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The Ember Reliquary
🕑 Added 2025-09-22 23:50:38 +0000 UTCThe Ember Reliquary is a ruin of devotion, a shrine to a god whose name has been scorched from every surface and memory. Ages ago, pilgrims descended into its chambers to bask in the warmth of divine flame and to offer sacrifices of oil, incense, and blood. Now the reliquary is a place of ruin and danger, its sacred fires guttering but never extinguished. The air is thick with soot, the walls cracked by heat. The place is never silent, the hiss of embers and the faint groan of stone that has been scorched for centuries echoes through the structure.
The reliquary was abandoned after the god’s fall from grace. The faithful were scattered, their rituals outlawed, and their relics seized or destroyed. Yet the reliquary itself resisted destruction. The fires within refused to die, and the relic at its heart still burns with a soul that flickers between life and death. Those who enter now do so not to worship but to plunder, to seek forbidden knowledge, or to test their courage against the lingering wrath of a forgotten divinity.
The Scorched Foyer
Past the locked and sealed bronze doors, the antechamber of the reliquary is charred and blackened stone. Once it was a place of welcome, where murals depicted the fire god in triumph, surrounded by supplicants who offered their lives to the flame. Now those murals are charred and broken. The god’s name has been melted and scorched out wherever it appeared, leaving only scars in the stone. The air smells of ash and old smoke. The floor is littered with fragments of burnt offerings, fused into the flagstones. There is a faint warmth here, as though the murals themselves still radiate heat. Some will hear whispers in the crackling of unseen embers, voices that urge them to remember the god’s name. Doors here lead to the Sanctum and Pit, and small openings in the wall look into the idol chamber at the centre of the complex.
The Cinder Pit
This chamber is dominated by a wide pit filled with blackened embers. The pit hisses and smoulders, though no fuel feeds it. The air is dry and acrid, and every breath tastes of ash. The pit reacts to falsehood. Whenever a lie is spoken within the chamber, flames erupt from the embers in a sudden burst, scorching those nearby. The flames vanish as quickly as they appear, leaving only the smell of burnt hair.
The Smothering Sanctum
Filled with cursed incense that never ceases to burn, the air in this chamber is thick and sluggish, and every breath feels like drowning in smoke. The incense siphons oxygen from the room, leaving intruders gasping for air. The walls are painted with faded images of supplicants kneeling in suffocation, their faces serene as they offered their last breath to the god.
The Molten Idol
The central chamber houses a massive cracked statue of the fire god, carved from basalt. The statue leaks lava from its wounds, which pools in a massive bowl it holds, and then flows to the floor where the edges hardened into jagged black glass. The idol demands appeasement. If offerings of blood or flame are not made, the lava flow increases, flooding the chamber with unbearable heat. If appeased, the keys to the final chamber float to the top of the lava. And of course, the idol has gemstone eyes, because this is D&D, right?
Ember’s End
Sealed away in the back chamber of the reliquary is Ember’s End, where the relic of the fire god still burns. The relic is a shard of divine essence, a flame that flickers with a soul caught between life and death. It rests on a raised pedestal of black stone, surrounded by a circle of scorched runes. The flame is small, no larger than a candle, yet it radiates immense heat and power. Approaching the relic, one’s soul becomes drawn towards it – as if the flame hungers for company. Touching it can sear flesh, ignite the spirit, burn away curses, or burn away the supplicant’s eyes. Some hear the voice of the forgotten god, others are consumed entirely, leaving only ash.
The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 7,200 x 10,200 pixels (24 x 34 squares). To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to either 70 pixels (for 5′ squares) or 140 pixels (for 10′ squares) – so resizing it to either 1,680 x 2,380 or 3,360 x 4,760, respectively.
https://dysonlogos.blog/2025/09/22/the-ember-reliquary/
