A few days’ travel from Prizewater lies Halberd Promontory, a stretch of coast marked by a series of cliffs resembling the blade of a halberd. Though many caves riddle the cliff face, one is well known to longtime residents of Prizewater.

They call it Lamozzarod’s Folly. The name belongs to a copper dragon who made this cave his lair for over a century. Proud, curious and obsessed with riddles. Then adventurers came looking for him one day and found only his skull, half-submerged in the shallows. When they began searching for any chance of remaining treasure, they heard the dragon’s voice.

Ever since, it is said that the spirit of Lamozzarod offers a piece of his vast knowledge to those who can answer his riddles and overcome his challenges. Although some have returned, many have not.

Here are the previous two story instalments to the Prizewater location

Using This Location

Lamozzarod’s Folly works as a standalone destination using the Dragonskull Cave battlemap by Cem Iroz. A strange, dangerous place where desperate people go to learn things no one else can tell them. It sits apart from Prizewater’s politics and factions, so characters don’t need a connection to the town to find it.

Sun Siren Beacon tie-in. If you’re running the Sun Siren Beacon story, Nehira is one of the few beings in the region old enough to know its true purpose. She can tell the characters what the beacon really does — not the church’s version, not the town’s version. She can reveal the location of the Sun Siren Shrine. This knowledge comes at a price, like everything else here.

What’s Really Going On

Lamozzarod has been dead for decades. A sphinx named Nehira outwitted him and turned his corpse into her new lair. Driven from her original lair by a knightly order that wanted her knowledge and wasn’t willing to wait for it, she fled to this coast and claimed the cave, but to keep herself and her cubs safe, she claimed the dragon’s myth too. Nehira speaks as Lamozzarod now. 

The skull is real. Lamozzarod’s remains sit in the shallows. Nehira speaks through it from deeper within, hidden in the tunnels she has carved through the dragon’s own fossilised remains.

What Nehira Knows

The Church of the Lucent Maiden calls the beacon the original light censer of the Lucent Maiden herself. Nehira finds this charming. She has heard many charming stories in her time.

The truth is older. Long before the church, before Prizewater, before the cliffs had a name, there was a sovereign of the deep sea. A creature of the ocean’s depths who found faith in a deity of the sun and ascended, becoming something celestial, something warm, a being that belonged to the sky instead of the water. 

Her own people called it betrayal. The sea-folk she had ruled were left leaderless, grief-stricken, furious. During a conflict between sun and sea, her soul was extracted from her body and sealed. How it was done remains a mystery, even for Nehira. What she knows is what remained: a petrified body on grey mountaintops far inland, kept deliberately from the ocean so that her people could not reach it. And a soul, bottled up in what the church now calls their holy relic.

The creatures drawn to the coast, that rise from the depths and circle Prizewater, are not attacking. They are grieving. They sense their sovereign’s soul nearby and have been following it for a very long time.

Nehira

Role: Hidden keeper of Lamozzarod’s Folly.

Appearance: A leonine sphinx with a deep crimson coat and cobalt blue flair. Her eyes are the colour of a hot blue sky. Her wings fade from deep crimson to silver-white, trimmed in cobalt blue.

Personality: Precise, patient, and quietly dangerous. She has the manner of someone who has heard every lie and found none of them interesting. She enjoys the exchange but her tolerance for fools is thin.

Motivation: Protect her anonymity and her cubs. Grow her library. The myth of Lamozzarod is her shield, and she will do what is necessary to keep it intact. Nehira (Sphinx of Lore) has lived through three eras along this coastline and remembers them all. She presents herself as the voice of a dead dragon, and she is good at it. Lamozzarod was known for riddles and theatrics. Nehira provides both. Behind the performance is a calculating mind that has been running this arrangement long enough to refine it.

She is not cruel. But she is precise. Characters who treat the exchange as a game will find she treats it the same way, and she would rather leave such a foolish creature aged and withering, rather than another corpse in her den. 

Hidden in the tunnels behind the skull, her two cubs watch every encounter through cracks in the stone.

Entering the cave

The skull’s eye sockets glow with the same cold blue light as the water. The voice that fills the cave is warm, dry, and slightly amused. It belongs to a dead copper dragon. Or so it would seem.

The Exchange

Nehira will answer one question truthfully in exchange for three things: a riddle answered, a story told in rhyme, and a price paid in blood. She frames it as her (Lamozzarod’s) tradition.

The Riddle

Nehira poses a riddle relevant to the knowledge the characters seek. She gives them time to confer. Answer correctly, and she is pleased. Answer incorrectly, and she asks whether the characters are sure of their answer, giving them a chance to change their minds before she uses her Weight in Years ability on each character, disguised as a mighty roar. 

The riddle is yours as DM. It should be difficult but fair, and feel connected to what the characters are trying to learn. If you need some random riddles pertaining to the Sun Siren Beacon, Prizewater, or the coast, refer to the table below.

The Story

Nehira challenges the party to tell a story through a limerick.  Each character must consecutively speak a line. If Nehira enjoys the rhyme in the limerick, they pass the test. If she isn’t impressed, the party must succeed a DC 17 Charisma (Performance) check or suffer from the effect of another Weight in Years ability from the sphinx.

The Battle

The price paid in blood is not a metaphor. The cave’s waters have drawn things over the years. The characters must prove themselves against what lives in the Folly. The encounter runs in three waves.

The Cubs

Somewhere in the stone, Nehira’s young, Ansana and Eranix are watching. Two Sphinxes of Wonder, small enough to hide in the cracks of the fossilised skull, old enough to be curious about everything. If you need to give the characters a little boost, the cubs use their Burst of Ingenuity on the characters as they are amused by their humour, desperation, or courage.

Deeper in the Den

Behind the skull, the cave continues. Nehira has carved tunnels through Lamozzarod’s fossilised remains, through ribs, along the spine, into cavities that were once organs and are now rooms. The walls pulse with wild magic. Things live here that serve her. 

This section of the Folly is expansion material. A dungeon, if you want one or just a rumour, if you don’t.

What might be found:

• A library carved into the dragon’s ribcage, containing knowledge Nehira has gathered over decades.
• Wild magic zones where spells misfire and reality bends.
• Creatures she has tamed, hired, or simply tolerated.
• Treasure accumulated from years of exchanges. Some of it is cursed.

Support the Creators

Ian Arguilles
What do Ian, a hydra, and a hat rack have in common? They all wear many hats. Ian freelances across copywriting, short fiction, and RPG design. If you’d rather just hear him ramble about telling better stories at the table, look for Unfound Fables on Instagram.

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