Free TTRPG Battlemap – Crashed Prison of Arcarix
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Your party is enjoying the sumptuous celebrations in a village renowned for its annual prosperity festival. Every year as a comet blazes across the sky its people celebrate with fried sweets, roasted meat, and copious quantities of white wine before releasing red sky lanterns.
Except this year, as the lanterns are being released, the comet begins to slip from the sky. As the inhabitants of the village begin to scream and panic, the night lights up in a white flash with a loud bang that reverberates in your ears. The comet fragments as it falls, the smaller blazing rocks shaking the earth as they collide.
Eventually the main body of the comet crashes into a nearby forest, pushing trees to the ground and shattering them as it sails low overhead. Many people are thrown off their feet by the impact and watch as a large, fiery being rises above the forest, roaring horrifically in a guttural tongue, before shrinking back beneath the treeline.
What’s happening? Long ago a fire elemental named Arcarix raged through the land, turning it into a burning waste. Only a wizard named Astraphalageous, after losing his wife and children to the calamity, stopped Arcarix before it was too late. He sacrificed his life to imprison the elemental within a fallen comet of skymetal, before sending it up far away; where it should never have touched the land again.
Astraphalageus’s Sacrifice is what the comet became called and is the real reason it was seen as a symbol of prosperity, for it returned hope to the land. However, as time flowed ever onward his sacrifice was forgotten, alongside the true story behind the comet.
Now, hundreds of years later the magic that once bound it has finally unraveled; causing the comet to fall and collide with the land. Arcarix, partially released from his prison, rose above the forest announcing his joy at finally being free in the fire elemental tongue.
Despite his initial hope, Arcarix hasn’t fully escaped his prison. It only cracked during its collision, allowing him to emerge from the comet, but not escape it. The little fires that broke off from him during the collision have become small fire elementals, beginning to foray out into the forest.
When you arrive the distressed Arcarix is cursing at being partially-imprisoned, whilst tearing chunks of rock away. If you understand and speak to him, he might explain how his active volcano was destroyed by a wizard and how, when he tried to find a new home, that man came after him, locking him away in the darkness where he could barely sustain his flame. Now he just wants to go back to his volcano, unaware of the damage he caused.
With a successful perception check, you can see glowing red runes of sealing inscribed on the meteorite, though they are partially damaged.
If approached by armed adventurers (or anyone who looks like a wizard), Arcarix will lash out and fight to the death.
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