Chapter 13: The Amber Temple - Curse of Strahd

Chapter 13: The Amber Temple. A secret society of good-aligned wizards built the Amber Temple in the Balinok Mountains more than two thousand years ago. They needed a vault in which to contain the evil vestiges (remnants of dead, malevolent entities) they had captured and the hoard of forbidden knowledge they had amassed. They dedicated the temple to a god of secrets, whom they trusted to keep it hidden from the rest of the world until the end of time. Unfortunately for the wizards, even the will of a god couldn't prevent other evil creatures from learning the temple's location. The wizards were forced to guard the temple themselves, to keep its secrets from falling into villainous hands. The evil forces that were imprisoned within the temple eventually corrupted the wizards, turning them against one another. The wizards were dead and gone by the time an evil archmage named Exethanter arrived at the temple. He breached the temple's wards, spoke to a vestige trapped in amber, and discovered the secret to becoming a lich. After his transformation, the lich Exethanter took over the temple and turned the skulls of it previous defenders into flameskulls under his command. Exethanter then took it upon himself to watch over the temple, not to hoard its evil secrets but to share them openly. Meanwhile, the evils within the temple fed on each other, growing in power. Extreme Cold The Amber Temple is a cold, dark place carved out of the snowy slope of Mount Ghakis. The temperature throughout the complex is −10 degrees Fahrenheit (−23 degrees Celsius). Characters who don't have heat sources, cold weather gear, or magic to protect them are subject to the effects of extreme cold, as described in the "Weather" section in chapter 5, "Adventure Environments," of the Dungeon Master's Guide. If Kasimir Velikov (see chapter 5, area N9a) is with the party, his ring of warmth protects him from the effects of the extreme cold. When Strahd came to the temple seeking immortality, Exetha...