What’s at the bottom of this well?

Posted on December 11, 2017 in Play Resources

1 – The top of the other well. We donโ€™t talk to the folk down there – theyโ€™re strange. Sometimes music leaks up, so plug your ears with wax when you go to collect water during a solstice, else youโ€™ll be drawn down beneath.

2 – A very stuck dragon. We couldnโ€™t get him out. Heโ€™s clearly embarrassed about it. Throw him a copper – he says heโ€™ll tell you your future if you do, but he clearly canโ€™t. Problem is: the older a dragon gets, the bigger it gets, and heโ€™s starting to buckle the ground around the well.

3 – A Sphere of Annihilation. Itโ€™s like a garbage disposal, but you donโ€™t need to worry about putting a fork in it, because itโ€™ll destroy that too. A wizard put it here (of course it was a wizard) after plucking it from the Elemental Plane of No, and after burying it didnโ€™t work (it annihilated the dirt and the shovels) they just built higher and higher walls around it.

4 – A branching myconid (fungus-folk) colony which is infecting people with waterborne spores. They have dire news from the Land Beneath and are trying to make an ambassador that has a human mouth, but itโ€™s going really wrong.

5 – During the day, nothing but water and the occasional frog. At night: a lank-haired witch-thing, skittering about on bent and broken limbs, who steals livestock and drags the bodies, still kicking, back down the well to feed. The villagers are working out whether itโ€™s best to keep placating her or try to stop her nightly rampages.

6 – Gold coins. Loads of them; theyโ€™re covered in grime, but you can see the glint of something valuable down there. Now, the whole village around it is abandoned, but presumably thatโ€™s got nothing to do with it. (Of course: itโ€™s not gold coins. Well. It is gold coins, stuck to the camouflaged shell of something between a wyrm and a squid, designed to lure in careless treasure-hunters.)

7 – Itโ€™s not a well: itโ€™s a chimney from a waterlogged dwarven forge that got stuck down there when the multiverse imploded. Springs and tiny cogs keep coming up along with the water.

8 – Goblins, filling the buckets with water, presumably as part of a ruse.

9 – The corpse of a unicorn. Its horn and bones are turning all the water to low-grade healing potions, making this village the healthiest one for miles around.

10 – Gin. A wizard magicked it this one time for a party and never changed it back, making this village one of the least healthy for miles around.

11 – An adventure! Thereโ€™s a guy down there, all covered in robes and stuff, and he says that the well conceals a portal to the land of the dead. If you can survive the seven trials and challenges ahead, you can rescue lost souls from the underworld. (Sounds like a ruse? About one in four people in the village claim to have been rescued from down there. But maybe theyโ€™re lying, too.)

12 – Clouds. And, beneath them, a desert of bone-white sands and endless black skies, where hungry ghosts trade coins from a damned kingdom for blood, and tattered madmen lead packs of semi-intelligent dogs to raid ruined libraries.


Remnants is a series where Chris and Grant, the creative leads behind Rowan, Rook & Decard, create a fantasy world through the use of Dx tables. Because who has time to read a full setting book?

[REMNANTS] Once upon a time, when the dragon-kings ruled the aetherealms and the Witch-Queens fought grand duels over generations with arcana of unimaginable power, the worlds split apart. There was too much magic, and reality couldnโ€™t bear the weight any longer. The otherworlds splintered apart like ships crashing against a shoreline; but the pieces remained, shards of reality, and they pierced the material realm. A thousand dimensions, all attached to various degrees, to the prime material: some forgotten, some overrun with new inhabitants, some spawning monstrous creatures into the world, and some ripe for plundering.

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