There exists a swale, a shallow dip in the ground, a low run between owned plots of land, about 30 feet wide, twice as long, and 3 feet deep. This swale contains a single, elderly tree, massive in girth and standing unfailingly straight and unbelievably tall.
During the rainy season, the swale fills with rainwater. Up and down the water level goes, collecting rain and evaporating away. When the swale overflows, the tree blossoms, blooms, and fruits. It's like a laser-light show, even during the day, each little flower, each leaf, each bud and bloom, even the cracks in the bark, everything lit up.
And the fruit! The Lumenfig, a pale, waxy fruit about the size of a large fig, with skin that you're pretty sure was pearl white, but now looks faint gold. The inside, dense and honey-dark, segmented like a small pomegranate, each seed encased in a translucent membrane that catches the light and holds on to it for a moment before releasing it as a faint glow. A smell of petrichor with underlying floral notes, a taste that begins bright and sharp like an underripe pear, continues through a slight and brief honey sweetness, and ends cool like a refreshing cup of ice water.
The swale is dry now. Has been for three years. The tree stands the same as ever, straight and tall, but dark. No blossoms, no fruit, no light. Ask anyone in town about it and they'll reminisce the way people do about the best day of their lives. Three years, the swale has dried up, the grass has died, leaving only cracked mud in its place. There has been no drought, the rainy season came and went as wet as ever, but the swale just... isn't itself.
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This is a prompt, not a finished side-quest. Drop it in your adventure, and see what your players do with it. Possible reasons behind the story include:
* The swale's underground water source has been blocked by a collapsed aquifer or new construction upstream.
* Something has nested in the tree and is feeding off of its energy.
* The tree knows something is coming and has gone dark deliberately.
* Somebody has figured out how to harvest the light or the fruit, has been doing so in secret, and has over-harvested, killing the tree slowly.
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#dnd #DungeonsAndDragons #TTRPG #DMTools #Homebrew #unearthedarcana #sidequest #Worldbuilding
SideQuesting
Klif
Tau
Sean Murthy
