Warrior

About the plot: essentially, this campaign serves as a prelude to upcoming events, which is why it has the brief description "The Beginning of the Story." Everything else will be revealed later.
About the roads: they are located along the path to the main objectives in the missions.
About the artifacts: I left the pendant there so that the player could acquire two racial perks without leveling it up.
About the difficulty: the campaign was intended to be simple and easy to complete. I agree that I may have overdone it.

Added 2 minutes later
And I didn't quite understand your point about the difficulty in the second one.
And regarding the empty areas: some zones were initially designed to be empty (the right bank in the second mission), while others became empty due to editor errors.