Once Laslea Glen is behind you, The Blood of Dawnwalker stops steering. The journal files the whole middle of the game under one chapter — The thirty days — and hands you an open valley with a countdown. This guide covers how that chapter is built, what in it is actually mandatory, and the two signals the game does give you for deciding where to go next.
What the chapter actually contains
The journal’s middle chapter is a set of quests you can approach in any order, sitting on top of three overlapping layers of content:
- The chapter’s own quests. Their order is yours to choose. They are not a chain in the sense the prologue is.
- The three vassal arcs. Each boyar runs a family of court quests across the valley. These are mandatory — all three arcs must be resolved before the endgame.
- Everything else. Side quests, activities, manuals, lairs, treasures and the collectibles spread across the map. Optional, but this is where your Corruption, gear and manuals come from.
The practical consequence: the mid-game is a budget problem, not a sequence problem. What you are deciding is which regions to spend your days in, not which quest comes next.
The two signals the game gives you
1. Region level bands
The game scales each region’s NPCs to a band of its own, and that band is the clearest routing signal it hands you. Crossing the valley costs no time, so there is no penalty for walking into a region early to look — fighting what lives there is the other matter. The bands below are the ones our region guides carry and are approximate:
| # | Region | Level band (approx.) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Laslea Glen | 1–8 |
| 2 | Briar Sloughs | 5–12 |
| 3 | Maragir Wealds | 12–20 |
| 4 | Boar’s Back | 10–18 |
| 5 | Rockfalls | 10–16 |
| 6 | St. Tyna’s Grove | 16–22 |
| 7 | Svartrau City | 15–25 |
| 8 | Greifberg Castle | 20–28 |
| 9 | The Silts | 18–26 |
| 10 | Tantari Woods | 14–22 |
2. The vassal order
The three arcs are structured as an ascending ladder, and each boyar is a named boss with a level range. Working them in level order is therefore also the safest difficulty curve:
| Order | Vassal | Boss level | Base region | Their court quests |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ambrus | 16–20 | Maragir Wealds | Cellars, Collectors, Dungeons, Prisoners, Transports |
| 2 | Bakir | 20–24 | Svartrau | Distilleries, Headhunters, Pillories, Transports |
| 3 | Xanthe | 24–28 | Svartrau | Blood Guards, Excavations, Recruiters, Transports |
The trade-offs of that order — and the cases where you would deliberately break it — are covered in the vassal order guide. Each boss also has its own fight guide: Ambrus, Bakir, Xanthe.
What is actually mandatory
Strip the chapter down and only one thing is compulsory: all three vassal arcs, resolved before the endgame.
- Resolving each arc well builds your Infamy — and maximum Infamy is what lets Brencis summon you to the final quest. The thresholds and what they gate are in the Infamy guide.
- The arcs cost days. They run on the same 30-day budget as everything else, so pacing them is a real planning decision. The time ledger is where you work that split out.
- Court quests are how you chip at a vassal before the boss fight. You can find all of them on the world map under the Quests filter, with regions and journal lines in the quests database.
Everything else in the chapter is optional — but “optional” is where your build actually comes from. Manuals unlock the Swordmastery and Witchcraft perks, blood vials and feeding drive Corruption for the Vampirism tree, and legendary equipment is spread across the regions above.
What you can lose
Advancing the story closes doors. Some side quests are permanently missable once you move past their region or beat, and the prologue’s set is the largest block of content you can lose without ever seeing it. The missable content guide tracks what is still open, and the key choices timeline covers the decisions in this chapter that change what the finale offers.