fixes that, you can log out and in again to restart events. However, the following conditions still occur:

– If an NPC is killed in a dangerous event, it stays dead. The others regenerate.
– You can not get your comrade back if he dies, but you can save him if he’s under attack and you’re not.
– If you log out during a puzzle event, everything restarts.

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THE REWARDS
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Originally, you would have to walk all the way back to Burgh de Rott in order to claim your reward. However, because of the new second part, you can just claim the reward once you get back after escorting another person. The first trip, you’ll get nothing at the moment, but every trip from then on you’ll get a lovely something. Here’s a list of items that you can get:

– Iron and coal certificates: Usually when you get this reward, which is rare, you will get a told amount of coal certificates and one half that amount of iron certificates. In other words, you’ll get half that number of unprepared steel bars. Still, getting 50 – 200 coal per trip can really add up for those cannon ammo makers out there (Nudges Hummerwar).

– Pure essence certificates: One thing I like about this event is the quantity of rewards you can receive. You can get, depending on the trip, up to 700 pure essence, and amybe more. Don’t be surprised if you get 666 pure essence notes from one trip – it happened to me twice.

– Herb certificates: You will get 2 bundles of herbs, the first going up to (the max I ever got) 75, and the other usually a third of the amount. The smaller amount is usually toadflax and the greater bundle is tarromin or harralander, both being essential herbs for around Burgh de Rott (Tarromin makes serum 207 with ashes and can be used to get swamp paste from Mort’ton villagers, and harralander makes Guthix balance which can be used on vampyres for some greater rewards). Otherwise, it’s worth the exp to identify them all.

– Wildblood seeds: Annoying as they are, you will get a lot of these if you keep trekking. Although they aren’t common, you get lots of them, up to 100 per trip, so any expert farmer would love to buy them off you. Otherwise, you can carry them around and just stick them in the hops patches you pass when entering Yanille or Lumbridge, or even while making law runes on Entrana.

– Silver bar certificates: I love this reward. Not only is it common, but you can get up to 200 silver bars, and that right there is an easy 10 000 crafting exp! Perfect for those crafters out there.

– Tome of learning: Ah, the tome of learning. They will boost a random skill (shown by the cover of the book) by a random amount of exp ranging higher depending on what color the book is, be it blue, yellow, or red.

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CONCLUSION
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All and all, I think this is a terrific update. Not only does it present a valuable method of gathering rune essence and silver bars, it also allows you to get lumberjack armor which can be merely worn to give you bonus exp with every log you chop (excellent for those yew choppers out there) just like the Goldsmithing gauntlets – the only other item in Runescape that does that. It also provides a quick and easy passage from Canifis to the barrows (strong guy on level 1 trek) and back again and even gives a nice little reward after.

Happy trekking. Have fun, and be safe!