Hex Crawl 23 #267: Shimmering Salts

Seven hexes northwest, six north of Alakran.

  

This salt deposit is not like others you might have seen in eastern Wahattu. Although the prevailing hue is pale, the crusts and humps of mineral shimmer with subtle colors, being composed of many salts beyond the simple sodium chloride we know. In modern chemical terminology, this terrain is streaked with deposits of:

• Cobalt nitrate (red)
• Copper sulphate (blue, drying to white)
• Cobalt chloride (blue in the dry season, pink in the wet season)
• Iron chloride hexahydrate (yellow-brown, drying to black)
• Ammonium dichromate (orange)
• Manganese chloride tetrahydrate (pink)
• Potassium permanganate (purple)
  

Other deposits, although white, give their immediate area a characteristic smell such as:

• Sodium acetate (vinegar)
• Potassium cyanide (almonds)
• Ammonium chloride (strong, piercing smell)

The proximity of these deposits is one reason why alchemy has always flourished in nearby Eryptos, and the salts are so easily gathered that the job is relegated to a dozen menial carriers who are paid barely enough to live on.

A curious tale circulates around this collection of salts. It is said that among them can be found all the tastes that food may acquire - sweet, salty (of course), bitter, sour, and savory. And thereby hangs a tale.

Generations ago, the alchemist Tuenar devised a diet for the obese Prince in Eryptos known as the Mountain of Eminence. The stuff of the food was clay of varying consistencies, and the flavors of salts were so skillfully combined to mimic various foodstuffs that, eating blindfolded, the Prince could barely tell the false food from his true meals. Alas, the Prince never became king, as the diet was quite easily poisoned. But in one version of the tale he was done in by his love of almond cakes, whose flavors could only be recreated using salts of cyanide.

 

Hex Crawl 23 #266: The Northern Meadows

Six hexes northwest, seven north of Alakran.

 

Herders from Kin-Yan eastward, and the river lands northward, take their flocks to these pastures, watering them from natural wells and thin rivulets flowing northwest. The meadows are called the Blood Fields by old people who remember tales of a mighty battle fought there. Indeed, rooting around the tufts of grass that are bone-pale in the dry season and a shy green in the rainy season, might (5%/ hour) reveal one of these finds (d6):

1. A skeleton hand gripping a sword hilt stuck in the earth. Just the hilt.

2. An arrow head with a magical one-time blessing to ignore armor, apparently never activated

3. A skull half-set in the ground where a family of jerboas has made their nest, and are hoarding two gold and eight copper coins. 

4. Flies buzzing around a haunted, indelible, ever-wet patch of blood in the ground.

5. A ring of green corrosion that marks the rim of a chariot wheel. Buried a finger's depth under the earth at the center of the ring is the bronze hub, also corroded but much of it intact.

6. A place where the wind, if it blows from the west, carries ghostly shouts of triumph, and if from the  east, carries the ghostly tumult of routed men.

Hex Crawl 23 #265: Arraqa Heights and Three Notable Trees

 Five hexes northwest, eight north of Alakran.

 

These wooded highlands and lowlands are covered at their thickest with pines, while tough scrub oaks and chaparral constitute the scrublands. Woodcutters found here hail from Armakhu-Lallu; as they work, their cheerful songs ring out through the trunks. They are just as likely to be found tending the undergrowth, clearing firebreaks, or picking the rare fungi that lurk under the loam, as actually felling trees - an activity which they regulate out of care not to strip the forest. 

Local people know the location of these three trees of legend within the woods, each with a power or secret.

1. The Parliament of Owls

A half-dead twenty-foot pine in whose decaying wood twelve tawny owls have made nests. Those who can speak with them will find them possessed of uncommon wisdom, but they will only give up their facts for knowledge of equal rarity and importance.

2. The Arms of Eset

Lightning clove this short hemlock's trunk in two, and in its recovery the halves grew out, curving separately to resemble embracing arms. It is said that whosoever stands between the arms is safe from lightning, and even that a pinecone of this tree will absorb the force* of any lightning strike.

3. The Signpost of Treasure

An eccentric in the last generation is said to have turned this dead pine trunk, still standing but only half its twenty-foot former height, into a signpost to a great treasure, but no markings can be seen on it. In actuality, he broke four branches from it whose stumps can still be seen on the trunk. These he used as rafters of his house, now occupied by a family who fled from Dulsharna. Inside the house, the rafters can be seen, each carved with notches: 10, 24, 32, and 25, referring to paces (the "10" rafter has a measure of the man's pace carved in it to avoid error). If the rafters' ends are matched to the stumps, and the paces and compass direction of each stump are paced out in order from bottom to top, the treasure spot will be reached. Buried three feet deep in a lead casket (avoiding magical detection) are:

•  A pair of "lucky" bone dice with a 5% extra chance of winning, but also a 1% chance per game of making suspicious giggling noises
•  A black domino mask that, if gazed through, detects invisible undead
• 60 gold pieces in a neck-rag
• A large irregular chunk of lapis lazuli carved with an eye on each side -- not magical but worth 100 gp to the curious

* Out of any number carried, one cone burns up and absorbs one die, or 5 points if no dice are involved, of the lightning damage.