Treasure Hoard - Rock Hearts
Name: Rock Heart
Description: small rock, shaped and coloured like anatomical human heart, the size of a thumb. Surprisingly tough and durable when it comes to mechanical and environmental damage but crumbles in a hand.
Usage:
- when it is crumbled in your fingers it restores some of your vitality.
- when it is touching your skin the moment you get hurt it immediately crumbles and restores a bit of health.
Encounters:
- On a sunlit meadow there are a lot of them spread hidden in high grass. Meadow is known for groups of deer gathering around it but never stepping onto it.
- A hole in the ground hosts a pile of them. There is also ash and charred remains of firewood in the hole. Rocks are whole, still warm, though the wood and soil are cold already.
- A group of children are playing by throwing rocks and drawing symbols on the ground. One of them has it among their collection nad won't give it up until sufficiently paid or dared.
- A witch is walking around with a necklace of them on her neck. Gossip says she is young forever. She doesn't care for the necklace as long as she gets something else equally gruesome to scare the villagers.
Gossip: (only mystics might know anything about it)
- They are artifacts of the god of blood and leaving them on one of their forbidden altars is a powerful sacrifice.
- Deep in the ground lives The Heart of Rock, a god trapped in endless tunnels whose servants are given these as seeds to sow its rebirth.
- These are hearts of giants that calcified and shrunk after death.
- If you touch it when sleeping it will regain a day of your youth.
- At night you can hear screams of victims who served as materials for their creation.
- Ancients made them with still beating human hearts but the knowledge of these rituals was destroyed in eon old wars.
Hooks:
- Noble or bourgeois obsessed with immortality wants all rock hearts and a steady supply of them so after acquisition of 'ancient' scroll with a ritual they order their mage to prepare it. It requires fresh human hearts and it doesn't even work.
- Law enforcement gets a hint that people who hold these rocks are followers of a cruel blood god. They start wide search for any trace of them. Captain wants them to themself so they could use pray at forgotten altar in the wilds.
- A bear in the woods grows bigger and stronger than any other and starts robbing villages in order to find sufficient amount of food. It has a load of rock hearts stuck in its stomach. Their wounds heal instantly and each night they grow more and more in strength as well as hunger. From time to time one of the uncrumbled ones goes out with the poop...
Random item stuff, I think I'll make more of that. And spells too.