Seafoot Games - Isolated Desert Well | 20x30 Battlemap

Wind whistles through the crumbling  ruins of an abandoned courtyard. A small tower looms above, equipped  with murder holes for a defensible position. You can feel the moisture  sucked from your mouth by the arid desert winds, and the smell of dust  is all you know.  

Grains of sand lash against your face,  clinging to your eyes, and occasionally rising into a fierce sandstorm;  standing so high over the desert that it could reach the tallest  thunderheads.  The well is a life-saving source of shelter for many  travellers, be it from the vicious storms which sweep the land, respite  against the glaring sun, or precious water after weeks of drinking from  stale, leather bladders which have all but run dry… 

Out  here, there are few travellers. Should something go wrong, no-one would  know what happened. Perhaps the desert simply swallowed another naive  adventurer—a victim to the elements. Or, perhaps, it was something far  more sinister…

Adventure Seeds 

• Your party stumbles upon a tribe of  nomads, all dying of thirst next to an isolated, desert well. The water,  they claim, is tainted—but they don’t know why. None of the slaves they  sent down there returned, and when there were none left they begun to  send their men—but still, none came back, and the water came up bloody  when they next tried to draw from the well.   
  
  If they don’t figure out  what’s wrong soon they’ll all die—for it’s too far to the next spring,  and too far from the last. There are women and children with them, as  well; huddled up in terrified clumps, and they watch your party with  desperate, exhausted eyes...  
  
  They have a wizard, who is capable of  purifying the water—but she needs your party to protect her so she can  enter safely, and preform her magic. They will pay you handsomely for  this—money, slaves, whatever you want!   
  
  But when you enter, you find an  assassin sitting on a stone step, beside an empty vial of poison, while  she slowly cleans her knives with a bloody cloth; the bodies of the  nomads who dared to enter piled up neatly in a corner, behind which  huddle the freed men, women, and children who once used to be slaves.    
  
  The assassin claims she was kidnapped by the nomads years ago, and used  as a slave before she escaped. She has spent years training,  planning for a way to get her vengeance, and free her little sister. But  her sister, she has learned, is dead—killed by the hands of that brute,  their leader.   
  
  All you have to do is leave now, and let her kill the  mage. She too, can pay handsomely—far better than those cattle herders  above. She would prefer not to shed blood so… meaninglessly. But they  all need to die—their children included. 

• Your party has heard rumour of a mysterious young woman, who waits  by a well in the centre of the desert. It is whispered she gives great  treasure to those who can answer her riddle—but those who cannot, she  kills.   
  
  Arriving at the well, your party see a woman with blonde hair,  clad in shining silver armour designed in the imitation of scales. Her  eyes are a fierce blue, and she has a challenging half smile upon her  lips, while she languidly leans against the well. There is a sword at  her waist, and her casual ease tells you she is very familiar with its  use.   
  
  “Well,” She asks, “Have you come to answer my riddle?” If you say  yes, she will ask it (ex. “what walks on four feet in the morning, two  in the afternoon and three at night?”). If you answer it correctly, each  party member gets to choose one item (and one item only) from her hoard  beneath the well. But, if you get the riddle wrong, a large, blue  dragon emerges from beneath the sands surrounding the courtyard—intent  on eating his meal (the point of the riddles, and their myth). If your  party attempts to enter the well without answering a riddle, he will  also reveal himself.   

• Your party learned from a group of  bandits where their treasure was located. The resulting search has led  you to a cave system beneath a desert well—to where they have stashed  their chest, and the very best of their bounty. But it is guarded by a  giant scorpion, which paralyses its victims, and slowly eats them alive…