“Hello!” “No one loves you!”
Travelers travailing across the Saar Desert face many hazards and obstacles. Sandmen prowl moonless nights. Windstorms whip up scouring clouds that can strip flesh to the bone. Brutal heat and numbing cold alternate each day and night. Wicked water elementals pose as life-giving oases, and all manner of venomous creatures lurk and hunt. Centuries of flash floods during the all-too-brief but fearsome rainy season gouged miles of twisting canyons, the deepest and most treacherous of which is the dreaded Saar Chasm.
The hissing Sybil ants build vast networks of tunnels and chambers in the chasm. Those stealthy, precognitive insects have swarmed more than one careless traveler, their venom quickly inducing paralysis but not unconsciousness, making it easier to drag their hapless prey underground to be drained of blood over a period of several days. Other ambush predators, most of them solitary and reptilian, wait in the chasm, often lairing in the crumbling cliff crypts built long ago by a now dead yet territorial race of deaf necromancers. Would-be tomb robbers venturing into the chasm must do so with the utmost care and quiet. Vicious enchantments etched into the very walls of the chasm transform echoes into stinging words of rebuke and ridicule, made all the more hurtful because they often carry the weight of truth.
Sounds louder than normal speech echo in the Saar Chasm. When such echoes occur, roll 1d4, but rolling no more than once per round. Add +1 for very loud noises, such as multiple combatants smiting about. Consult the list of effects below. In all cases, such effects only apply to those who can hear them and have a language. Creatures hear the echoes of Saar Chasm in their native tongue.
1 – Succeed on a DC 13 Wisdom saving throw or take 1d4 psychic damage and have disadvantage on your next attack roll made before the end of your next turn.
2 – Succeed on a DC 13 Wisdom saving throw or fall prone, becoming incapacitated with laughter at another’s expense. You are unable to stand up 1 minute. At the end of each of your turns, and each time you takes damage, make another DC 13 Wisdom saving throw. You have advantage on the saving throw if it’s triggered by damage. On a success, the effect ends.
3 – Succeed on a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw or take 2d4 psychic damage and have disadvantage on your next attack roll made before the end of your next turn.
4 – Succeed on a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw or fall prone, becoming incapacitated with laughter at another’s expense. You are unable to stand up 1 minute. At the end of each of your turns, and each time you takes damage, make another DC 15 Wisdom saving throw. You have advantage on the saving throw if it’s triggered by damage. On a success, the effect ends.
5 – The echoes reveal your darkest, most embarrassing secrets. Make a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw or drop whatever you are holding and become frightened for 1 minute. While frightened by this effect, you must take the Dash action and move away from others by the safest available route on each of your turns, unless there is nowhere to move. If you end your turn in a location where no creature has line of sight to you, the creature can attempt a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw. On a successful save, the effect ends.
