Hex Crawl 23 #269: The Crystal Dragon Effigy

Seven hexes northwest, six north of Alakran.

 

Rising from the plain south of Eryptos, crouching with wings folded and tail coiled, regarding the back of Tiamat's great statue who in turn bends back two heads to look at it -- behold a statue, four hundred feet long and 120 feet tall, of the platinum dragon Bahamut. It is made, somehow, of crystal, but not transparent crystal. At night it is seen to be mostly opaque with a few eerie lights shining through translucent places.

Nobody has seen him in four or five years, but the inhabitant of this marvel is an ancient wizard called Kul-Gattur, titled The Mahal. Supreme of power in the eastern Wahatti lands is he, and the tutor of Eryptos' own master wizards Syrioth and Abru, but now he is assumed sunk in scholarly pursuits or planar sojourn. Thieves mutter about what riches he might possess. Indeed, the statue has four doors on the ground, one between the toes of each foot, but it is widely known that only one of these leads somewhere; the rest lead to death. Again, one might fly or climb up to the dragon's head, which has five entries, for mouth, nostrils and ears; but the odds are even worse, for all of them are ultimately lethal except for one.

What's inside is necessarily second- or third-hand news. Day's light, apparently, shines in through lenses and prisms with odd effects, sometimes blinding, sometimes creating chromatic magics, sometimes spilling illusions or hypnotic moires. Beings of animate light feature in the wilder tales. Then risk it by night! But dark whispers, too, circulate about what the lenses and prisms do to the shadows of the night sky and the scintillas of the moon and stars.

In conclusion, both the wizard's effigy and the great idol of Tiamat can be entered, there to face foes and haul, one hopes, great treasure. But when the dungeon is a dragon, anything can happen.

Hex Crawl 23 #174: The Wizard of Gagaz-Parku

 Fifteen hexes north, one northwest of Alakran.

 

The peak of Gagaz-Parku rises tall and forbidding in the north and west of Shasari. Its ruddy color and location are the subject of a local riddle:

What is gold in the morning, red at day, and black in the evening?

Great Gagaz; gold when the rising rays hit it, red under the high sun, black when the sun sets behind it.

The mountain is inaccessible from any side but the west, where a precarious path climbs the face and leads past a weird iron tower which suddenly appeared a couple of years ago, The structure, a tall block of the burnished, unrusted exotic metal, sits in an oddly gray patch on the face of the ruddy mountain where the tower and gate stood. It bears a grim decor of skeletons, half in the earth, half out,  molded on the facade.Its strong iron door cannot be opened by normal means, but can be knocked on.

Rumor has it that a wizard did it, and this is the case. The wizard is a man of ochre complexion, a lean wedge of a head, brown shabby layered robes, and a thin mustache. He is Azriel Siyal, an ex-necromancer of the land of Thuranom, a kingdom far away where the living are few and the walking dead many. He had heretically embraced the supremacy of the earth over the corpse it devours and entombs. So, he is an exile to these remote parts, where the local necromancers are so quaintly pathetic in his view. If friendly, he will tell of their ways, but he considers them too weak and petty to intervene directly. And if approached by a fellow wizard in a spirit of learning, with gifts appropriate to the sphere of earth, Siyal will teach deep secrets of the earth magic he has come to master.

Siyal's lair is a cave complex of no natural shaping, but formed out of the living stone by his magic. Like the outside of the mountain, it is built with many precipitous plunges and precarious pathways. The shafts and chasms lead deep, deep below. With Siyal's knowledge it is possible to reach not only the tunnels of the Darkness Beneath but the very deep and very weird Veins of the Earth.