Sunday 30 April 2023

Hex Crawl 23 #119: The Stinking Place

Two hexes southwest, four northwest of Alakran.

 

In the sunset-shadow of the mountainous landmark known as Sutekh's Knee to all who tread the Wahatti plain, there is "a place which none may see but all may know" to cite a traditional riddle -- variously called the Stench, the Whiff, the Foul, the Bowel, or the Stinking Place.

It is limned on our map as hexes of dead land and grass, and indeed the soil there, though brown and dry like the surrounding lands, is curiously ashen and unhappy-looking. The grasses and few shrubs that eke out their existence there seem shrunken, abashed, as if to say -- "This is not my fault". For an awful smell permeates all those lands. It has the worst of life and death about it, the reek of every orifice's tribute and the plunder of grave worms. It reverses not only the will to eat but the will to exist. In those lands or up to five miles downwind, everyone and everything who breathes must make a CON and WIS save, or take one level of exhaustion per failed save.

This fatigue is one reason, perhaps, why Alakran is not more often visited from Gesshed to the west, and why in times of stronger trade to far Dulsharna, westward caravans made a camp by the river whose traces and fire-circles can still be discerned -- even though, unimpaired, it would be possible to crack on further to Gesshed.

Legends of the Stench often implicate Sutekh because of the proximity of his eponymous Knee. At which the serious priests of Set scoff, and turn animist in the defense of their god's ancestor, saying, "All beings have an anus; why not, then, the Earth itself?"


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