pharobell bay

Once a bustling coastal town and wizard academy, Pharobell Bay was quickly annihilated in a magical cataclysm.  The bay was scoured by magic, remade  into tumbling dunes.  Rockpools and shallow waters choked by sandbars yield difficult terrain.  Seabirds wheel overhead while crabs scuttle, shells adorned with gem and slate chips and fragments of arcane trappings.

The town is ruined, scorched stones amid veins of glass.  Patches of red sand shimmer with heat even now.  In the day, dust devils whip the ruins, racing to the sand dunes. At dawn and dusk, mist creeps around the ruins.  At night, there are whispers, strange lights and bodiless undead.

A subtler peril is a phenomenon called dweomertwist.  This drains a healing surge from all living humanoids for each day spent in Pharobell Bay; those without remaining healing surges lose 25% of their hit points.  Those dying of dweomertwist dessicate into a plume of residuum that blows into the sands.

Users of arcane power who make a successful Arcana check (DC 25) can use dweomertwist to restore one used encounter power by expending a healing surge.  No hit points are regained from the healing surge burned this way beyond those (if any) restored by the encounter power.

The dunes and sandbars contain a salt-and-pepper mixture of sand, ash and traces of residuum.  Unskilled peasants dredge then sift the sand, a day's effort yields 1d6gp worth.  Wizard crabs can be caught with an hour and a DC20 Nature check, if ground up a shell yields 1d8+2gp worth and up to five crabs can be safely caught per day before tides drown the hunter.

Though humanoids rarely stay in the bay for long due to dweomertaint, there is a wrongness about the area that discourages settlers.  Stories of spectres and ghosts in the ruins, wizard crab swarms and rumours of creatures living in the sea off Pharobell Bay disturb all but the dedicated or desperate.