Hex Crawl 23 #54: The Red Ghost

 Four hexes southwest of Alakran.

The camel herds who walk the arroyo south of the Road of Flowers are paltry in numbers, often poached for taming, so only d20 beasts will be encountered at a time from here. And if the dice show 1, you will come across a legend strikingly similar to one that still lingers around the doomed attempt to introduce the humped beasts to the American Southwest.

Image from Annake's Garden

They speak of a red dromedary, some say normal size, some say as tall as an ogre, some swear it's grown to thirty feet tall, never ask how. Tied into the saddle is a skeletal corpse, some poor bastard who grew faint from thirst out in the desert and trusted in his camel to lead hm to water. Maybe the man's skeleton is a living revenant, consumed with hate for everything alive. Maybe the man sold his soul in vain to the Devil, and the camel is a demon, or the Devil himself, mocking the contract by bringing him back to the road dead. Maybe the saddlebags are bulging with a treasure he went too far into the sands to discover. Maybe he never found it, and all he has is the ragged map clutched in his withered hand. 

All these things can be true, or false, when speaking of the corpse-ridden camel, the legendary Red Ghost.