The Shrine atop Lazuni Hill (Patreon)

The Rangers of Lazuni built a watch tower atop this hill in ages past to track the movements of the spider armies through the region. With the end of the Arachnid Empire the tower was only checked in on once a year or so until it was compromised during a major earthquake and then collapsed over the next few decades. About two centuries ago the ruins were finally cleared and the stones used to build a shrine to the local aspect of an earth deity. That local aspect has slowly been subsumed into the greater image of the deity, and the shrine has been mostly abandoned for the last generation or two.

The shrine itself has massive stone double doors to enter it which are held closed by a heavy chain running through two holes in the doors and locked with a heavy padlock – the key to which is in the hands of the priesthood of the earth god back in the city. The shrine contains four statuettes of the deity in various poses and made of different stones, each with a minor magical blessing to whoever carries the twenty- to thirty-pound objects. A small stone coffer once also contained an obsidian wand of healing, but it appears to have been removed sometime in the last few years.

There is a second smaller shrine on the switchback climbing the hill with a larger statue of the earth god on it and a few sacrifices laid out about it (mostly pretty stones and a few sheaves of old grain). On the south side of the ascent are a pair of stone benches that provide a nice view of the valley leading down to the farmland about the city. Then there are the pillars – each pillar is a cylindrical construction ten feet across by thirty feet tall and they dominate the west side of the hill. In all there are eight pairs of pillars along this portion of the ascent meant to be turned into archways where supplicants would pause in their climb in order to offer prayer and thanks.

Finally, there is a cave mouth on the southeastern side of the final promontory. This leads to a grotto under the shrine and some associated substructures that were cut into the hill with earth magic – and that will be the subject of our next map.

The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 9,600 pixels (32 squares) wide. 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 the image to either 2,240 pixels wide or 4,480 pixels wide, respectively.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2023/01/04/the-shrine-atop-lazuni-hill/