The Raindrinkers

When clear skies suddenly turn stormy, people look for the strange wagons of the Raindrinkers sliding over the mud, collecting the rain as they go. These nomadic peoples know a terrible truth: the earth’s waters are tainted.

The Raindrinkers is a wandering encounter-style two-pager written by a longtime friend, guest writer Tim Groth. Tim locked in on the strange weapons of the Martoi*—the terrible poisons unleashed on the living by the echoes of ancient conquerors.

What would a people be like if they had made peace with the danger?

Raindrinkers PDF

The Raindrinkers revolves around the five elders of the raindrinker clans. While the clans share a way of life and often travel together in their long, mud-sled caravans, each of the elders has different goals for their people, and a different attitudes towards visitors that would try to ingratiate themselves with the nomads.

If you're integrating the Raindrinkers into your own setting, you have a few options, mostly answers to the question, "What are they avoiding?"

In nightmarish or apocalyptic settings, they can fit in more or less directly. If your world is a little lower key, the Raindrinkers' habits might be religious observances, meant to keep them spiritually pure rather than physically safe.

In the world of Trilemma Adventures, I'm situating them in Haverlow on the big map. I see them travelling a sparsely populated land, visiting a series of towns and villages high enough up in the various watersheds that they're safe from the worst of the weapons—as long as there's rain.

* * *

This isn't an adventure, exactly, but a roving community, or a network of communities. They're a potential source of safety, replacement characters (if it comes to that!) and because of their mobility, possible allies against mutual enemies, if they can be made to see the common threat.

On the other hand, if you cross them (or if there should be an unfortunate misunderstanding), you'll have to go a long way to get out of their sphere of influence.

(I've never done this, but it's cool to imagine taking a replacement character from some allied raindrinkers, but they've said they'll hunt you down and kill you if so-and-so gets hurt.)

Hell, under the right circumstances, the elders themselves could be PCs.

Thanks again to all of my patrons for supporting the project. More in on the way very soon!

* For more on the Martoi, see The Unmended Way, Task of Zeichus, and Veil of the Once-Queen.