The Plains of Ashford
A country the ghosts refuse to leave
Just east of the Black Citadel, past a gate cut into a wall built by charr on the ruins of a wall built by humans, the road drops down into a country of low hills, dry grass, broken masonry and thin blue fire. The Plains of Ashford is the charr starter zone, and it looks like nothing else in the game. Even Diessa Plateau to the north, its immediate neighbour and the other primary territory of the Iron Legion, does not look like this. Ashford is a landscape held by an army that won a war two centuries ago and is still fighting it, against enemies that no longer have a body.
Two hundred and fifty years on
The country a new charr character is asked to defend used to be a human kingdom. The wiki's own summary of the zone is worth quoting for its plainness: "Long ago, the human kingdom of Ascalon occupied the Plains of Ashford. Now, the ruins of that once-great nation tumble across the landscape, and the ghosts of the past haunt any who pass through their territory."
Ascalon had been a human province since the middle of the Reign of Humans and a fully independent kingdom for the best part of a millennium. Its capital, Rin, occupied the land where the Black Citadel now sits. Its landed families held estates along the Adorean river valley and up into the hills to the east. Its cattle grazed the meadows around Ashford, a small village on the plains that gave its name, eventually, to the whole region.
In 1070 AE, the Flame Legion's shamans called down the Searing on Ascalon, using magical cauldrons given to them by titans acting under Abaddon's orders, and left the entire kingdom scorched and barren in a single day. Twenty years later, in 1090 AE, King Adelbern stood on the highest tower of Ascalon City with an ancient sword called Magdaer in his hand, drove the blade into the stone of the tower, and unleashed the Foefire. A white flame in the shape of a blade travelled outward from the epicentre in a slow-moving wave. Every human it touched died. Every human it touched became a ghost.
The Foefire was, in the strict sense, a piece of preservation magic. Adelbern had been convinced that Ascalon could not be held by force of arms and had reasoned that force of will and sorcery might succeed where the sword had not. What he preserved was not Ascalon but its dead. Two hundred and thirty-six years later, at the time a new charr character walks down out of the Black Citadel, the ghosts are still there. They defend the Ascalon City ruins. They haunt the estates. They gather in the crypts. They will attack anyone crossing their territory — charr, other humans, sylvari, asura, norn; it makes no difference. The Foefire made them defenders of a country that no longer exists, and they take that role seriously.
That is the strategic problem the charr have inherited. The land is theirs. The dead will not concede it.
The eastern gate at first light
Smokestead is the village at the western edge of the plains, tucked against the Black Citadel wall by the Ashford Gate. A new charr character arrives there through Fury of the Dead, the tutorial instance that ships as the first personal-story mission for any charr player. The scene is nothing like Defending Shaemoor. There is no idle village to defend. Smokestead is already on fire.
Ghosts have broken through the crypt gate and are pouring across the plains. Legionnaire Tosia Domesplitter waves the new soldier through with a set of orders that amount to fight your way forward and don't stop. On the way through, the warband is scattered — Reeva keeping score of kills, Maverick showing off, Clawspur in the shadows, Dinky counting to three and losing track, Euryale keeping the youngest cubs alive, Howl the Brazen already at the front. Somewhere down in Barradin's crypt, Tribune Rytlock Brimstone of the Blood Legion is fighting the ghost of Duke Barradin – who provoked the assault – in person.
The tutorial ends in the crypt, where a statue possessed by a ghost tries to kill the recruit. When the statue falls, Rytlock's line is brisk: "Mission accomplished. You're heroes now, boys and girls, congratulations. Report back to Smokestead."
It is a different opening beat entirely from the human one. Where Shaemoor teaches a new player that Kryta is a country under siege at a barricade, Ashford teaches a new player that Ascalon is a country under siege from the inside, from its own dead, and that the war is old and personal and unlikely to end. Howl the Brazen dies in the tutorial, and the warband loses two other members in the collapse. A new charr character starts their career at a funeral.
The plains themselves
Above Smokestead, the country opens out. Twenty-six named areas, arranged around seventeen renown hearts. The landscape reads as high Ascalonian summer country gone slightly to seed: grazing land turned scrub, terraced hillsides half-reclaimed by the Iron Legion's engineers, dry watercourses, orchards half-standing, the low ridge of the Ascalonian coast off to the south, the Ashford Gate to the west and the road east to Blazeridge Steppes. The Great Northern Wall runs along the northern edge of the zone as a broken monumental line — the border between Ascalon and the Blood Legion homelands in the older maps of Guild Wars 1, now the border between Iron Legion territory and Diessa Plateau. The wall is toppled in places. One of those places is called ‘The Toppled Wall’.
The tone of the work here is not domestic. There are no potato fields to defend, no stables to muck out. The renown hearts ask a new soldier to help Crucibis Forgeweld run the armoury at Gunbreach Hills, to help Tolona Ironrustler with her farm, to help Scar Stripeclaw organise the wrecking yard, to help Latera Painstorm fight the Flame Legion at Lake Feritas, to help Bryllana Deepmind and Kyra Sharptracker and Gavros Spiritfoe thin out ghosts at Old Duke's Estate and Victor's Praesidium and the Devast District. Two hearts alone are for thinning ghosts. One is for retaking Ascalon City itself, for Ghyrtratus Fiendmauler. One is for helping Mei Hawkslayer disrupt the human separatists at Loreclaw Expanse — Ascalonian holdouts who refuse to accept the truce and would rather keep fighting their own people's war.
The soldier the zone is training is not a farmer with a sword. It is a cub who will spend a career on the plains and the plateau and the marches beyond, holding ground against three enemies at once: Ascalonian ghosts, Flame Legion insurgents, and human separatists. The land itself is the least of it. What the charr are asked to hold together is a peace that half the survivors on both sides do not want.
Ruins and estates and crypts
The Plains of Ashford is the most archaeological zone in the core game. Two hundred and thirty-six years is not ancient as ruins go, but the Searing did in a day what centuries of neglect would not, and the Foefire did the rest. What is left is a landscape thick with named human places, most of them still burning.
Old Duke's Estate, in the southwest, is the manor house of Duke Barradin himself, the same Barradin whose ghost we defeated in the tutorial. The estate stands. The duke does not – at least until his ghost slowly reforms. Langmar Estate, a little further southwest, is the home of Countess Langmar, whose ghosts still defend the terraces.
Victor's Praesidium, halfway across the plains, is a compound built atop Vir's Gate, an older Ascalonian fortification; beneath the praesidium lie Barradin's Vaults, the crypts where Rytlock's fight took place in the tutorial. Ashford Forum, in the middle of the map, is the market square of the old human village of Ashford, from which the zone takes its name. Ashford itself was destroyed in the Searing. The forum is one of the few buildings still standing.
The eastern half of the zone gets stranger. Devast District, near the northern edge, is the industrial quarter of a former Ascalonian town, now held by the Iron Legion's spirit hunters, whose job is to run the containment units and monuments that keep the ghosts in check. The Ethereal Vanguard Monument stands here — a piece of memorial architecture built by the charr, not the humans, commemorating their own dead.
The Ascalonian Catacombs, in Phasmatis Corridor, are the entrance to a five-person dungeon that runs deep beneath the plains and is one of the earliest instanced dungeons in the game. Ghostsummit, above the catacombs, is the ridge where the Ascalonian ghost hierarchy meets — a piece of world-building that was in the game from launch and has never been formally explained.
To the far east, Cadem Forest holds an ogre kraal at Stonecrag; Watchcrag Tower stands over Duskrend Overlook; and the road east eventually runs out through The Last Whiskey Bar into Blazeridge Steppes. To the far south, Ascalon Basin holds the Irondock Shipyard, where the Iron Legion builds its Iron Barracudas — armoured land-vehicles that would look at home in any dieselpunk illustration — and where the separatist attack chain runs its longest sequence of events. In the middle of it all, Ascalon City Ruins holds the Foefire's Heart, the epicentre of Adelbern's spell, still burning with eerie light. Ashford is not a peaceful zone. It is a working excavation.
The peace, and the people who don't want it
For most of the two centuries after the Foefire, the charr occupation was a war of attrition against ghosts and the human holdouts at the fortress of Ebonhawke in the far southeast. That war did not end so much as pause. In 1320 AE, the Elder Dragon Kralkatorrik woke in the Blood Legion homelands to the north, flew south across Ascalon toward the Crystal Desert, and left the Dragonbrand behind — a swath of crystalline corruption running southeast across Ashford and Blazeridge and beyond.
The Brand crippled the charr war effort against Ebonhawke. Both sides sued for a truce, which was signed in 1324 AE. Queen Jennah, the same monarch who holds Divinity's Reach in Kryta, is credited with much of the diplomatic work; the retrieval of the Claw of the Khan-Ur — the sacred artefact required to unify the charr legions — by Dougal Keane of Ebonhawke and Ember Doomforge of the Ash Legion is credited with the rest.
By 1325 AE, when the events of the game begin, the truce is a year old and increasingly durable. The Rurikton district of Divinity's Reach is home to the Ascalonian diaspora. The three high legions have accepted, in principle, that the war against living humans is over.
The war against dead ones has not stopped, and it is not going to. That is the frame around the Plains of Ashford. The tutorial's ghost attack is not an exceptional event. It is a Tuesday. The renown hearts asking a new soldier to help thin out ghosts at three separate estates are the plains as they normally are. The Ethereal Vanguard Monument in Devast District is a memorial not to a battle but to a policy — an acknowledgement that the war against Adelbern's dead is going to be fought forever, and that the Iron Legion has made its peace with fighting it. Somewhere in the ruins of Ascalon City, Foefire's Heart keeps burning.
And around the human separatists in the hills at Loreclaw Expanse, and the Flame Legion insurgents at Gunbreach and Lake Feritas, is the harder political fact. The truce is an agreement between governments. It is not an agreement among the people whose parents and grandparents died in the Searing or the Foefire or the two hundred and fifty years of war that followed. On both sides, there are people who would rather keep fighting than accept that the war is over.
Fourteen years in the Plains of Ashford
Plains of Ashford launched with the game on 28 August 2012 and, like Queensdale, has been left largely alone since. The map is unchanged. Two hearts were added, and one waypoint moved in the September 2014 New Player Experience revision, and Langmar Estate Waypoint had been added in the February 2013 update. The tutorial has been retuned; the loot tables have been re-costed; the level ranges remain as they were.
The zone did not host a Champion Train. It did host, and still hosts, one of the game's more unusual dungeon runs at the Ascalonian Catacombs — a story-mode dungeon whose difficulty was famously greater than intended at launch, and which for the first year of the game's life became the place players went to learn what a boss fight actually meant. The catacombs remain the entry point for anyone doing the original core dungeons, and a returning player can walk from Smokestead to the catacomb gate in Phasmatis Corridor and find the room laid out exactly as it always was.
The country stays under attack. Rytlock does not appear on the plains any more — his personal story took him elsewhere, into Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire and every expansion since — but his old fights are still marked on the map. Barradin's Vaults are open, the statue is broken, and the ghosts are still there.
Standing on the plains today
To roll a new charr character in the summer of 2026 is to arrive at Smokestead in the middle of a ghost attack that has, in strict continuity terms, been going on for two hundred and thirty-six years. Tosia Domesplitter is at her post. Krysknife is down and calling for a medic. Reeva is keeping score. Somewhere in the crypt, Rytlock is telling the recruit to fall in. Across the plains, in a country whose fields have been fought over since before there was a Kryta, the Ascalonians who died in the Foefire are still refusing to let the country go.
It is not a hopeful zone. Nothing about Ashford asks the player to believe that things will improve. What it asks the player to do is hold ground — held by an army that took the land two centuries ago and cannot quite finish taking it — against a country of the dead who would rather keep dying than concede. A new soldier learns very early what the terms of the job are.
