Hex Crawl 23 #193: Jagged Temple Ruin

Three hexes northwest, four southwest of Alakran.

In any campaign where players are given free will, there will be a number of sites that are dangled tantalizingly within eyesight, but passed by for greater glories or the simple needs of the day. Such a site is the Ruin of the Jagged Temple, or Jagged Ruins of the Temple, which sits atop a rocky hill and can be glimpsed from the Road of Flowers over the heat and haze of the dry plain.

The original design of the temple is forgotten. The fused and glazed ribs and melted walls of its structure, somehow, speak to the kind of inspired or fanciful architecture that answers to the rigorous demands of a theology, rather than the comfortable or defensible needs of a price, and so it is known as the "Temple." What could have transformed the strangely colored sandstone into a bubbled and jagged amalgam of seawater-colored glass? 

At any rate, the upper structure is passable and quiet enough, but an opening underneath a slumped, fused cylinder -- was it once an altar? -- leads down. Carved into the stone of the hill is a small chamber, made smaller by the shaking and dripping of the temple superstructure. There, if the light of the sun or moon shines straight down, can be seen tiny scraps that with good eyesight resolve themselves into small animal parts carved of yellowed marble -- paws, tails, snouts. These scraps are clues that a cockatrice dwells here, who petrifies then eats its small prey, but always leaves a little something for later. 

To get to the treasure in this place, explorers must haphazardly smash at the glass pillars and curtains that have dripped down to seal off the ends and corners of this cellars. At various points they may find the following objects:

* A jade figurine of the lizard-headed god once worshipped here, worth 80 gp.

* A bull's horn, stoppered at one end, with ony foul-smelling residue within, but engraved with 5 generations of a now-prosperous family that still can be found in Gesshed and will pay 100 gp for the heirloom.

* Buried in a crevice completely sealed over by glass, 25 pure golden kuzen of a bygone epoch, each one worth 5 gp.

* Folded into the two leaves of a woven asbestos folio, a singed papyrus, "The Preamble to the Great Invocation and Exhortation of the Phoenix" -- a protection from fire spell usable by clerics, warlocks, and wizards at level 3, that may have saved its casters from whatever conflagration destroyed the place, but did nothing for the temple.

*