The White Desert #3 · The Wet Ring — A Daggerheart Compatible Tier 2 Adventure

THE WET RING — A Daggerheart Compatible Tier 2 Adventure

Daggerheart Compatible · 3–5 players · Tier 2 · one session, about two hours · free

Nothing grows on this road and nothing falls out of the sky. A place on the map between two cities exists because somebody standing there can make water, and it stops existing the day they cannot. So a waystation is not a building with a well in it. It is one person, and the building is where they sleep.

Around Halfwell there is a circle of damp sand, three paces wide and four hundred paces around. Sandworms move through dry sand the way a fish moves through water; wet sand will not hold a tunnel, and a worm that meets it turns aside. That circle is the only wall that works out here, it is built out of the most expensive substance in the world, and it has to be built again tomorrow morning. A traveller sees a dark stripe in the sand and does not think about it again.

Tonight there are seventeen wagons in the yard from both directions, a queue at the well house, and a house guard captain out of Whitestone who has come eighteen days up this road to take the woman who waters the ring. He is not cruel and he is not lying. He has a written grant of the power he intends to use, he will not move before the wagons are watered, and when somebody finally asks him whether that grant covers her, the honest answer from every person in the yard is that nobody knows. Nobody has ever walked into the question before.

There is no court here, no justice, no guard and no crown. Whichever way this goes, it gets decided by people who are leaving in the morning — and while they decide it, eight stretches of wet sand are drying out on the table in front of them.

What's In It

The gauge. Eight tokens on the table, in the open, all session — the eight stretches of the ring and how many are still wet. Two come off at the end of every scene whatever anybody does. Up to three go back, and every one of them costs the party the scene they spent on it. No rolls, nothing hidden, no GM fiat.

Three parts and four pressure scenes: The Queue, The News, Ket Working, and They Come Through The Thin Place. The gauge counts four scenes whether your table burns one in ninety seconds or lingers twenty minutes in another.

An argument with no correct answer, written so that every NPC in it tells the truth, including about what they do not know.

Two fights. The first should take ten minutes. The second is two storeys of animal, and it is fought in two places at once — outside, and inside.

A swallowed-character rule that keeps both halves of that fight live at the table: the two groups are deaf to each other in the fiction, everything either one does opens something for the other, and there are three separate ways out so that no single kind of character holds the key.

Four NPCs written as Hope and Fear — what they are working toward in their own words, and the thing they have not sat down and looked at — plus what each will say and what each will not.

Adversaries straight from the SRD, named and used as written. The boss is built on a Tier 2 Solo with not one number raised; it gets four replacement features instead, because inflating a Solo makes a long fight, not a big one.

Twenty-one read-aloud blocks, and a book that tells you plainly where not to narrate.

Both endings of the night are written out, and neither one is a failure.

The Setting, For GMs Who Want To Keep It

The White Desert is a standalone setting and this book carries the whole of its 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. Everything else about domains, domain cards, Loadout, Vault, Recall Cost and the Spellcast Trait works exactly as written in the SRD.

Two suns boiled the seas off this world and then went out, and the hole they left is in the sky of every scene. Nobody in this series is going to close it. Under it, people are doing fine — water is bought and sold, caravans run, three kingdoms argue about a war that ended twenty years ago, and there is a decent inn in most towns worth stopping at. This adventure requires none of the others and assumes none of them.

Legal

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.

Patreon

Patrons get the drafts, the setting notes, the parts that did not make it into the book, and the paid modules before release. https://patreon.com/CallduckGuild?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_ca..

This Is The Free One

Every book in the White Desert 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 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/