The White Desert #4 · WHOSE WATER — A Daggerheart Compatible Tier 2 Adventure

WHOSE WATER — A Daggerheart Compatible Tier 2 Adventure Daggerheart Compatible · four players · Tier 2 (levels 2–4) · about four and a half hours, under four without the optional scenes · 31 pages · free The queue for water runs twice around the square and out into the street. At the front, two mages in wet aprons hold their hands over a trough, and water pours out of nothing into it. Across the square, on the temple steps, the priests go on praying. Nobody in the queue looks at them. Verdance has always drunk from its oases, and the oases belong to the water god. Then a fire cult called the Kindled broke into the god's temple and brought its statue down, and the god's blessing on the water broke with it. To keep the city drinking, the Queen broke her own ban on private water-making and put almost every mage in Verdance to work. The mage water works. That is the problem. Every day it keeps the city alive, the city has less reason to go back to the temple. The party clears the temple, follows the Kindled across the city, and ends in a square ringed by burning buildings, with the fire of the cult's dead bishop standing two stories tall in the middle of it and the refugees pressed against the walls, watching. Every building that goes out is put out by one of two hands: the god's last gift, in the players' hands, or the Queen's water mages when they arrive. What the city believes afterwards depends on whose water it saw. What's In It Three Parts. The Broken God is a sealed temple of rooms held by god-binders, ending in an ambush in the worship hall where the floor can give way into the dry cistern underneath. Faith takes the party to the Verdance Academy while three attacks are under way at once, and the order they take them in changes what is left of each. The Bishop is the finale. A finale built as a boss fight with a clock. The bishop cannot be defeated while anything around him burns. The Fire track runs from 0 to 12 on the table where everyone can see it: at 3, 6 and 9 the bishop gains a new feature, and at 12 the water mages arrive and put out everything still burning. The players choose, building by building, whether to spend their turns putting the fire out themselves or holding on until the mages come. When the last building goes out he drops into a second phase, and the trigger, what changes and what carries over are all printed in one place, next to a default turn order for the GM who wants the fight to run itself. Three people still inside the burning buildings, for when the fight needs more choices. Nobody in them dies either way; getting them out sooner is its own reward. Side stories that run along the main line: Pell, a boy at the water line; the temple's offering vault; Orrin Vell, who sells blessed water in the market. Each is set up in one scene and pays off in the Conclusion. Every ending written out. The Conclusion counts the buildings the god put out and gives what the Queen decides for all, some or none of them, and what becomes of each side character under each result. Stat blocks for the Kindled, the god-binders they summon, a chaos skull and the bishop's fire, one environment block, seven items and loot entries, fifteen read-aloud boxes, and four d6 tables for street scenes, the Academy, the fire's voice and what the refugees say. The Setting The book carries the full White Desert front matter: seven playable ancestries with features, two magic house rules and one ruling that sit on top of SRD 1.0 without adding a system, what water costs and who sells it, how the three kingdoms work, and a page of prices. The World Two suns boiled the seas off this world and then went out, and what is left is white sand from one horizon to the other and a hole in the sky where they used to be. Nothing falls out of that sky. Every mouthful of water anybody drinks was made by somebody standing in a room and working, or came up out of the ground where a god allowed it. Verdance is the second kind of city, and this is the week it found out it could be the first. This Is The Free One Every book in the White Desert series stands on its own, and this one costs nothing. If it runs the way your table likes to play, the rest of the series is here: https://ricaburn.itch.io/the-white-desert-vol-1-three-daggerheart-compatible-adv... The Other Series: Dawn City There is a second setting in this catalogue, and it is a city on an island where the sky stopped. Twenty years ago it stopped at a single dusk and has not moved since. Time still passes — people age, food spoils, children grow up — only the sky stood still. The ground there never shakes, and that is the only reason anyone goes: everywhere else in that world the earth comes apart, so people cross the strait and stand in a queue under an orange sky that never changes, waiting to be written into a book. Where the White Desert is a road and the question is who is holding the water, Dawn City is a wall and the question is who gets let through it. Same way of building a book, though: nobody in them is hiding anything, the thing driving each adventure sits on the table where the players can watch it move, and every ending is written out — including the ones where nothing goes well. Dawn City is here: https://ricaburn.itch.io/dawn-city-vol1 Legal Whose Water is an independent production by Ricaburn and is not affiliated with Darrington Press or Critical Role. Copyright © 2026 Ricaburn. All rights reserved. This product includes materials from the Daggerheart System Reference Document 1.0, © Critical Role, LLC. under the terms of the Darrington Press Community Gaming (DPCGL) License. More information can be found at https://www.daggerheart.com. There are no previous modifications by others. Darrington Press™ and the Darrington Press authorized work logo are trademarks of Critical Role, LLC and used with permission. The White Desert, and all original characters, locations, factions, and story content contained herein, are the property of Ricaburn and are not covered by the above notice. Daggerheart game rules and mechanics referenced in this work remain the property of Critical Role, LLC and are used under the Darrington Press Community Gaming License. Full license terms are available at https://darringtonpress.com/license. Patreon Patrons get the drafts, the setting notes, the parts that did not make it into the books, and new adventures before release. https://patreon.com/CallduckGuild

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