Hex Crawl 23 #225: Snakes in a Lake

 Eight hexes northwest, two north of Alakran.

 

Like the Lake of "Vampires," this lake is an overflow for the irrigation waters of the Rows of Muttra. It is less accessible to the Road of Flowers, so its perils are less evident. But by common report it is the watering and breeding place of a population of poisonous snakes, the black and white striped dipsas serpents to be precise. Tiny and hard to see, the dipsas' bite, rarely felt, brings death through a great thirst and consuming of the vitals with choleric humor. Indeed, just as the mosquito-ridden Pulka'al is dotted with the remains of the dead, so this nameless "Lake of Thirst" has within eyesight always one or two corpses of unfortunate man or beast who have rushed there to take their last desperate drink. 

Unfortunately for human assassins, the venom of the dipsas decays rapidly and is useless an hour after bring removed from the creature's fangs. Only the live creature will do, and there are many recorded cases of these easily concealed serpents being used for surreptitious murder.

Hex Crawl 23 #25: The All-Seeing Serpent

 Two hexes southeast, one northeast of Alakran.

 

In a stand of oleander bushes near the River Shi-Ar, just where the watershed gets narrower and drier, dwells a serpent remarkable not only for its size -- the length of five camels at last report -- but also for the feature that gave it the local names "The All-Seeing" and "The Never-Blind".

The dust-brown venomous snake has a second head mounted on its tail. This head is perpetually sour and grumpy; it is at the wrong end of the snake's digestive tract and can only command the whole body when there is a threat from behind. So, whereas the front head deals reasonably with threats and is amenable to bribery with meat or animals, and rationally avoids danger, the rear head flies into a self-affirming rage when enemies draw near from that quarter.

A word on the gaming monster used to represent the Never-Blind One.The amphisbaena is only one of a catalogue of fantastically venomous reptiles said to crawl the Libyan desert in antiquity, tall tales elaborated on by Lucan in his account of the Civil War and said to have sprung from the blood drops of Medusa's severed head. In first edition D&D's Fiend Folio another Lucanian legend joined the monster rolls, the flying (or in game, leaping) snakes called jaculi. It's certain that a few more of this catalogue of sixteen deadly serpents, with their bizarre features and death-dealing scenes worthy of a horror film, can be found within three days' travel of the Scarp.