Maybe it was naive of us to think that war camps were the kind of encounter we could pump out daily. Scratch the maybe, that was definitely naive. This Thar encounter involves a pair of wyverns nesting in the ruins of an ancient Thar watchtower, because progress on the Bloody Hands war camp is going pretty slow.
Summary: A pair of wyverns nest in a watchtower of ancient Thar, long since fallen into disrepair. Within the remnants of the watchtower is a treasure vault within which the wyverns make their home.
Hook: The watch tower may demand exploration on its own accord. Alternatively, if the players were attacked by one of the two wyverns in the Galena Mountains or their foothills, they may have tracked the wyverns to their lair here.
Exploration: The tower is crumbling. The top floor, where the guard house once was, has been worn away completely by time, the spiral stairs leading up to it just ending in mid-air about twenty feet up, leaving some rubble behind on the ground floor. The wyverns have gathered up a nest of debris and nearby tree branches and trunks, mostly evergreens. The nest is built into a corner with the remains of the stairs looping up overhead, and some conveniently placed debris and the material added by the wyverns makes it mostly sheltered from the winter snows of the Galena Mountains.
Encounter: Generally speaking, one wyvern will be in the nest while the other is out hunting. If the party have tracked a wounded wyvern here, both will be in the nest when they arrive, although a day or two after the wounded wyvern arrives its mate will depart to hunt. The two wyverns will fight to the death to defend one another and their nest.
Rewards: The nest contains 1d3+2 wyvern eggs all of which will hatch in 1d6 months. Upon hatching, the wyverns will imprint on the first creature they see, so if the players are patient and have some decent Animal Handling checks to make, they can get some loyal baby wyverns. These wyverns take two years to reach maturity, and if raised from infancy will automatically be tamed when they reach adulthood.
Beneath the nest is a trap door that can be found with a DC 10 Investigation check. The trap door leads to a cellar containing ancient treasures of Thar, stored here by guards of the royal palace who looted the treasury and turned tail when the kingdom went belly up, then hid here where their friends were posted. They were cut off from civilization by a sudden snowstorm, and with no kingdom to dig them out and three times as many people to feed as the tower was prepared for, the remote watch tower burned through their food in two months and starved to death. Their bones still litter the storage cellar, where all that’s left are the non-perishable valuables they brought with them.
Those valuables are specifically 1,200 cp, 6,000 sp, 2,200 gp, 90 pp, an amber (100 gp), an amethyst (100 gp), a coral (100 gp), a garnet (100 gp), a jade (100 gp), three jets (100 gp), a pearl (100 gp), two spinels (100 gp), three tourmalines (100 gp), a periapt of wound closure, a stone of good luck, and a wand of magic missiles. The skeletal remains of the guards also still have their six breastplates and long swords. A DC 20 History check will reveal the origins of the treasure based on the markings on the coins, clearly from Thar, and the heraldry engraved on the breastplates of four out of the six guards marking them as royal guards, whereas the other two have no heraldry, and presumably kept theirs on tabards that have now rotted away. A DC 20 Medicine check will confirm that the guards did not die of any wounds.
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