Battlemap
The Salt-Cistern Temple
Every bell trembles softly above a basin of black water.
The Salt-Cistern Temple was built around a natural brine spring, where priests once preserved the dead and purified the living. Its lower sanctum has become a sealed refuge for the last priest, whose rites now feed something hungry beneath the stone.
The temple smells of wet salt, old incense, and lamp oil. Water ticks through unseen channels, bells murmur whenever the stone settles, and pale blue lamps cast restless light across walls furred with mineral crust.
☠ Threat
High Priest Shushen remains alive in the lower sanctum, sustained by brine drawn from the Listener Below. His body is swollen with salt crystals, and his prayers animate the temple's dead guardians. He believes every intruder must be drowned, preserved, and offered to the buried spirit before the old bargain can be completed.
History
The temple was built by the Brine Votaries after workers cleared a salt-choked sinkhole and discovered a spring that never ran dry. For generations, priests used the water in healing rites and guarded a buried spirit they called the Listener Below. When the final high priest tried to bargain for eternal life, the temple was sealed, its records hidden, and its prisoners left behind.
Encounter Table
CRA drowned attendant drags a broken prayer bench through the corridors, searching for the refectory.
A cluster of salt-crusted rats drinks from the wall channels and carries scraps of prayer cloth in their nests.
A headless temple warden patrols with a rusted spear, following old instructions it can no longer understand.
Rumours & Whispers
The blue lamps beneath the old salt works are not ghosts. They are prayers burning underwater.
A priest once kept an entire village alive through a winter famine by preserving food in the temple cistern.
People who sleep near the sealed temple wake with someone else's name on their lips.
The temple treasury was never looted because the dead guards still recognize the old priest's voice.
A mason who escaped the ruins claims there is a sea beneath the hills, though no map shows one.
Quest Hooks
Quest giver: Seshai, a salt gatherer
Seshai, a salt gatherer from a nearby hamlet, asks the party to find workers who vanished after opening the temple's outer doors.
A purse of 35 gold pieces, a month's supply of preserved food, and free lodging in the hamlet.
Quest giver: Tupaq Orin, a traveling historian
Tupaq Orin, a temple historian, wants the records in room-1 recovered before grave robbers sell them to collectors.
A translated map of the surrounding ruins and a healing potion kept in his family vault.
Quest giver: Hesh Varo, a village bell keeper
The party is hired to stop the blue lights visible from the road, which began appearing after the old temple bell rang three nights in a row.
A silver temple seal worth 60 gold pieces and local authority to explore the abandoned cisterns.
Corridor Notes
Shallow grooves carry brackish water along the corridor edges toward the lower chambers.
Faded floor mosaics show robed figures pouring salt into a black basin, with several tiles scratched away.
Small bronze bells hang from cracked arches and ring softly when creatures pass beneath them.
Prayer strips, stiff with salt, cling to the walls and bear names worn unreadable by damp.
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