“The Prizewater Dunes” is a quiet run of sand and salt-scrub up the coast from town. Locals call this stretch Widow’s Reach, named for the wives who once walked it, watching the horizon for ships already lost. It’s often a place where Prizewater folk go to be alone, but that doesn’t mean it’s always quiet.

A small, gentle map is the best classroom a first-tier party ever gets: low stakes, town in walking distance, every job a short walk from a warm bed. I’ve written four quests for Widow’s Reach, one for each level of the first tier of play, and while I had the 2-Minute Tabletop setting of Prizewater in mind, you can use these simple encounters as any early campaign side treks in a coastal setting.

Running the Dunes

Although each of these encounters are standalone, it’s possible to run them in sequence, as if each encounter happens further along the dunes. This is a great way to stitch together a multi-session prologue for a larger nautical campaign. Otherwise, these encounters work perfectly as quick side quests the characters can take on as a break from the main plot.

General Features

These features apply across all four encounters.

Soft Sand. The dune faces are loose fill. They count as difficult terrain, and climbing a steep face costs double movement. A creature knocked prone on a slope slides 5 feet downhill.

The Shrubs. The pigface and saltbush are the only cover on the map. They grant half cover, and stand just tall enough to hide a crouching Small creature (DC 12 Stealth (Dexterity) to hide behind them).

Sun and Sea Breeze. Open sky, open water. Bright light by day; dim moonlight and faint phosphorescence by night. The wind carries sound off the water, so creatures have disadvantage on Perception (Wisdom) checks to hear anything downwind.

Shrub Hubbub (1st Level)

Hook. Old Samphire is Prizewater’s newest apothecary, and is three months into a new shopfront on the harbour road. But they are short on tonic, and shorter on temper. The pigface she brews into healing potions has started running off, pulling up its own roots and bolting the moment a forager comes near. She’ll pay, per plant, for any brought back whole. Any that’s gathered damaged will only make poor products.

Background. A passing fey has taken a liking to this coast and has awakened native flora for its own amusement. The succulents that roam are harmless and easily terrified. They dash, burrow, and hide wondering why the Tide-Piper ever awakened them in the first place.

Read aloud when the characters reach the foraging ground:

The dune ahead is thick with pigface, fat and green against the sand. Then one of them stands. Roots peel out of the ground like fingers, the whole patch shivers and it scatters, a hundred little plants sprinting for cover.

Eight to ten awakened succulents (Awakened Shrubs) are scattered across the dunes. To take one whole, a character must reach it and pin it: a DC 12 Sleight of Hand (Dexterity) or Athletics (Strength) check, or a grapple. Any damage dealt to a plant kills it and tarnishes its bounty. Reward cleverness; a trail of fresh water, a soft song, druidcraft, or a thrown net lowers the DC or skips the roll outright. Every third round the spooked patch bolts to fresh cover, and any character who Dashes among them panics the nearest 1d4 into scattering.

Talking to Plants. A successful DC 13 Nature (Charisma) check on a captured succulent calms them enough for a conversation. The plants will tell the characters about the Tide-Piper, a fey who roams the coast on a full moon, searching for washed up treasure and awakens more plants to recruit before it retreats back inland.

Treasure. Samphire pays silver equal to each plant’s remaining hit points. Clear the lot without a single casualty and she parts with a Potion of Healing from her own shelf, plus a standing discount. A character may also know that Wren, the Scurvy Stern’s bookish barkeep, will quietly pay 15 gold pieces to study a live one. He’s teaching himself wizardry and has never met a plant with opinions.

Conclusion. With the pigface back in Samphire’s pots, Prizewater’s tonic shelves fill again and the beach falls quiet, give or take a few succulents that were never caught, still sunning themselves and bolting from gulls.

Duke of the Dunes (2nd Level)

Hook. Prizewater is missing things. A ladle, a locket, a good boot. Stranger still, the missing keeps turning up out on the dunes, laid in neat little rows, eventually returned to owners who swear they never carried the thing out there in the first place.

Background. A rat caught the same fey mischief that woke the succulents, and woke up with ambition. The Duke has pressed the local colony into a court of thieves and crowned himself king of the sand. He isn’t cruel. He’s lonely, proud, and building a hoard the only way he’s ever seen it done.

Read aloud as characters arrive at a burrow beneath the tallest dune:

The burrow mouth is ringed with treasure: buttons and spoons, a wedding ring, a mug stamped S.S., Anse’s lucky fishing lure–every piece arranged with terrible care. Atop the pile sits a rat the size of a cat, a thimble on its head, and it looks at you the way a king looks at latecomers.

The Duke wants to be treated as a sovereign; bow, bargain, or bring tribute and he grants a parley. He’ll end the raids for one of three prices: formal recognition (a signed treaty), a standing tithe of food, or one grand shiny thing for his hoard. Insult him or draw steel and the colony answers: the Duke fights as a Giant Rat and on initiative count 20 each round a Swarm of Rats claws up from the sand (to a maximum of two). He fights clever, not brave. At half his hit points he tries to talk his way clear, and failing that, to vanish down a bolt-hole.

For a favour or a shiny, the Duke also trades what he has seen. He has watched the town for months from the gutters of Founders’ Walk and the top of the Prizewater Steps, unnoticed: who slips out at night, whose salvage was never salvaged, and where that glint of brass up the coast comes from. His word is good, and unsettlingly precise.

Treasure. Peace with the Duke returns the town’s goods; Wilbur’s pilfered stock, Oswin’s missing chisels, and half the Scurvy Stern’s spoons, and buys a reliable informant on the dunes. Battle scatters the court and leaves the hoard: 40 gp in mixed coin, two sentimental trinkets (returnable in town for goodwill), and a Ring of Jumping the Duke wore as a crown, prised long ago from a dead thief.

Conclusion. However it ends, the raids on Prizewater stop. Crown the Duke and he holds his court in the dunes as an odd little ally–a sovereign of spoons who keeps his word. Scatter him and the colony melts back into the sand, the stolen goods go home, and the town is left wondering how a rat ever emptied their pantries in the first place.

The Sand Man (3rd Level)

Hook. Prizewater folk keep nodding off on Widow’s Reach. Folk drop mid-stroll and wake an hour later, unhurt and unnerved; someone has been building people out of sand. Little effigies, each one posed like a villager to the life. Although nobody is harmed, everybody is spooked.

Background. Brass dragon wyrmling twins have found the funniest game in the world. They came up the coast chasing a rumour that a great copper dragon named Lamozzarod died in a cave out at Halberd Promontory, half-hoping to meet a living legend, half-hoping to prove the stories wrong. They got bored on the way, and now they creep up on a mark, breathe a puff of their breath weapon to put them under, sculpt their likeness in the sand, then hide to watch them wake. Brass dragons are the incorrigible chatterboxes of the metallic line, forever short on company. They mean no harm, and they would be delighted to be caught.

Read aloud on the beach:

A dozen sand-people stand in a loose ring, faces smoothed by the wind but unmistakable. Every one of them faces the town.

Investigating the effigies with a successful DC 12 Investigation (Intelligence) check turns up dragon-clawed prints and a taste of magic in the sand; a DC 14 Perception (Wisdom) check catches a glint of brass on a nearby dune.

The two Brass Dragon Wyrmlings are Wynx and Zyzz. They would rather be chased than fought. They banter, boast, and bolt the moment blades come out, because they’ll lose the game before they’ll lose a sibling. They aren’t only bored. They’re lonely, hiding from a world that hunts dragons for sport.

Treasure. Won over, the twins dig up their squirrelled hoard: 120 gp in mixed coin, a Cap of Water Breathing, and a barnacled brass spyglass.

Conclusion. The pranks end, and Prizewater sleeps through the night again. Win the twins over and they linger off the coast as giggling, half-tame guardians who’ll surface for anyone who plays fair. Drive them off or slay them and the effigies stop appearing, and people stop falling asleep on the dunes, although they begin to miss the luscious deep sleep those dragons offered.

The Elusive Loot (4th Level)

Hook. Ask anyone at the Scurvy Stern for a ghost story, and they’ll tell you of a coral-crusted chest that comes ashore on Widow’s Reach that will not be caught. Reach for it and it scuttles; wait too long and, at the turn of the tide, it drags itself back into the surf. This chest is really there, and rumour puts a pirate fortune inside.

Background. The chest isn’t alive, but something certainly possesses it. Years ago, Captain Elias Roper went down with his ship in the shallows off Prizewater–one of the old hulls the town’s ship graveyard grew from–and his grief soaked into the seabed. Now he rises through the wet sand as an elemental of drowned earth, hauling his hoard behind him. But he isn’t hoarding the booty, he’s saving it. Every coin was meant for Maren, the woman he was sailing home to. She still lives, old now, in a crooked house on Founders’ Walk built from the very ship that drowned him. Until she comes, no living hand touches a copper.

Read aloud when a character reaches for the chest:

The chest sits at the waterline, black with barnacles and streaming coral. As you step closer the chest slides away, as if surfing away on the sand.

Captain Roper (Earth Elemental with undead creature type) erupts from the sand the moment someone makes contact with the chest, and he fights to keep them off it. He only speaks his wife’s name, but through the sand he possesses, it is slurred and easily misheard as mine.

A character who succeeds on a DC 15 History (Charisma) check has heard stories around Prizewater of a widow on Founders’ Walk who lives in a crooked home by the name of Maren who, for a time, visited the dunes every night in hopes to see her husband return from sea.

Treasure. The coral chest holds 800 gp in old coin and gems, a +1 weapon of the party’s choosing (Elias’s cutlass or pistol), a waterlogged love letter addressed to Maren, and his journal containing stories of his adventures he hoped to share with his loved ones.

Conclusion. The party may claim the booty without ever knowing the history of the people behind it. Or they may reunite the lovers, in which case the Captain’s spirit is allowed rest, and Maren offerst the characters all the gold, and the journal but would like to keep Elias’s weapon and love letter. Perusing the journal yields many hooks for future adventures on the high seas, with more booty to be looted, yarrgh.

Random Tables

Encounters

Roll a d12 when the characters cross the dunes, or choose one that suits your table.

What the Tide Leaves

Roll a d12 when a character searches the wrack line.

Support the Creators

Ian Arguilles
What do Ian, a hydra, and a hat rack have in common? They all wear many hats. Ian freelances across copywriting, short fiction, and RPG design. If you’d rather just hear him ramble about telling better stories at the table, look for Unfound Fables on Instagram.

---

You can also further support our talented token artists by buying them a cup of coffee!

David Rhodes
David has opted to leave Ko-fi

Subscribe

We put out new content like this almost every week! If you’d like to keep up, here are all the ways that you can do it, be it on social media or with our email newsletter: