dysonlogos
patreon
The Pillared Vault of Serathis
🕑 Added 2025-07-23 13:49:54 +0000 UTCNestled beneath crumbling temple ruins, the Shattered Vault of Serathis is a damp and sprawling complex. Rough-cut stone columns rise from wet stone floors, vaulted halls drip with moisture. Ornate runes glow faintly along cracked walls, hinting at long-forgotten rituals. Alcoves conceal old scrolls now rotted and mildewy.
The vault served as Serathis’s inner sanctum – a secluded priest of the princes of the elemental planes. Serathis slowly went mad and paranoid, and when their paranoia finally pushed them over the edge, they chased off all other priests and faithful and finally fractured the vault itself with arcane wards to keep it out of the hands of their perceived enemies. Since then, the temple above collapsed, sealing the Vault in ominous silence.
Elemental Unrest & The Shade’s Bargain
Corrupted elementals and strange fluctuations in elemental magic have plagued the tower of Melwer the Mage (a low-level wizard with delusions of adequacy) and he believes the source of these disturbances is the ancient elemental temple in the Red Swamp (which was once the Red Forest, but has slowly flooded over the last few hundred years). But those who take up his request to descend into the ancient halls awaken the Seeker’s Shade (an ally of Serathis who was slain in the time of paranoia and isolation). The Seeker’s Shade will offer explorers arcane secrets in exchange for reconstructing the fractured wards – if they can gather the rune fragments and re-empower them. This will of course increase the regional elemental magic fluctuations and enrage Melwer the Mage.
And of course, within the Vault, elemental-based magics are unpredictable and erratic, at times empowered, disrupted, or changed by Serathis’s broken wards.
Like the Depths of the Ashen Throne, I’ve put together two versions of this map that will work as standard desktop wallpaper – I've attached 4k and 1080p versions.
The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 14,400 x 7,500 pixels in size (48 x 25 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 the recommended 10′ squares) – so resizing it to either 3,360 x 1,750 or 6,720 x 3,500 respectively.
https://dysonlogos.blog/2025/07/23/the-pillared-vault-of-serathis/
Comments
ViggenCA
Love the idea of the wards affecting magicks. Perfect excuse to breakout wild-magic style tables and have some fun.
