Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Finder’s Archives.
In this column, we take some of the lands from Magic: The Gathering and turn them into something you can use for your fantasy games.
The stats given in each entry assumes that you’re using Pathfinder 2 for your games, but they can easily be converted over into any fantasy system. This week we grab a small boat and cling for dear life as we traverse the Bad River.
Bad River
The great river Styx travels across the multiverse and reaches into all planes of existence. That much is known to all scholars of the Outer Planes. What they overlook is that the Styx has a “mortal” descendant, known as the Bad River. It appears in legends across the Material Plane and seems to move with a malevolent will of its own.
Lay of the Land
The Bad River is not set in a specific location. Instead, it appears whenever there has been a great flood that’s claimed the life of at least 100 people. It appears there, once the waters start to recede, and stays there for at least a week. During that time, it is possible for mortals to traverse the length and breadth of it.
Its waters are brackish and stale, smelling like death, and while there are fish in its waters, they’re all undead and decaying. The riverbanks are populated by vultures and scavengers from across all the various types of terrain and habitat, seemingly evidence that when the river moves, those who are nearby move with it. This has never been confirmed by intelligent creatures however, so it is only conjectured at this point. What is a fact, however, is that at one end, the Bad River always leads to a swamp, and at the other always leads to an island. The swamp and the island can be any on that particular planet and do not have to be linked or even close together. As such the river might (or might not) be a great way for someone to cross from one end of the world to another. Of course, there’s no guarantee that it takes you where you want to go, or that it stays in that location until you’ve finished moving across it.
Dangers
The waters of the Bad River are toxic. Anyone falling in must make a DC 15 Fortitude (or DC 15 Constitution) saving throw or take 2d6 points of necrotic damage for each round. Anyone who is killed by the waters is turned into a zombie that rises 24 hours later. These zombies stay in the vicinity of the river and travel along with it wherever it goes.
The only other inhabitants are the Thanadaemons (for Pathfinder 1 and D&D 5e – use the stats for a Ceustodaemon for Pathfinder 2) which will ferry people across or along the river, at a small cost of 1 gp. Rumors abound that most of their passengers do not reach their destinations, but enough do that it is still considered the safest way to cross the Bad River).
Kim Frandsen
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