The Viper Pit/Polmachis' Folly

The Viper Pit is an ancient, overgrown Yuan-ti sacred site abandoned in antiquity for reasons that become obvious should one travel all the way through the ruins to the ritual chamber.
It is a lonely, forlorn place frequented by Civaak carrion-birds, ravens and hyenas. Though no tribes or clans claim it, occasionally Gnolls are found using some portion of the lava chamber or the Sequence as an especially rustic lair. It is, as these places often are, rumored to hold untold riches and magical artifacts of great power, which attracts a certain kind of adventurer; the skulls and bones of many of these litter the less accessible regions of the ruin.
It has three main areas:

1. Outer curtain wall: a retaining wall intended to keep invaders and water from flowing into the sunken center of the collapsed lava chamber. This has been so reduced to rubble in places that it's not even recognizable as such, but enough of the wall remains to define the outer section. The main entrance is in this area, guarded silently by a moss-covered mythical serpent or dragon-monster which retains some of its enameled scales. Legends say that this serpent represents Polmachis, a Yuan-Ti Malison who once ruled a powerful clan that built and worshipped their gods at this temple.
2. Collapsed lava chamber: The central pit which gives the Viper Pit its name is a stone bowl built into a dead (?) volcano that has fallen about a hundred feet below the surface, in an area about 300' across.
3. The Sequence: Eight rooms circle this chamber, carved into the softer rock of the volcano's throat; One of them, on the opposite side of the circle from where the stairwell descends from the curtain wall, connects to the chamber, but they all connect to each other in sequence via internal doors. Most of these have been picked clean over the centuries, but three of the rooms, including the final ritual room carved from an incursion of incredibly hard black obsidian crystal, remain mostly intact and retain their dangers as well as their furnishings and potentially, their treasure; any of these eight might have secret cubbyholes or even secret doors to other areas.

Yuan Ti are very fond of nines and threes, so eight rooms seems unsatisfying, but if the lava chamber is also counted as a room, that makes nine.
The traitor Zelara admitted that she stashed the stolen Fangs of Sseth in the ruins, in a hidden panel in one of the rooms, but the sequence of rooms is different depending on where you begin. The Chieftain suspected she simply wanted to be included in the trip, planning no doubt to make her escape once inside the ruins, so he has entrusted the party to figure it out without her.
The Fangs of Sseth are ritual artifacts, by age at least though not evidently in power, or Zelara would never have given them up in the first place.

It is said that a peculiar enchantment protects the fangs from theft, in that they will seem to all appearances to simply be wooden spoons, but when held and the name of Sseth is invoked, their illusionary appearance is exchanged for their true form. They are exceedingly sharp daggers infused, at the very least, with enchantment magic, but their true nature and use is a closely guarded secret of the Zhis'kaas clan. Obviously they are critical to the performance of some Yuan-ti ritual or other, likely one involving sacrifice and the spilling of blood.

Purpose / Function

Intended as a ritual site permitting transformation into higher orders of Yuan-Ti, it was abandoned after a plan to change Beholders into Yuan-ti went (predictably) awry. It is filled with aspirational vignettes that seem to advertise how wonderful it will be to have a 10-snake-headed beholder who can cast petrify rather than an antimagic ray, It broke free during the final ritual and slaughtered everyone in the temple, setting up camp as a local pestilence for centuries before a Kaalengi clan sickened it and then overwhelmed it; enchanted parts of its body sometimes show up in local magic items.
After Polmachis and the beholder were both dead, the site was flooded after an earthquake rerouted the path of a local river, and it has only re=emerged from the muck in the past two thousand years or so. Jungle gnolls, who move in small family bands of no more than two dozen, and who migrate over a very large territory, occasionally use it as a stopover for a season before moving on.

Polmachis-serpent in the curtain wall area.

RUINED STRUCTURE
6100

Type

Ruins

Parent Location

The Caetica Region

Related Report (Primary Locations)

• S1 E12: Polmachis and Pevushal

Related Report (Secondary Locations)

• S1 E11: Into the Viper Pit
• S1 E13: A Timely Rescue

overview of the inner chambers, below.