I Need Water: survival and division in Vaarn
Water scarcity, conflicting factions, and underground exploration in a Vaarn scenario, with writing, cartography, and layout in InDesign.
I Need Water… and I don’t want to die! is a short scenario for Vaults of Vaarn, adaptable to other simple RPG systems. I created it for the 2024 Vaarn Summer Jam, handling writing, cartography, editing, and layout in Adobe InDesign. The PDF runs to nine pages.1
The situation starts with a direct request: a dehydrated man meets the travelers and asks for help reaching a well. Behind that immediate need lies a divided community, a disease, and a dispute over access to water.
A resource that organizes the conflict
The well supports a small desert community. After a cow arrives and a disease follows the consumption of its milk, some inhabitants are expelled. They need water and want to return; the village leadership blocks their entry and fears that the disease will spread.
Svein represents the expelled group, while Sonia leads the well community. The text states each side’s goals explicitly. The game master receives a situation to put before the players, with incompatible needs and people who depend on the decisions made there.
The village leadership’s offer to the travelers sharpens the conflict. Access to the resource is tied to violence against the expelled inhabitants. The adventure leaves room to investigate, negotiate, or seek other ways forward, rather than assuming the first proposal must be accepted.
From the village to exploration
The scenario combines surface locations with an eight-area underground complex. The village includes a council housed in an ancient tower, a war-camel breeding facility, and a ritual site associated with a sand worm. These connect water supply to the community’s economic, political, and religious life.
Underground exploration adds passages, old installations, creatures, and objects that can change the party’s understanding of the situation. This article preserves those secrets and the conflict’s resolution, leaving them for the group to discover.
The module includes an eight-result encounter table and two stat blocks for central characters or creatures. They provide compact support for a short adventure without requiring an entire campaign setting.
A map of connections
The complex’s map uses numbers and dashed connections between areas. Corresponding descriptions let the game master track movement without a detailed floor plan for every room. The diagram communicates the relationships between exploration locations in a small space.
This format keeps the text close to the route’s structure. The game master can find a number on the map, then return to the description block covering the environment and its interactive elements.
Visual composition and credits
The front and back covers use broad red and black fields. Inside, light backgrounds, columns, and red outlines maintain a shared visual identity. Illustrations extend across some of those divisions, participating in the page composition alongside the text.
The editorial work brings the conflict, faction goals, locations, encounters, and stat blocks into one small publication. Alongside writing the scenario, I developed that composition in InDesign.
I handled the adventure’s writing, cartography, editing, and design, with layout in InDesign. The illustrations are by Kim Holm under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, as stated on the credits page.
Find the scenario and download the PDF on itch.io (opens in a new tab).
Footnotes
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I need water and I dont want to die, nine pages. This article describes the premise, play resources, and editorial work without revealing the scenario’s solution. The PDF is available on the adventure page (opens in a new tab). ↩